1. a tape player either as standard equipment or as an option on a new vehicle
2. PDA’s
3. E-mail accounts you have to pay for
4. Dial up
5. Getting film developed
6. Movie rental stores
7. Maps
8. Newspaper clasified
9. Landlines
10. Long distance charges
11. Public pay phones
12. VCR’s
13. Fax machines
14. Phone books, dictionaries, encyclopedias
15. Calling ’411′
16. CD’s
17. Backing up your data on floppies or CDs
18. Getting bills in the mail
19. Buttons
20. Losing touch
21. Boundaries
22. Paper
23. Record stores
Interesting.
I also just loved the latest Funny or Die video about AOL and HuffPost but it’s not to safe for work so I’ll let you find it on your own.
HizookRobotics writes “The Bilibot Project, an open-source robot platform based on Microsoft’s Kinect, was just announced by MIT researcher Garratt Gallagher on Hizook.com. Bilibot is just the first in what will likely be a torrent of robots (both hobbyist and professional) utilizing the Kinect. This sentiment was echoed in an essay by Fred Nikgohar, CEO of RoboDynamics, who believes we’ve reached a watershed moment in robotics enabled by cheap 3D sensing. While much of the attention for the Kinect has focused on video gaming, perhaps robotics will be its greatest beneficiary.”
We’ve just come across Solo, a beautiful new app for freelance designers — and considering the app is intended for use in the design community, the attention to details such as color, typography, animations and texture couldn’t have been used on a better project.
Solo is a project management application for designers of all stripes, both traditional and digital. Right now, designers can try it free for 10 days; afterward, it costs £5 per month.
The experience starts with a dashboard, a snapshot of all the projects, clients and deadlines you’re juggling at the moment. From this big-picture view, you can zoom in on timesheets, invoices, client contacts, and your own personal journal.
Perhaps best of all, the app is really, really pretty. When viewed at full-size, the pages show a stunning depth of nuance rarely seen in web apps. You’ll need to sign up for yourself to get a true feel for the app’s UI, but you can take a look at these sample screenshots to get a rough idea:
Click to see larger versions.
The downside is the app is still in a very early stage, hence the low introductory price. You’re likely to find a couple bugs lurking here and there in the software; and many features, such as client logins, document uploads, messaging and design blog feeds are still “coming soon.” Still, it’s definitely worth a try while it’s fresh.
Solo is the freshman release from UK software shop Thrive. A company rep wrote in an email, “We’ve been beavering away for the last nine months creating a new online management tool for freelancers… Being designers ourselves, we love the creative input and critical eye of our peers. At the end of the day, Solo is for us and you.”
Sign up for the app’s 10-day free trial, and let us know what you think in the comments. Is this something you’d use as a freelance designer? What other features would be useful?
Before implementing a killer feature for an application, be sure to consider whether it will support your company’s killer idea. Justin James offers additional insights about features vs. ideas.
Shocklee points us to some fantastic infographics about global internet censorship, including this first one highlighting levels of internet censorship around the globe. Frankly, it looks like in some of the areas where there’s “no censorship,” it might just be that there’s not much internet usage. Also, I do wonder how accurate or up-to-date some of it is. For example, it says there’s no internet censorship in Venezuela, but we were just discussing some content regulations there.
Then there’s a Venn diagram that tries to highlight exactly what the censorship “is about.” As this critique of the infographics suggests, it’s not the greatest, since the specific points are somewhat subjective.
There’s also this infographic explaining how the censorship generally works, which is interesting, but different countries use different methods, so I’m not quite sure how informative just this graphic is alone.
Either way, in combination, it suggests that there’s a fair bit of internet censorship that goes on around the world.
