On February 11th, Bill Gates apparently demoed Xobni in front of a huge crowd! Xobni’s Matt Brezina writes:
Bill Gates demoed Xobni as part of his opening keynote at the Office Developers Conference in San Jose, California today.
Bill called Xobni “the next generation of social networking.” He credited Xobni as leveraging the data in email to help users better manage their relationships.
Vestal designed Xobni’s user interface several months ago, and it’s great to see our design up on the big screen…
Kogbox lets users create snippets – small scripts limited to 100 lines and 10 seconds of execution time. Write as many as you like, and combine your snippets with others’ to build simple web tools.
This new project is kind of like a Wikipedia for code… but active code, not code examples. I’ve often come up with ideas for small tools or functions which don’t quite merit an entire website, and which could be easily incorporated into other projects. Kogbox (as its name implies) allows users to create small snippets which all work together to accomplish larger tasks. It’s also a kind of sandbox for experimentation.
You don’t have to take my word for it, take a look at the Kogbox website »
For now it’s invitation only. Contact me for an account.
Above, Lubov Galkina, an entrepreneur from Ukraine, requests a loan of $1000 to expand her business.
If you are anything like me, you would like nothing more than to avoid throwing yourself into hordes of crazed shoppers, Christmas music, and mindless consumerism this holiday season. You probably also want to get everyone “the perfect gift” and always wait til the last minute to do so, meaning you have missed out on internet shopping due to shipping concerns. Heck! You’re probably even reading this right now to procrastinate! Never fear, we have just the solution for you.
By now, you may have heard about Kiva, the microfinancing organization that has allowed users to give over $15 million in small loans to entrepreneurs in developing worlds. You may not know, however, that they have gift certificates, which, with a Kiva account and a credit card, you can purchase for as little as $25 and print out at home. No shopping. No hordes. This is especially appealing when you consider how you were probably going to throw at least $30 at some stupid bobble head toy that your friend would have laughed at once and then thrown away. Instead, your recipient now gets to pick out which deserving, underprivileged individual the loan goes to and after the loan is repaid, can reinvest or make off with the cash, all the while being reminded again of how awesome you are. Give a gift that keeps on giving and return the meaning of Christmas back to the season all at the same time. Amazing.
Happy Holidays Everyone! Link, to Kiva Gift Certificates
This was covered by Engadget already, but it is amazing enough that we’re jumping on the bandwagon.
Victor Kaonga points us to Dr. Cedrick Ngalande, a Malawian, who has built a prototype power source made specifically for Africa. It generates power using sugar and yeast for up to 8 hours at a time.
A few months ago we did a small project for ClimateCounts, an organization which tracks climate “performance” of a variety of well-known companies. Wood Turner, who directs ClimateCounts, gave us a lot of freedom to do a design which expresses some of the rich data they track.
The design, above, displays company size (by market capitalization) as relative “tread” size; that is, General Electric and Google are large companies. Color (green,yellow,red) corresponds to climate performance, as does the size of the typeface. Therefore Starbucks, which is a relatively small company, is shown in large text size and with a green colored tread. We did 2 shirts each in 2 color schemes.
The intention is not for users to derive hard numbers from this, but the meaning behind the shirt makes for a good talking point and is a quick way to look up climate performance without looking like a dense table of data. We also wanted to make a shirt which people would want to wear. We’re getting a pile of these on top of our fee so we can strut around wearing our own design.
At the Vestal Blog, we try to present you with interesting and useful information every day. Let us know how we’re doing! Please send us your feedback at blog@vestaldesign.com. And do the world a favor today: be useful!
Regular visitors to this blog may remember the massively popular 2005
post on Peter Feigenbaum’s Trainset Ghetto project. Peter, who is a
23 year-old Brooklyn-based artist, musician, illustrator and
architectural designer, has returned with a new set of photographs
taken this past May in preparation for a group show at Gallery Aferro
(Link) in Newark, which is up until November 17.
The multimedia/photography project revolves around a miniature
facsimile of burned-out, grafitti covered 1980s New York City, which
Peter built from model railroad supplies. It touches on themes of
architectural vernacular, teenage suburban fantasy/urban poseurdom,
and uncanny juxtapositions of scale and era.
Additional photos are available at Peter’s website.
Have you ever wanted to move things with just your thoughts? Well ‘sci-fi’ isn’t too far away. Brainloop, a media project created by the Aksioma Institute for Contemporary Art in Ljubljana, is turning brainwaves into movement, in this case through a program like Google Earth. Simply by thinking about moving your right hand, you can transmit a non-muscular signal to the ‘Brain Computer Interface’ unit and elicit a response from the program, such as zooming in, allowing you to travel the world literally without lifting a finger.
Aside from just being cool, this could have some very real applications for the physically disabled. While this might not replace Helper Monkeys anytime soon, it’s a step towards creating a different medium for people to communicate and turn thoughts into actions.
A common problem for our clients is that they’d like to display images which have been optimized for web display (500px wide, jpg compression, nice and crisp) but want to offer the full-resolution images for download also. However not everyone wants to boot up Photoshop, Automator, or their photo editor of choice to create the thumbnails and web-sized images. Here’s a WordPress plugin incorporating James Heinrich’s phpThumb() thumbnailing script. It automates the process:
Simply upload a large (huge) version of the image, put them in normal <img src="" /> tags. WPIR parses them out and generates 400px wide versions (configurable) in a <div class="images"></div> at the top of the post. You can style this to float:right; or whatever.
It also generates a <div class="presskit"></div> at the bottom of the post with links to the high-res originals. These do a force-download instead of opening in the browser window.
Exempt images from resizing: <img class="custom" src="foo" />
Puts a nice, slight unsharp mask filter to crispify the images after that muddy bicubic resampling.
There are more details and specifics in the INSTALL file. The plugin does not create any new databases and all the resized images are cached in the plugin folder. Using ImageMagick as described in the INSTALL file is highly recommended.
I’d like to have a full WP interface to allow different widths to be configured, perhaps by what kind of page they’re in, what category, or even just a field in the WordPress sidebar to specify pixel width. But this is a good start… anyone want to pitch in?
