Hasta La Ideas

Although it launched nearly a year ago, I’m surprised that an app called How.Do didn’t turn up on our radar—after all, an app for making quick’n’dirty how-to tutorials is right up our alley. Thankfully, co-founder Emma Rose Metcalfe reached out to us on the occasion of the launch of How.Do Two.Oh (Version 2.0, that is), which was released yesterday on the occasion of iOS7 and the World Maker Faire this weekend. (Supported by venture capital, her fellow co-founders Nils Westerlund and Edward Jewson round out the Berlin-based team.)

Viewable both through the free app and online, the Micro Guides are concise user-generated slideshows with audio, an ideal format for step-by-step tutorials and on-the-go reference guides. Insofar as the app hits a sweet spot in the maker/fixer/lifehacking movement, the How.Do team will be reporting from World Maker Faire tomorrow and Sunday, offering a unique window into the festivities at the New York Hall of Science—follow them on Twitter @HowDo_ to get the scoop!

As busy as they are this weekend, Metcalfe took a few moments to share her thoughts at this exciting time for the growing company.

Core77: What inspired you to create How.Do in the first place?

Emma Rose Metcalfe: How.Do is the intersection of my MFA research in sharing and distributing meaningful experiences and Nils’ interest in the challenges of scaling projects for large communities. He had left SoundCloud to finish his studies at Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship where the two of us met. Long story short, we came home from a design bootcamp in India wanting work on something together. We shared the belief that knowledge is deeply personal. The space created between the emotional power of sound and the fantasy of image is incredibly profound—we wanted to harness that to make sharing and learning feel good.

(more…)

It’s very strange that Google Glass is not mentioned once in this news segment. Researchers at Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) have developed this eyeglass-based display, below, that uses images projected onto the lenses, and depth cameras focusing beyond the lenses, to create the functional illusion of operating a “floating touchscreen”:

ITRI is simply the latest research group to use depth cameras to track our fingers, which then triggers a microprocessor to recognize that as an actionable “touch.” Most recently we saw this with Fujitsu Labs’ FingerLink Interaction System. So you might wonder why we’re looking at this—isn’t this just a combination of existing technologies that we’ve all seen before? It is, but so was the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad when they first came out.

(more…)

In addition to unveiling their redesigned Mac Pro, yesterday Apple also previewed their forthcoming iOS 7. This is the one many an industrial designer has been waiting to see; we all know Jonathan Ive can do hardware, but iOS 7 will be the first real indication of what software will look like under Ive rule—and if he’d be given free reign. Former Apple executive Scott Forstall was famously a proponent of skeuomorphism, the inclusion of real-world elements—stitched leather, lined legal pads, spiral bindings—that many in the design community found tacky and backwards-looking. Following his ouster, Ive was placed in charge of iOS design, and he’s made it no secret that he intended to Think Different.

Well, based on what we’re seeing, we’re happy to report that it seems Ive’s creative control is complete.

The first thing users will likely note is the change in typography. Just as Forstall’s beloved word “skeuomorphism” has an unusual sequence of three vowels in a row, Ive has switched the font to what looks to be Helvetica Neue Ultra Light, which has an equally foreign sequence of contiguous vowels. The resultant look is undoubtedly more modern (though your correspondent prefers thicker fonts for legibility’s sake).

“Flatness” is the adjective of the day, and the new iOS has it in spades. In the past decade-and-a-half icons have spun steadily out of control; what were once simple representations of objects, necessarily drawn in low-res due to computing constraints, unpleasantly evolved into overcomplicated, miniaturized portraits. Ive’s flat design approach returns to the roots of the graphic icon, eschewing 3D shading and instead using line to tell the tale. With the exception of a couple of icons—the Settings gears and Game Center’s balloons—shading is completely absent. The cartoonish highlights on the text message word bubbles are gone. Background gradations are the only non-flat visual variation allowed.

Interestingly enough, the keypad now looks like something graphically designed by the Braun of yore…

(more…)

Color me impressed! I figured the next generation of designer-relevant input devices would come from Apple or Wacom, but surprise—it’s Adobe. The software giant is venturing into hardware, and their resultant Project Mighty looks pretty damn wicked so far.

The Adobe Mighty Pen is designed for sketching on tablets, and it’s got at least two brilliant features integrated with their drawing app: Since the screen can distinguish between the pen’s nib and your mitts, you can draw with the pen, then erase with your finger. No more having to click a submenu to change the tool. And when you do need a submenu, you click a button on the pen itself to make it appear on-screen.

The truly awesome device, however, is the pen’s Napoleon Ruler. Adobe’s VP of Product Experience Michael Gough was trained as an architect, and wanted to bring the efficacy of sketching with a secondary guiding tool–like we all once did with our assortment of plastic triangles, French curves and the like–to the tablet experience. What the Napoleon does is so simple and brilliant, you’ve just got to see it for yourself:

Presumably they’re still working out the kinks, as the release date is TBD.

(more…)

Cyclepedia on-the-go! (NB: Mounting an iPad with a Turtle Claw is not advised.)

We covered Michael Embacher’s Cyclepedia back in 2011, when it made its debut in print, and the Viennese architect/designer’s enviable bicycle collection was exhibited behind glass, so to speak, shortly thereafter. Although the iPad app—developed by Heuristic Media for publisher Thames & Hudson—originally came out in December 2011, they’ve since launched a new version on the occasion of the 2012 Tour de France, with substantially more content beyond the 26 new bikes that bring the total to 126.

The bikes themselves are indexed by Year, Type, Make and Name, Country of Origin, Materials and (perhaps most interestingly) Weight, for which the thumbnails neatly arrange themselves around the circular dial of a scale. Different users will find the different options more useful than others, though the small size of the thumbnails makes it difficult to differentiate between about 75% of the bikes, which are distinguished by more fine-grained details. (The lack of search feature is also a missed opportunity, IMHO.)

That said, the photography is uniformly excellent—the 360° views alone are composed of over 50 images each, as evidenced by the lighting on the chrome Raleigh Tourist—and the detail shots are consistently drool-worthy. Each bike has been polished to perfection for the photo shoot, yet the perfectly in-focus photos also capture telltale signs of age—minor dings, paint chips and peeling decals that suggest that the bicycle has been put to good use. (The rather gratuitous bike porn is accompanied by descriptions that are just the right length for casual browsing, as well as technical details such as date, weight and componentry.)

(more…)