Hasta La Ideas

Create animated gifs with ease using this new iPhone app

For those curious iPhone users out there looking to add a spark of life to their stagnant snapshots look no further than Gif Shop. Launching today, the iPhone app makes creating, editing and sharing animated gifs less tedious and more fun. We’ve been playing with in the office for a while now and will definitely vouch that although its not the first of its kind it may very well be the most fun. The simplistic design and user friendly interface make creating and sending these little gems a breeze. Plus its capable of sharing across multiple social networks without file size limitations or hosting needs.

Born out of collaboration between idea man Daniel Savage and technical designer Matthew Archer, the intuitive app was originally inspired by a disappointing attempt to document an especially hilarious Halloween costume.

Click on over to iTunes App Store where Gif Shop is now available for $1.99 in the Photography section. Then check online for plenty of great videos and user uploaded content. But be warned, Savage claims it’s “easy enough for your mom to use.” So watch out for an influx of more misspelled check up texts full of even funnier animated images from home.

In anticipation of Device Design Day 2011, we’ve partnered with Kicker Studio to bring you a series where speakers from this year’s conference reflect on six questions about design and their practice. D3 brings together visual, interaction and industrial designers for a multi-disciplinary conversation about the design of consumer electronics and objects with embedded technology.

Leading up to August 5th’s Device Design Day in San Francisco, we’ll be learning more about this year’s speakers through a short series of six questions from Kicker Studio. This week we sit down with interaction designer and Porsche-racing speed demon Elizabeth Bacon. Read on to learn about quite possibly the coolest pen in the world, the thrill of motocross and why designers should always remember: Only you can make yourself happy.

Elizabeth Bacon is a practicing interaction designer with over 12 years of professional experience. She began her career at Cooper, where she got her “post-grad” education in interaction design while working across a variety of domains. She then was a “Human Factors Design Engineer” for over five years in the Cardiac Rhythm Management Division of St. Jude Medical, a Fortune 100 company. She designed multiple products around the clinical systems that handle implanted pacemakers and defibrillators, and formalized a process that blended interaction design methods with traditional human factors engineering approaches. Liz has been running her own design consultancy, Devise, for the past several years. She’s also a Director Emeritus of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). On the personal side, she loves to draw, write poetry and race cars, although not usually at the same time.

Read on for more from this year’s Device Design Day speakers:
Six Questions for Mike Kruzeniski, Microsoft
Six Questions for Branko Lukic, NONOBJECT
Six Questions for Cori Schauer, NASA

Kicker Studio: What is the most cherished product in your life? Why?

Liz Bacon: My life’s most cherished product is a 3,018 pound one: my 2006 Porsche Cayman S. This beautiful Arctic Silver Metallic piece of design & engineering magnificence brings me more joy than anything else in my life that doesn’t have a beating heart. At times, I sometimes imagine that she really does have a heart, and once she became mine (about a year ago now) I quickly gave her a name, Cherie. I’ve always loved driving for the simultaneous involvement and release of the experience, but only started practicing the competitive performance driving sport of autocross about 7 years ago. I had made a vow to myself when I was 9 years old that I would drive a Porsche some day, so Cherie’s arrival into my life was truly the fulfillment of a life-long dream. I started going to the race track with her in 2010 for non-competitive driving events, where the increased speeds added a new level of development to my already intense focus on improving my car handling skills. When the tach needle is pushing into the red at 120+ miles per hour in the back straight at Portland International Raceway and I’m approaching the zone for hard braking & heel-and-toe downshifting coming in a few seconds, I’m wholly existing in a flow state where few memories are formed but I feel completely in touch with every atom of the car sliding through space…that is a cherished feeling unlike any other in my life.

What’s the one product you wish you’d designed, and why?

I wish I’d designed the Livescribe Pulse smartpen. For those who aren’t familiar with it, it’s a pen with a built-in microphone & speaker that also has a camera in its tip; when used with specially-coded paper it allows for the synchronization of your written marks and recorded audio so that it can play back the sound associated in time with your written marks. All that data is synced to your computer, becoming a text-string searchable record of written notes, plus the sessions can be shared with other people either privately or publicly.

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En installant cette expérience au milieu de désert du Sahara, Markus Kayser a pu explorer le potentiel du désert et de sa production d’énergie. Autour de cette machine utilisant un procédé d’impression 3D, ce concept intéressant est à découvrir en vidéo dans la suite.

Previously on Fubiz

• Small World Energy
• Areva – Energy Story
• Desert Indoors

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Well, almost: Lytro, a Silicon Valley startup, has been getting quite a bit of buzz for its new “light field” camera, which allows photographers to manipulate the focal length for any given image after the photo has been taken. While the technology has existed since the mid-90’s, Dr. Ren Ng has taken his lauded dissertation research from the hallowed grounds of Stanford to nearby Mountain Valley, where he’s managed to adapt the imaging technique—”light field” once meant some 100 cameras in a room— for consumer use under the Lytro moniker.

And what, exactly, is a “light field,” anyway? The short description is that it captures every ray of light, deflecting off every object at every angle, in any given image. Where traditional camera lenses “simply add up all the light rays and record them as a single amount of light,” the “light field sensor captures the color, intensity and vector direction of the rays of light.”

The light field is a core concept in imaging science, representing fundamentally more powerful data than in regular photographs. The light field fully defines how a scene appears. It is the amount of light traveling in every direction through every point in space—it’s all the light rays in a scene. Conventional cameras cannot record the light field.

via Ng’s dissertation (PDF)

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Digitally-enhanced tabletop speakers integrate seamlessly with wireless devices

As fans of the big speaker sound engineered into Audyssey’s compact Audio Dock, the launch of their new Lower East Side Media Speaker is even more tech-enhanced music to our ears. The LES produces precision sound with low bass, warm mids and clear highs using the same type of digital acoustics that the brand uses when they design sound for IMAX theaters and Jaguars.

To take advantage of all the “Smart” electronics inside, the speakers include an optical input that plugs directly into Apple TV, giving you the freedom of AirPlay-enabled audio in a speaker small enough to fit next to your computer. With its clean, simple lines it won’t add to the clutter on your desk, and, inspired by the music scene in the NYC neighborhood from which it takes its name, Audyssey’s LES speaker just begs for late-night jam sessions at the office.

The pair sells for $200, check Audyssey online for more info and purchasing details.