Garbage Bags and Spandrels
February 19, 2008
I love outdoor black garbage bags with the quick tie feature. Instead of a straight cut, the top of the garbage bag is cut in a curved shape so that you end up with two longer edges that are easy to grab.
Now I’m sure that quick tie was a wonderful feature on its own. Many garbage bag executives probably struggled with the idea of re-engineering their manufacturing processes to add this functionality. For me, I couldn’t care less about the extra handle-like feature. So why do I love them?
Well, having the curved cut has a positive side-effect. A spandrel in evolutionary biology terms. The curved cut allows me to easily tell the “open” edge from the sealed edge. No more pulling back and forth between the two edges unsure of which side is supposed to open.
Now I’m sure there are other ways to distinguish edge that opens from the sealed edge but it makes me happy that this minor irritation was fixed inadvertently by a feature designed with a whole different purpose in mind.
RADBags with New Opening Detection Technology. What a wonderful discovery :-)
Palm Foleo: HP Jornada 820 Reincarnated?
June 1, 2007
Jeff Hawkins announced the Palm Foleo which is described as a new device category, the Mobile Companion. The device reminds me of the HP Jornada 820 which is a Windows CE device that was released in 1999 and looks like this. Read the rest of this entry »
Tesla Death Beam
April 9, 2007
Tesla Motors makes a high performance electric car, the Tesla Roadster. I think they should rename it the Tesla Death Beam after Nikola Tesla’s ummmmmmmm….. peace ray.
PocketRAD
March 28, 2007
Who is it for?
Nerds – Being nerds ourselves, we know that having a geiger counter is just cool! Particularly when you show your friends all the radioactive items around the house.
iPhone U Phone Wii All Phone
January 23, 2007
Apple announced their highly anticipated iPhone earlier this month. If you want to see it in action you should check out the video of Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone. The iPhone has a PDA form factor but rather than use a stylus for text input and navigation it uses a “multi-touch” user interface. It looks like Apple nailed the stylus-less touch screen navigation. The scrolling, a kind of thumb/finger flick, looks awesome.
What confuses me, though, is the overall package and what need the iPhone addresses. Does that wonderful touch-screen navigation compliment its other features to create a unique user experience? It is relatively thin (0.46″) but it has a very Pocket PC-like 2.4″ x 4.5″ face which is largely filled by its 320 x 480 pixel screen. This is the form factor everyone expects from a pure video iPod but the iPhone will carry 4 or 8 GB of flash based storage which is Nano-like rather than the 30 or 80 GB disk based iPod. It has WiFi so browsing when near a 802.11 b/g hotspot should be fast but I’m not convinced that browsing on a 320×480 screen will be such a wonderful experience. Have I missed an important software breakthrough on the iPhone that will make 320×480 viewing wonderful? I have used a WiFi enabled Dell Axim with a 480 x 640 pixel screen to browse and it just doesn’t cut it.
I really like the iPhone’s Visual VoiceMail interface but its seems like the hard part is implemented by Cingular on the back end. The phone navigation looks good but is 2.4″ x 4.5″ too big to hold up to your ear comfortably? A Blackberry user pointed out to me recently that “nobody puts their phone up to their ear anymore”. Maybe.
Speaking of Blackberry, is the iPhone a threat to RIM’s dominant position in e-mail centric smart phones? It may take some of the shine off the Blackberry Pearl in the consumer space but anyone that values e-mail or Instant Messaging or any application that requires decent text input will stick with the Pearl.
I’d certainly love to play with one though :-)
Whadya think?
