The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘design’

When you’ve been making iPod and iPhone docks since the beginning, what is there to do but tweak the design every once in a while? That’s JBL’s situation, and these “new” docks are pretty much what you had before, but no one would choose the old ones over the new ones

Read more:
JBL makes slight changes to iPod dock lineup

We’re happy to announce the rollout of a mobile version of TechCrunch. We know how spotty wireless coverage can be, and how frustrating it can get to wait for a ton of extras to load while you’re staring at 2.5″ screen and can’t see them anyway. To that end, this version is stripped down to the bare essentials to ensure quick load times and ease of use. It’s based on the WPTouch theme by BraveNewCode.

It’s not an app – it works with any touch-enabled browser. You can, of course, add it to your home screen for easy access to the latest in technology news. Thank you to Bing, our launch partner for the mobile version.

To see the new mobile version, just go to techcrunch.com on any touch-screen mobile device. We’ll be adding full support for non-touchscreen models soon.

We’ll be improving on the design in the coming weeks, so tell us your thoughts in the comments.

Doesn’t this look like something you’d see in an alien’s house? It is in fact real, and is a lamp design by Patrick Jouin for MGX , a group that does lighting via 3D printing techniques. We’ve posted a few times about Shapeways , which does fabrication of submitted 3D models, but these are designer

Continued here: 
“Bloom” light shows what’s possible with 3D-printed decor

I’m not an electrician, nor do I play one on TV, but this I like.

Read the original post: 
Take that, old UK electrical plug

Which employee does what, when, how and with which tools? That’s a critical question for many companies, which usually rely on business process management (BPM) solutions to visualize, streamline, and implement predefined workflows. Just last month, enterprise SaaS behemoth Salesforce.com rolled out a new BPM tool, Visual Process Manager – only to be now challenged by a small startup called Questetra, which thinks its eponymous solution can stack up.

The way Questetra’s BPM suite (and similar products) work is that users chart business workflows to identify redundancies, “bottle necks” or conflicts in future company processes. Once the design is ready, the designer can authorize other users to revise the system themselves, meaning these designs are then put to actual use in a work environment.

The applicant in the reimbursement process visualized below, for instance, submits a request through the Flash application, which then notifies his supervisor who can then approve and send the request to the accounting division for a final check (there’s actually a whole bunch of different task execution functions built into the application). All actions can be managed via a user-specific dashboard, and just like with Salesforce.com’s solution, for example, Questetra users don’t need to deal with any code.

Apart from relatively low pricing and ease of use, Questetra says the “killer feature” of their suite is that it’s 100% web-based, meaning separate software isn’t required to design a process or perform a task. Another key selling point is the seamless integration with Google Apps (in the SaaS version, users can log in with their existing Google accounts and easily export data to Google Docs).

Questetra, which says their suite is especially interesting for companies with 20 to 200 employees, offers a self-hosted (downloadable) edition and an SaaS solution for $10 per user per month (there’s also a trial version and a number of free sample workflows). It’s also one of the first applications distributed through the Google Apps Marketplace that launched just last week.

Questetra, which is based in Kyoto/Japan, is currently working on mobile-friendly features and an API to be rolled out in the near future. Apart from Salesforce.com’s Visual Process Manager, the Questetra BPM suite competes with SAP’s Visual Composer, Appian, and Intalio, amongst others.

Under the radar startup NorthScale is publicly launching today with a new data management technology to help web-based companies, particularly startups that deal with large amounts of transactional data. For example, social gaming giant Zynga has been using NorthScale since December.

Founded by leaders of the memcached open source project, NorthScale is like Cloudera for Hadoop or Red Hat for Linux; the startup is commercializing the open source technology. As web applications generate vast volumes of data, there is a need for a data management technology that caters towards transactional software systems. NorthScale’s elastic data infrastructure software promises to cache frequently used data while also offering performance and scalability.

The NorthScale Memcached Server is the also includes the ability to securely support multiple applications on a shared cluster, and allows a memcached cluster to dynamically change with automatic client updates. The NorthScale Membase Server is a high‐performance, distributed key‐value database which builds on the NorthScale Memcached Server foundation and is directly compatible with memcached APIs and client libraries.

Currently Zynga and NHN are using NorthScale as a foundations for shared data management infrastructure. Founded in 2009, the startup has raised $5 million in Series A funding from Accel Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners.

Weebly, the startup that allows users to build rich websites using a straightforward drag and drag interface, is about to get a lot more colorful. The site has opened a new Theme Community, allowing any of its 3.5 million users to submit their own themes for use by other Weebly members. To help launch the new feature, Weebly is holding a contest where it’s giving $10,000 to the top submitted design, as determined by a panel of professional designers.

This is a pretty big deal for Weebly. Up until now, users have had around 80 themes to choose from, which pales in comparison to the number of themes available for some other site building platforms, like WordPress. You’ve always been free to use your own custom CSS styling, but many of the site’s users are using Weebly specifically because they don’t want to have to deal with that sort of thing. Now they’ll have a lot more variety to choose from, with no mucking around in CSS required.

At launch, Weebly’s theme gallery is still only going to consist of the 80 themes that already exist, since it’s just opening to submissions for the first time today. But CEO David Rusenko expects that to change quickly, in part spurred by the design competition the site is holding. He also believes that designers will be compelled to create themes for the site because of the large audience it reaches — Weebly now has 3.5 million site building users, who see 80 million page views per month from 17 million unique visitors. And he says that traffic is growing 20% month over month. It’s a bit surprising that it took this long for the site to roll out the feature (Weebly launched back in 2007), but Rusenko says that they “wanted to get it right”. Fair enough.

Users will be able to access the themes both through the site’s editor (which has been revamped a bit to accommodate the new gallery) and from this page, which you can view even if you aren’t a Weebly member. Themes won’t include attribution in their footers, but the gallery itself will allow designers to build up their own profiles, allowing users to see all of the themes they’ve submitted. At launch, all themes will be free, but Rusenko says that the site plans to begin allowing designers to sell premium themes in the future.

The design competition has a submission deadline of April 30, is open in any country where such contests are valid, and is being judged by Michael Cronan, Scott Thomas, Jason Putorti, Andrew Wilkinson, Dustin Curtis, and Rob Martin.

Andrew Wilkinson of MetaLab Design has just written a blog post accusing Mozilla of plagiarizing the design of its FlightDeck editor. To make matters worse, Wilkinson says that MetaLabs actually bid on creating the design for FlightDeck months ago, but was turned down by Mozilla.

While Wilkinson is understandably upset, at this point,it looks like the plagiarized image is just a mockup on the Mozilla wiki — not the actual product (though it’s obviously still in bad taste). We’ve reached out to Mozilla for a comment.

On its wiki, Mozilla describes FlightDeck as a tool to “enable the community to rapidly, collaboratively develop both extensions that utilize the Jetpack framework and Jetpack Capabilities crucial to the expansion of the Jetpack framework’s core.“

Andrew Wilkinson of MetaLab Design has just written a blog post accusing Mozilla of plagiarizing the design of its FlightDeck editor. To make matters worse, Wilkinson says that MetaLabs actually bid on creating the design for FlightDeck months ago, but was turned down by Mozilla.

While Wilkinson is understandably upset, at this point,it looks like the plagiarized image is just a mockup on the Mozilla wiki — not the actual product (though it’s obviously still in bad taste). We’ve reached out to Mozilla for a comment.

On its wiki, Mozilla describes FlightDeck as a tool to “enable the community to rapidly, collaboratively develop both extensions that utilize the Jetpack framework and Jetpack Capabilities crucial to the expansion of the Jetpack framework’s core.“

Andrew Wilkinson of MetaLab Design has just written a blog post accusing Mozilla of plagiarizing the design of its FlightDeck editor. To make matters worse, Wilkinson says that MetaLabs actually bid on creating the design for FlightDeck months ago, but was turned down by Mozilla.

While Wilkinson is understandably upset, at this point,it looks like the plagiarized image is just a mockup on the Mozilla wiki — not the actual product (though it’s obviously still in bad taste). We’ve reached out to Mozilla for a comment.

On its wiki, Mozilla describes FlightDeck as a tool to “enable the community to rapidly, collaboratively develop both extensions that utilize the Jetpack framework and Jetpack Capabilities crucial to the expansion of the Jetpack framework’s core.“