Bob Turek’s speaker system, called “Stereo”, is a bit… unusual.
It’s part of his Object Remix series, and Stereo “forces the music source into the center of attention and creates a radically new user interface”.
Putting a hand built stereo amplifier inside of a fiberglass mannequin with an MP3 player and speakers attached to and protruding from the naughty bits and pieces probably isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but if you want a speaker system that’s hard to ignore, I can’t imagine one (or would prefer not to) that’s better than this.
Delicious (the social bookmarking site formerly known as del.icio.us that calls itself “the tastiest bookmarks on the web” and was also the father of the strange domain name), launched its long awaited redesign yesterday to help move the site beyond its late ‘90s style.
Though the underlying functionality is still the same, the new look and feel is designed to make it faster, easier to learn, and hopefully more desirable.
Speed: We’ve moved to a new infrastructure that makes every page faster. This new platform will enable us to keep up with traffic growth while ensuring Delicious is responsive and reliable. You may not have noticed, but the old backend was getting creaky under the load of five million users.
Search: We’ve completely overhauled our search engine to make it faster and more powerful. Searches used to take ages to return results; now they’re very quick. The new search engine is also smarter, and more social: you can search within one of your tags, another public user’s bookmarks, or your social network. Now it’s easier to take advantage of the expertise and interests of your friends, not to mention the Delicious community at large.
Design: Finally, we’ve updated the user interface to improve usability and add a few often-requested features (such as selectable detail levels and alphabetical sorting of bookmarks). Our goal has been to keep the new design similar in spirit to the old one, so all of you veterans should be able to jump in without any confusion. At the same time, we’re hoping that newcomers to Delicious will find it easier to learn.
I’m a big Delicious user (http://delicious.com/cory411), but since I use the Firefox plugin, I rarely if ever visit the site.
However, with looks like this, I just might have to give it a second chance.
Google has finally released details about their phone plans, and despite rumors, it’s not going to be a Gphone.
Instead, Google announced the creation of the Open Handset Alliance, and specifically Android, “the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices. It includes an operating system, user-interface and applications — all of the software to run a mobile phone, but without the proprietary obstacles that have hindered mobile innovation.”
While it’s not an iPhone killer that most had hoped for, it does present some interesting opportunities for the mobile world, so stay tuned to see what they do with it.
