design

It's end-of-term time, which means brainy college students throughout the land are busily quaffing coffee and eschewing sleep to get their final projects sewn up.

That means too, of course, that many of these compelling projects are being put on display for the first time.

We got an e-mail from Golan Levin, a professor of new-media arts at Carnegie Mellon University, about student work in his advanced class this spring: "Special Topics in Interactive Art and Computational Design." Levin has put together a Web page of videos, and the projects display an admirable diversity of interests and approaches (and in some cases a mischievous sense of humor).

They range from Kinect-powered 3D soundscapes to virtual houseflies to sexy long-distance physical-stimulation devices (digital foreplay, anyone?).… Read more

Discovered by Patently Apple in a group of 21 patents issued to Apple by the Patent and Trademark Office, the in-vehicle remote-control patent describes a product designed for drivers wishing to control their iOS devices more easily.

Currently, drivers must fumble around with their iPhone, iPod, or iPad to change songs, get directions, or make calls if their car's in-dash system doesn't support iOS devices. This lack of integration can cause serious distractions for drivers.

Apple's solution is a small device that would attach to any steering wheel, allowing users to connect to their iOS devices and control basic functions.… Read more

Evernote for Mac is just one part of an excellent, access-from-anywhere note-taking system. In addition to the Evernote desktop client, you can create and get to your notes from a variety of mobile devices (including apps for the iPhone and iPad) and any Web browser on any computer. A free Evernote account links all your notes together.

Evernote is a mature and popular application, with an impressively streamlined interface that shares similarities across its multiple platforms and gives you many different ways to create notes and collections of notes called notebooks. Your notes can be text, images, or Web clippings, … Read more

In today's show, Google takes the wheel, Microsoft listens to your movements, and 'resumegate' fires up:

Yahoo's "resumegate" has claimed it's first victim -- but it's not the CEO. Yahoo board member Patti Hart said she plans to not seek re-election to Yahoo's board. She's tied up in the drama because she was in charge of the search to hire the chief executive and vet his resume. The scandal, which has been developing for nearly a week now, surrounds Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson and his bios that claimed he had a computer … Read more

Boost Mobile is getting into the 4G mix with the launch of the HTC Evo Design 4G.

The smartphone, which will launch on May 31, comes with a 4-inch qHD, or 960x540-pixel resolution, touch screen and Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). In addition, the handset boasts a 1.2GHz processor, a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera to complement its 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera, and Wi-Fi hot-spot functionality.

The big news of the day, however, is that the smartphone will become the first 4G-ready device to hit Boost Mobile's service by operating on Sprint's 4G (WiMax) network. According to Boost … Read more

When I got my Panasonic cordless home phone system about two years ago, I was amused to discover that its voice-announce features used two different voices. The voice that reads the caller ID is female. The one that talks me through the voice-mail options is male. It's pretty clear that this is not the result of an intentional design decision, nor an homage to "Airplane," but rather, because these two systems were built separately and grafted together at the last minute. Look close enough at this phone and you can almost see the duct tape.

I thought … Read more

Adobe Systems today began selling Creative Suite 6, its mammoth but expensive collection of software for designers, artists, photographers, videographers, publishers, and others in the "content creation" business.

The software is available in the $2,599 Master Collection, the smaller $1,899 Design and Web Premium or Production Premium collections, or the yet-smaller $1,299 Design Standard collection. About three quarters of Adobe's unit shipments today are in these collections, but individual packages are available, too, such as Photoshop CS6 for $699 in its standard version or Illustrator CS6 for $599.

With CS6, Adobe tried to mix … Read more

Our old friend Andrew Mager joins us in the studio this morning to tell us what it takes to earn the role of Hacker Advocate over at Spotify.

He'll also give us a live demo of some of the popular apps you can download for Spotify that help you discover new music, browse music lyrics, read more about your favorite artists, scan your albums using a Web cam, and more. Somewhere during this episode, we also decide to start a four-man band, so let us know what you think our name should be.… Read more

Working at a restaurant requires doing many repetitious tasks, but perhaps the most tedious and lamented (aside from bathroom cleanup) is wrapping silverware in a napkin.

To solve that age-old annoyance of having to bundle countless utensils, the Capstone Design class at Georgia Tech created an autonomous silverware wrapper capable of perfectly packaging silverware at a respectable speed. … Read more