April

April Fools' Day 2011--who's gonna get you, sucka?

For years now, the tech industry has been a sucker for the "gotcha" moment every April 1. Teams at companies large and small cook up clever gadgets and widgets and such that sound ever so almost plausible. Or not.

In case you hadn't already noticed, April Fools' Day is here again. A flurry of pranks has descended upon us via the Web. Some of them are quite smart and might just elicit a few chuckles from even the most cynical of us. Others are just plain goofy.

We're keeping tabs on the April Fools' jokes for … Read more

Google's joking, but Monotype isn't: Comic Sans Pro

Comic Sans, the Windows font reviled by font snobs everywhere, has joined the big leagues.

Monotype Imaging released the oxymoronic but definitely real Comic Sans Pro, taking advantage of April Fools' Day to bring some humor to the occasion. The new typeface combines a script style geared for typographically clumsy children's birthday invitations with high-end font features more commonly used on wedding invitations.

"Comic Sans Pro contains a versatile range of typographic features including swashes, small caps, ornaments, old-style figures, and stylistic alternates," Monotype said, referring to a variety of ways designers extend beyond the standard character … Read more

Friday Poll: Most April Fool-ish product?

Happy April Fools' Day! Some news outlets love playing jokes on audiences on April 1. The BBC, for example, has a tradition of pulling off great fake news pranks, from spaghetti trees to flying penguins. Their high jinks have become increasingly sophisticated.

Here at Crave, we are, of course, way too mature to inflict any fake news today. But plenty of loony ideas get fed into our Crave news machine, and more than a few recent ones are so silly they beggar belief.

Take Israeli start-up BioExplorers. It has a security screening system that relies on mice to sniff out concealed bombs. Fortunately, we hear the critters have graduated from the Bomb Sniffing Academy for Rodents and are thus highly trained.

Over in Australia, industrial designer Melody Shiue has designed a fetus viewer for expecting parents. Yes, moms strap the gadget on and the magic of ultrasound turns their tummies into windows on the uterus. Apparently this idea won an award of some sort. … Read more

Can the iPad 2's camera see through clothes?

We're seeing the above video spreading around the Internet, and while it's cool, and it's based on real science, we're calling an early April Fools' gag.

U.K. comedian, tech-head, and all-around good nerd Jason Bradbury is seen in the vid using a pair of cheap night vision goggles, cling wrap, and an iPad 2's camera to take a revealing photo of himself--through his clothes.

The idea is based on an inadvertent side effect that some camcorders with low-light functions experienced about a decade ago. The cameras worked by emitting infrared light via special LEDs. The camera, when in "night vision" mode, would then record video in infrared instead of visible light. Some cameras, though, generated an "X-ray effect," allowing the viewer to see through the clothes of the person being videotaped.

This phenomenon was well documented and later-generation cameras were modified to exclude the "feature." While Bradbury's setup is more or less similar to the one employed by the first-generation naked-inducing cameras, we're not remotely convinced. … Read more

The 404 788: Where we buy you a virtual girlfriend (podcast)

Scott Stein fills in for Wilson, who is spending a sick day at home trawling WebMD on his iPad. Or maybe he's at a job interview for Grand Theft Auto V. Today's show discusses a phenomenon known as "Netflix hoarding," how to buy an online girlfriend using a new service called Cloud Girlfriend, and we suggest a few April Fools' Day pranks for nerds.

Episode 788 Subscribe in iTunes (audio) | Subscribe in iTunes (video) | Subscribe in RSS Audio | Subscribe in RSS Video… Read more

Geeks threatened by Pork Board over unicorn meat

Sometimes lawyers don't always spend their time in the most productive ways. Indeed, one wonders whether the lawyers at the firm of Faegre and Benson spent their time productively in reportedly sending out a 12-page cease and desist letter to the japesters at ThinkGeek.com.

I have no nag in this spat, as I can no more understand geeks than I can understand lawyers. Yet ThinkGeek.com is adamant that this cease and desist is heartily genuine and deeply critical of its attempt to sell unicorn meat. Specifically, canned unicorn meat.

Should you be frustrated at missing the opportunity … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 1197: Where this episode is no joke (podcast)

Once again this year, we've had it with April Fool's jokes. Except for one. You'll see. If you're more tired of iPad than you are of April Fool's, skip the first half of the show where we recap other people's reviews since Apple refuses to give us an iPad early. Also, we debunk Microsoft's claims that Chrome is fundamentally insecure, which almost ought to be a joke.

Subscribe with iTunes (audio) Subscribe with iTunes (video) Subscribe with RSS (audio) Subscribe with RSS (video) EPISODE 1197

iPad reviews roll in from USA, Mossberg and … Read more

Geeky in-jokes dominate April Fools' Day 2010

If you work on the Internet, it seems like you either love or hate April Fools' Day, which has become just about any tech company's excuse to make fake product announcements or attempt to mislead readers. This year was no exception: Though there was no "Hotelicopter"-like prank that actually fooled reputable news sources, fake news was more ubiquitous than ever.

Most of 2010's gags, to be honest, aren't all that funny if you don't get the tech industry in-jokes referenced. But a few, like the In-N-Out Burger prank in New York, were pretty darn good. Also worth noting: we haven't seen a single Rickroll.… Read more

Six April Fools' Day launches that were real

Every year the tech world trips over itself to create a myriad fake products for user chuckles and some easy press. There's also a very small percentage of companies that decide to launch real products. We've rounded up six of those sites and services below, as well as some honorable April Fools' Day-related news events.

1. Google Gmail

One of the most notable April Fools' Day launches was Google's Gmail in 2004. Back then, a gigabyte of storage for a Web e-mail service was a big deal. This was especially true given that competitors like Microsoft and Yahoo were charging for extra in-box space.

Gmail wasn't open to everyone though. Its small, 1,000-user private beta test, which expanded through the company doling out user invites from time to time, became a hot tech ticket, and one that spawned an entire ecosystem of invite-trading economies.

Gmail has since continued to expand how much service it gives users, which is now up to 7.4GB.

2. Yahoo Sideline

Yahoo launched its Twitter tracking tool Sideline exactly one year ago, and it's still up and running. The Adobe Air-based app lets users keep an eye on Twitter in real time. Users can enter in search queries, and see them stream in across multiple tabs. The software is meant to be running all the time, though it cannot do some basic things like allow you to post to Twitter, or quickly follow a user that shows up in the results.

See our hands-on with it from last year.

3. Scribd's "Paper to iPaper"

A scanning-by-mail service from a digital documents service? It seemed too outlandish that a company would eat the cost of scanning a giant stack of your documents in order to get them in its database. But that's just what Web document-sharing tool Scribd launched on April Fools' Day in 2008. We thought it was a joke and so did our readers.

The service, which was quietly killed off last year, worked pretty well in our testing (see the result). The only big downsides were that you never got your physical documents back, and you had to pay for it to be shipped to Scribd's scanning headquarters.… Read more