Friday, April 24, 2009

Cheeseburger in a can?

If you are the wandering type -- and have decided to go on a long trek. Can you get a Cheeseburger in a can? The answer is .. "yes you can". The Germans' (of all people) have come up with the solution for a few Euro.

Well, in case you are saying "I like extra cheese" -- esp. the pre-melted stuff. Fear not for Kraft has a solution for you in their "Easy Cheese" range.


PLUS


I guess, this must be what progress and civilisation is all about.

If you are interested, you should read a more comprehensive review of this product (Gizmodo recently also attempted to consume it).

Fortunately, this nourishment is not available in Australia (yet!).



Saturday, April 18, 2009

UI Design (or lack of...)

Some designers never think .... these are a couple of links that came up on Reddit.

http://ingoodhands.com (A Financial Company home page)

http://now.sprint.com/widget/ (Sprint Telecommunications)
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Think about the time a group of people spent on actually creating these sites. There is absolutely no rational explanation ... except, may be, this is the way the geeks and artists are getting back at the Telephone companies (for their plethora of nasty policies) and Financial companies for the current economic mess.

Interestingly, both of these User interfaces would look "so" cool for a 4-5 second shot in a movie. This is possibly how they got User acceptance -- just showed the project sponsors a couple of shot video clips.

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If you are into UI design, do read the article from 37 Signals - Learning from Bad UI design.

There is always the classic - UI Hall of Shame on what not to do (it is quite old, but will certainly bring back memories from the past).

My fav. one about tabs from the UI hall of shame is ...









There was a time when MS Word got pretty close to this kind of mess with tabs. Thankfully, these days, the designers heavily use grouping icons and lists on the right hand side to provide drill-downs as needed (Eclipse IDE especially).

-- rv