This game might just make you (or your kids) realize how fun it can be to do some household chores. Chore Wars is a web-based role-playing game. But instead of fantasizing you're a blood-sucking vampire or a white-haired wizard, you're yourself, in a party, doing chores. Wait! Think of the possibilities! Each chore is a new adventure. Say it's cleaning your own room. You can get other people to help you out with it, or do it by yourself. And what could possibly be exciting about that?
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Let's first admit that most consumer electronics out there aren't as pleasing to the eye as we would like them to be. (That's why we all agree Apple's products are groundbreaking---if at least for their impeccable industrial design.) Rarely, too, do we see tech products designed for the female taste. It's not just splashing a coat of pink paint on an iPod or a mobile phone. But does it also mean slapping the Hello Kitty motif onto every nook and cranny of a laptop? I wouldn't really say that, but what's the harm in bringing this pop culture icon into the computer gadget industry? This cute cat already has, actually. Looking at three Hello Kitty themed laptops shouldn't be so bad.
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Amidst all the cries of ecstasy over Mac OS X Leopard at the WWDC07, we have a little surpsrise: Safari is released for Windows. It's a public beta, to be exact. That's great news, coming not from someone who wants Apple to take over the world, but as a web designer who wants to test web pages in all kinds of browsers. I haven't been able to do that on Safari since it's always been released on the Mac exclusively. It's also a great idea to discover a new browser every once in a while. Find out which one has features that best suit your taste. After all, Steve Jobs claims it's twice as fast as Internet Explorer and 1.6 times as fast as Firefox. Problem is, right after downloading and installing Safari for Windows I ran into two major problems right away.
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Before Netscape.com turned into a social voting website (read: Digg clone), before Firefox graduated from the Mozilla Application Suite and became the darling of net geeks and casual surfers alike, before Internet Explorer emerged victorious from the First Browser War using the classic Microsoft tactic, and before people understood the value of a web browser, there was Netscape. It was actually called the Mosaic Netscape browser then, since the company started out as the Mosaic Communications Corporation. Netscape---both the company and the browser---has gone through ups and downs but today it stands tall, having released version 9 of the classic browser this June 5th. Here are some highlights of the latest version of Netscape Navigator:
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There were many interesting things to discover and enjoy at this year's D conference, D5. One such example was Microsoft Surface. But surely the biggest highlight of the event was the interview with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs for the first time in twenty years. Paying Tribute Before turning into the two icons representing the two biggest rivals in the computer industry, Bill and Steve were first and foremost pioneers and visionaries whose work catapulted them and their companies into great success. D5's interview quickly reminds us to cease the hostilities if at least for one night, and simply be in awe ...
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We've all seen and heard about modding the look of computer peripherals and other present-day machines to fit a person's personality or simply to follow certain whims (read: too much time on one's hands). An interesting, shall we say, genre modders like to do is that of Steampunk. It's a look based on the type of sci-fi/fantasy/speculative fiction literary genre, Steampunk, where steam is used to power high-tech inventions set in the Victorian era.
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I recently had the privilege of unboxing one of my most treasured possessions ever: an Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium. It's not a gadget, but it's tangible, and costs more than any other thing I own (other than Risk, my laptop). What is unboxing? It's one thing to pick out a tech toy and become its proud owner. But it's a whole other matter to do the honors of unboxing it. Unboxing, as the word suggests, is the geeky ceremony of taking your beloved gadget, toy, or whatnot, out of its box, piece by piece. Enthusiasts who engage themselves in such an activity pay attention to the packaging and other accessories that come with the box. Also, they ...
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Meet the umbrella that lets you do more than shield you from the rain, the Pileus: Pileus is an umbrella connected to the Internet to make walking in rainy days fun. Pileus has a large screen on the top surface, a built-in camera, a motion sensor, GPS, and a digital compass, and it provides two main functions; [sic] A Social Photo-sharing and A 3D Map Navigation. The "social photo-sharing" part is actually with Flickr, while the "3d map navigation" part is powered by Google Earth. Pileus started out as a research project by Sho Hashimoto and Takashi Matsumoto at Keio University's Human Computer-Interaction (HCI) Design Lab. Here's a short ...
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It seems the most unlikely products want to be iPod-compatible. That's how powerful the Apple iPod brand has become: it's now a selling point for companies wanting a little boost in their sales. Here are just some of the examples of products that have made it a point to please the MP3 player giant: Pause: iPod-Compatible Bed The Pause by Design Mobel is the world's first bed that lets you play your iPod with it. They also call it the "world's most comfortable iPod Dock". Photo from DesignMobel.co.nz See also: Lomme, another iPod-friendly bed with a futuristic feel.
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You and I may be gadget freaks, but we can't own 'em all. What could we possibly do once we see or hear about a cool new tech toy we'd love to get our hands on but can't (at the moment, at least)? Why, add it to our wishlist, of course! Amazon Wishlists I believe it was Amazon that popularized the concept of a virtual wishlist. You'd find them on the sidebars of people's personal websites even before blogging really caught on. But these lists were mostly made of book titles, not necessarily gadgets. Eventually wishlists have been incorporated as one of the neater features of online shops. But like Amazon's, the wishlists do not work across multiple online shops. Web 2.0 ...
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