The AppsLab

Recently, I bought a Withings (@withings) Smart Baby Monitor. I read about it a while back in TUAW, and I recall reading about their other products, the Wi-Fi Body Scale and Blood Pressure Monitor, all very slick in design and especially iOS-friendly. My daughter has reached that phase where silence portends disaster, so we have… Read More

After a quiet Summer during which I hear he was busy getting married, Friend of the ‘Lab John Sim (@jrsim_uix) of Fishbowl Solutions (@fishbowle20) has unleashed a torrent of good technical posts over on his C4 blog. The four c’s are content, context, collaboration and community, if you’re wondering about the blog’s name. ADF WebCenter… Read More

Little Big Details (@littlebigdetail) is a Tumblr that highlights small, but meaningful design details in various software from all over the place. This one shows how bud.ge reimagines settings as a letter written by the user to the software. It’s both personal in nature and natural in language, very clever. Kudos to bud.ge. I can hear… Read More

Here’s another interesting one via Jason Kottke, whose blog you really should read anyway. Thinking about the question, “What games do/did you play?” I’m reminded of how I fill the quiet moments and of how few there are anymore, partly because I’m an adult with a full life, but also because I fill many of… Read More

So this happened, a physical typewriter experience adapted to the iPad, delightfully munging old and new school. Oddly, the user in the video is definitely not a touch-typist. h/t Jason Kottke

The amount of data Facebook collects from its nearly one billion users is astounding. The highlights from Facebook is collecting your data — 500 terabytes a day — Data | GigaOM: 2.5 billion content items shared per day (status updates + wall posts + photos + videos + comments) 2.7 billion Likes per day 300 million… Read More

After a few days off, I’m back at the wheel. Logging into the admin panel of this blog, I was greeted with an odd graphic. Initially, I thought traffic had really taken a nose-dive, but that tower was just making our normally small traffic look even smaller. Puzzled at the influx of pageviews, especially on… Read More

Peter (@peterreiser) alerted me to a new feature of Google Chrome. Starting in Chrome 21, the browser will no longer allow installation of extensions via the .crx file. Instead, you’ll get a message that extensions can only be installed from the Chrome Web Store. This is a bummer if you have an extension you built… Read More

I just realized that friend of the ‘Lab, John Brunswick (@johnbrunswick) has a webcast tomorrow, an installment in the Oracle Social Business Thought Leader Webcast Series, called 6 Counterintuitive Best Practices for Social Collaboration Adoption. If you’re familiar with John and his work, you’ll know he’s not only an expert, but he’s a really nice guy. Check… Read More

I noticed that both posts from earlier today have titles beginning with “some.” This was an accident, but now that I’ve noticed, I must obey. Anyway, while driving a few weeks ago, I was passed by a maniac speeding and weaving between lanes. I use the term maniac as per the late George Carlin’s definition… Read More

I’m a weird font nerd. I notice typefaces, especially when they don’t match. I have opinions on serif vs. sans serif, etc. Every so often, I like to share stuff I’ve found on typefaces for any of you who happen to share my font addictions. Which Are More Legible: Serif or Sans Serif Typefaces? Infographics… Read More

Now that I have a phone running Jelly Bean, I can test drive Google Now, which looks insanely cool and super creepy. Google recently announced voice enhancements to its mobile search app that also exist within Google Now that position it to compete with Siri. Check our the detailed review at Ars if you’re interested… Read More

The story of how Mat Honan’s accounts were hacked has been floating around for several days now. It’s an unfortunate combination of unpreparedness, social engineering, lax personal security and worst of all, lax corporate security. It’s definitely worth a read because there are more than likely several parallels from which we can all learn. Mat… Read More

While Noel (@noelportugal) is off exploring South America on the OTN Latin America Tour, I too had a conference, just across the river, the annual conference of the Northwest Oracle Users Group (NWOUG), here in beautiful Portland, Oregon. NWOUG represents Oracle users in Washington and Oregon, with some members hailing from Vancouver, British Columbia, Idaho and… Read More

Early last week, I messed around with a GSM Nexus S that Rich (@rmanalan) sent me. It had Firefox OS (a.k.a. Boot to Gecko) on it, but I couldn’t get the wifi functioning, making it pretty much a brick. Rather than try to upgrade to the latest Firefox OS, which does look sweet, I decided… Read More

The rash of credential and password harvests over the past couple years, the real effects of password reuse are beginning to be felt. The Dropbox Blog: Security update & new features The backstory: News trickled out recently that Dropbox might have been compromised, since people who have single-use email addresses for Dropbox only were getting… Read More

A while back, I mused about a couple unexpected innovations around traffic lights. At the time, I assumed traffic lights had reached their design ceiling, but I was ever-so wrong. Maybe I’m oddly in-tune with traffic lights because I’ve noticed something new on the streets, the flashing yellow left turn arrow. I saw one over the… Read More

Recently, Randall Munroe, nerd icon and xkcd creator, started What If? a Q&A site of sorts. In his own words: I get a lot of strange hypothetical science questions in my email. People get in debates with their friends – stuff like “what would happen if someone threw a baseball at nearly the speed of light?” or “how many velociraptors… Read More

So, this is interesting; at first, I thought it was April Fools’. Last week, Google introduced Handwrite to make mobile device searches easier. Check out the video: At first blush, this seems like a good exercise in user experience. Stabbing your tiny smart phone keyboard isn’t always practical, which is why I frequently use the… Read More

So this happened. A Japanese modder created a trashcan that will move to catch objects you toss in the air.  An XBox Kinect is mounted to the wall to scan for moving objects, and when something flies, the can moves to catch it. I still hope to get John Sim (@jrsim_uix) and Noel (@noelportugal) in… Read More