mpatrick

Happy Birthday to my son Jonas (6 years)! Behind the scenes, Jonas has helped inspect and box almost every WTD plush sold this year. Have a good one! - mpatrick

The first real customer experience we have when we get a new product is the package. Of course you might say that with the internet we can buy online and see the product before buying it, I know I get it, but the package design is a very inportant part of the customer experience. The unboxing process is exciting, Apple has shown us that it really matters, and whe have been seeing more and more companies following that wagon. In this post I decided to look for really cool package designs, but not randomly or super famous pacakges such as the awesome Apple boxes. Therefore, I will list only dark package designs. Some could be described as product designs, such as the "Salt&Pepper Cell", but they are so cool that deserved a spot in the list. Steve Jobs has always been fascinated by packaging, believing the unboxing routine to be a crucial part of the customer experience. All of Jobs’s products have been carefully packaged going back to the original Mac in 1984. Jobs believes unpacking a... - mpatrick

<this page left intentionally blank> contrary to Wired’s belief, we don’t know shit. - mpatrick

Firefox only: Since the dawn of the Like button on Facebook, people have rallied for it's counterpart, the Dislike button. Although Facebook hasn't stepped up to the plate with their own Dislike button, French developer Thomas Moquet has made it possible for Firefox users. If your Facebook feed is anything like ours, a Dislike button could be more than useful to let the overly lewd, crude, or socially unacceptable friend, know just how you feel about their updates. (Then again, you could just hide that user.) Only other Firefox users who have the add-on installed will be able to see your disapproval, so it's not as though it's tapping into some secret Facebook feature or anything like that. Dislike 0.2 is a free, experimental extension, works wherever Firefox does. Dislike 0.2 [via Web Crawler] - mpatrick

There are a whole lot of mobile, desktop, and helper apps tied to Flickr. The team at the photo sharing service decided to make those apps easier to find and install by opening a free "App Garden" to everyone. Like you might expect, the App Garden is an uncluttered, keen-looking showcase for the efforts of Flickr-happy developers and companies that have made it easy to download and upload photos to the service from many platforms. Apps are tagged by developers, making it fairly easy to find, say, a desktop Mac uploader or Android-based tool. To help users stumble across great apps, Flickr has also started tagging photos with the tools they were uploaded with, with a link back to that app in the Garden. Share some of your favorite Flickr app finds in the comments, and read up on Flickr's API if you're interested in developing an app yourself. The App Garden [Flickr via Flickr Blog] - mpatrick

Big THANK YOU to Christian Kuiphoff for creating a new WTD Apple Dashboard Widget. This new widget pulls from the new (current) RSS feed allowing you to get your daily dose of duck on your dashboard. Download the zip file HERE. - mpatrick

© 2009 Aaron Johnson - mpatrick

Whoa, what have we here? It's Alex, the dual-screen e-book reader from Spring Design looking very much like the Barnes and Noble device rumored for a Tuesday launch. It features a 6-inch E-ink EPD (electronic paper display) and 3.5-inch LCD running Google's Android OS for browsing the web or viewing video, audio, photos, and notes. It also packs a removeable SD card, speaker, headphone jack, and WiFi or 3G EVDO/CDMA and GSM radios. An interesting Duet Navigator feature even lets you toggle content captured on the LCD and present it back to the EPD to save on battery life. The device is planned for release sometime this year without any details on who might be involved in that exercise. Show full PR text FREMONT, CA - OCTOBER 19, 2009-- Spring Design today announced Alex[TM], the first e-book based on Google Android featuring full browser capabilities and patented dual screen interaction technology, the Duet Navigator[TM]. The Alex livens up text with multimedia links, adding a new... - mpatrick

© 2009 Aaron Johnson - mpatrick

October special! Free duck bill (mask) with any purchase of a WTD plush. October only. First come, first serve.
http://s75125.gridserver.com/content... © 2009 Aaron Johnson - mpatrick