Hey, phone producing companies, place screen and buttons on one side of the cell phone and dynamic on the other. Is that so hard? Every year when summer starts to heat the plastic or glass phone screen starts to stick to your ear or cheek. While it’s just uncomfortable with regular cell phones it makes touch screen phones (like iPhone and its brothers from other producers) unusable. You have to wipe the screen so it could feel you touch it again. Placing the dynamic on the other side of the phone solves that!

It was a 5-years-long waiting for MINI to hear my thoughts (as they did in c1rca) and make the Cooper I’d buy. Not just buy but also adore, love, respect, be proud of and drive like I’m riding a dream. Here it is — coming soon MINI Cooper Countryman. Besides it’s new design and perfect body it has normal amount of doors. MINI fans can blame me I don’t feel the spirit, banish Countryman out of Cooper family — I don’t care. I just want to ride this perfect six-speed manual gear box beauty!

Just because it’s MINI, the ads are wonderful. I’ll spoil the joy a bit offering you to watch Countryman ad prior to teaser of that car.

As MRNCH said: I’m happy to see car ad that doesn’t say ‘Your car — your road’

And here’s MINI Countryman teaser. Pay attention to the camouflage that is usually used to hide specific details of new models from papparazi. Now it’s a part of a new promotion:

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Those who consider Countryman is not MINI can enjoy my photo of old marvelous MINI taken in Rome:

I love to cook and dislike using prewritten recipes. Even if I read the recipe I do the dish my own way and it always tastes better ;) I’ve made a salad that I called “Prawn the Queen” recently. It isn’t just tasty but it looks pretty. So I present you the recipe and infographic of this salad. Let’s file it under hightech ;)

Recipe

5 slices of carambola (starfruit) about 4 mm thick

5 prawns

5 leaves of Crisphead salad

30 gr of mayonnaise

30 gr of olive oil

Tear the salad leaves in tasty-sized pieces, add starfruit slices there (you have to cut slices on two halves so they look like little crowns — six-pointed starfruits suit better). Then boil the prawns, remove their armor and add to the salad and carambola. You can buy precooked prawns so you’ll have just to unfrozen them. Mix mayonnaise with olive oil and pour on ingredients. Mix the salad again and enjoy! This is salad for one.

I found a link to stoplight concept of Damjan Stanković on dirty.ru. Designer offers to add sectors round the stop light so the drivers could see how soon they can move again and stop their engines thus saving gas and nature.

Damjan Stanković “Eko stoplight” concept

I like the idea and the contemplations but there are some problems with the product itself:

• the red light reduces — the less time left, the smaller the red light, the less chances you’ll notice it;
• uncertainty about the ending — the last sector is placed on the top, the stoplight are usually hung very high and the last sector is in the topmost position of the stoplight;
• different stoplights ave different time intervals, so we should vary the speed of the segments disappearing and that would confuse — people are concentrated on the road not on the patterns creation to understand stoplights, so this invention makes the simple object (as it has to be) more complicated;
• the old technology — LEDs are widely used nowadays to create stoplights instead of lamps behind colored glass as it is shown in the concept. LEDs are better because they are useful even when the sun is blinding. Furthermore it would be expensive to create such stoplights without LEDs.

Conveniet traffic light

See full size

We start with enlarged red light. It is useful and convenient because it’s the only one sign that orders us to stop and wait while others are more appeasable ;) We’ll use LEDs with no options and change the round shape to square. As far as I remember the stoplights are square in Minsk and even if I am wrong, I am sure I’m not the one who came up with the idea of using the whole available are. LEDs allow to do it instead of old technology with lamp and glass where the corners would be dark anyway. Time left would be displayed right on the square with light, so we won’t distract from the light but also won’t still the area of the signal.

Convenient font

I sketched a pixel font that would look good on the traffic light concept I suggest. It is also made that way that it takes the occupies the smallest area preserving readability (one of the suggestions is stealing one “pixel” from some of the numbers).

1 and 7 would never be mixed up. Also there is a way to show time intervals more then 99 seconds. If the interval is longer then we can show minutes turning to seconds the minute before the lights change. For the roads closed due to some cortege there is infinity sign showing how much those free riding care about us standing in the jam.

More features

As far as LEDs are used there are a lot of ways to inform and control drivers. Examples including cyrillic localization are shown below.

Okay, it was morning, I wanted to sleep and somehow wrote long interesting and long comment in one blog. Then I woke up swearing at myself: not recent posts in my blog and I write long comments in others. So I decided to post that comment here, adding pictures. It’s about pay cards for cellular operators and its’ usability.

Events Preceding

Roman Golubovsky attends pay codes on cards of cellular operators in his blog. He found out the Kyivstar clients had to enter the long code with no separators, to add money to their account, while MTS users saw code divided by spaces, so it was easier to read. Roman asks himself if nowadays Kyivstar has stolen the idea or it doesn’t matter as long as cards became easier to use. Finally he decides, that MTS made standard and it began to spread.

For Real

Separation long numbers in shorter to improve readability is not new. There are some things like this, that are obvious to anyone who thinks about problem of usability.

First grader of Ukraine, US and some other country would write 20-th element of Fibonacci’s AAAAA somehow like this

In school we studied that dividing the long numbers is ok. In Ukraine we used dot while in US, as far as I know, coma was a separator. We wrote five thousands like 5.000 (period is not separating decimal while coma does in Ukrainian and Russian). Then we grew up and got all that bunch of phone numbers, dates and others, where long numbers are separated so it is easier to read and understand them.

Easy to read numbers are all around starting from random phone number and finishing with IP’s of rad sites

Spaces, hyphens, slashes, dots and comas can be separators. After the pencils became common in Japan, many teenage girl started to separate words with different kawaii symbols like ★♥♂☼ and even Latin letters. ^___^ It was prohibited later but migrated to blogs, comics, anime and etc. That’s quite another topic to discuss.

It’s a pity, but we don’t use apostrophes to separate numbers. They look magnificent: 12`500`002 — stylishly and doesn’t break the lexeme that number is for sure is.

Okay, I am almost finished, just want to add that I used pay cards in Moscow in about `03 and numbers were separated by spaces already. And nowadays even UIN (ICQ numbers) are separated with hyphens.

From Numbers to the Cards

It just looks like one day the developer of the Kyivstar cards started loving his job and decided to make them more usable. And he did it, even disregarding numbers separation, let’s see why.

Photo by Roman Golubovsky

1. Position of number is perfect, because people hold the card at the bottom corners while entering code. MTS placed code in way it would be too near to the thumb that would make user feel uncomfy, while Kyivstar left enough space to feel freedom ;)
2. The method of entering the code with prefix is illustrated better on Kyivstar cards while MTS’ “*100*” looks like decoration and # with phone icon may be connected with anything but the code.
3. The most valuable for me is that code on Kyivstar’s cards is placed that way that even if you tear perforated plastic wrap with card, you won’t damage the code anyway. MTS’ code can be torn away if the perforation is on the left site of the bag.

I use life :) cell operator and use iBox terminals or Euroset’ stores to add money to my cell account. Euroset’ gives checks where the code is also separated by spaces, so, MTS’, nothing new in your way of presenting code, but respect that you though of that and now you have even more things to improve!

I bought a new kettle today Copco Torino (central on the photo) to replace the old one made in Czechoslovak and burnt like heretic. It’s a miracle that I could find a pretty-looking kettle that suits my kitchen design. I was desperate about other kettles and was about buying electrical one (they got pretty designs). The sparkling circle on it’s lid is whistler and the lid is opened by the gentle press on the front part of handle. I was proud to know that this water boiler without only a hint on spout is 2005 Housewares Design Award winner.