Yahoo has <a href="http://axis.yahoo.com">just announced Axis</a>, a browser extension thing and mobile app that “redefines what it means to search and browse the Web [sic].”

Curtis explains why it shouldn't have, and how this tells us more (as if we needed it) about Yahoo right now.

Interesting: just as Google acquires Motorola, it also buys a design studio. Maybe hardware really is where the money is.

Ever wanted to connect your Legos and Tinkertoys together? Now you can — and much more. Announcing the Free Universal Construction Kit: a set of adapters for complete interoperability between 10 popular construction toys.

Great idea. Needs work on the acronym if it wants to appeal to parents buying it for children though.

Timothy Lee:

But if Google is guilty of using Apple's ideas, Apple is equally guilty. Many researchers and companies invented technologies that predate the iPhone but made it possible. As Microsoft's Buxton points out, Wayne Westerman (the multitouch researcher who sold his startup and became an Apple employee in 2005) cited the work of numerous early multitouch researchers in his 1999 PhD thesis. The iPhone incorporated key innovations pioneered by Bob Boie, IBM, Jazzmutant, Jeff Han, and others.

Indeed, what made the iPhone such a great product was precisely that Apple drew together a number of innovations already developed separately—touchscreen phones, capacitive touchscreens, sophisticated multitouch user interfaces—and combined them in a product greater than the sum of its parts. This pattern of combining and refining of previous innovations is the rule, not the exception, in innovative industries. Android is simply the latest example of the pattern.

Yes, multi-touch (for example) was known about for years. So were touch screens. But all the lawsuits are over implementations and specific features - not the generality of an idea. To point to Xerox's GUI again - well, the history there is that Apple paid Xerox in shares to use its ideas. (Thanks @hotsoup for the link.)

Android now has its own design language, for 4.0 onward. Looks very smooth and well thought-out. And also, <a href="http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2012/01/holo-everywhere.html">"We’ve made the inclusion of the unmodified Holo theme family a compatibility requirement for devices running Android 4.0 and forward. If the device has Android Market it will have the Holo themes as they were originally designed."</a>, Is this the end of skinning a la Samsung TouchWiz and HTC Sense?

"There are inherent problems with binary social networks. The idea that someone is either full-on in your life (and therefore has access to everything about you) or not at all is not how it works offline. You tend to share certain information only with certain groups of people. Only some people will be interested in photos of your new puppy, whereas those same people will probably not be interested in blog posts about your work.

Google Circles aims to solve these problems by allowing you to drag and drop people into distinct buckets, and letting you only share what you want with each circle. And yes, the UI makes it really easy to do this. It’s great design."

But it's impossible for that great design to make up for the fact that you can't maintain the listing of who belongs in which circles (or overlapping circles) for any length of time.

"Looks like hard work and a creative talent pays off. Jan-Michael Cart, known worldwide for his iOS concept videos has announced he has achieved his goal of working for Apple as an intern, as posted on his updated blog:"

"Welcome to the new blog section of my website. Soon I will be embarking to California, where I will be interning at a fruit company for seven months. I will be updating this to chronicle my adventures and misadventures in the Bay Area for my family, friends, and followers online. Stay tuned, I leave in less than a month!"

Though his Notifications designs are hefty - too busy compared to the phone's UI. Very interested to see how this pans out.

Having read a Verge review of the Samsung Chronos, Matt Gemmell is moved to write. "You, the PC consumer, simply shouldn’t be putting up this sort of situation. Low expectations permeate the PC press, due to the type of products foisted upon the market for many years. Poorly-integrated plastic boxes (often poor copies of existing products), optimised for cheapness of manufacture and co-branding opportunities, resulting in horribly compromised products for the consumer.

"There are certain companies out there who wouldn’t allow a product with even one of those flaws to ever make it to manufacturing. It’s a terrible indictment of the PC industry that even journalists often don’t expect anything better."

"This week, I talked with Dan Russell, a search anthropologist at Google, about the time he spends with random people studying how they search for stuff. One statistic blew my mind. 90 percent of people in their studies don't know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page! I probably use that trick 20 times per day and yet the vast majority of people don't use it at all.

"90 percent of the US Internet population does not know that. This is on a sample size of thousands," Russell said. "I do these field studies and I can't tell you how many hours I've sat in somebody's house as they've read through a long document trying to find the result they're looking for. At the end I'll say to them, 'Let me show one little trick here,' and very often people will say, 'I can't believe I've been wasting my life!'"

They probably didn't build the computer themselves, either. Nor install a smartphone mod. Defaults rule. (via @wtfcuk)

Thoughtful analysis by Matt Gemmell: "From the perspective of pure expediency (convenience regardless of morality), copying makes a hell of a lot of sense. We’ve all been tempted. Aside from potential legal vulnerability, what’s the down-side? I’ll tell you, even though it’s something you already know. Here’s the incredibly obvious truth:

"Copies never, ever achieve the success of the thing they copied."

He also points out various other problems that it leads to.

"I’ve been wondering why Apple chose to make the iPhone 4′s screen 3.5-inches when other comparable phones with Android and Windows Phone 7 have larger, more inviting screens. When you first see a phone with a 4-inch or larger screen, it seems like a much better experience. I thought it was a technical decision, and it could be, but since switching to an Android phone — a Samsung Galaxy S II, the “best Android phone you can buy, anywhere” — 15 days ago, I have realised another huge downside of larger screens."

Word used to ship with Autosave. But you had to enable it. And people didn't (because people don't change defaults, and they thought Microsoft had disabled it for a well-considered reason). But why was it disabled? <br />
<br />
"It turns out the reason the feature was disabled in that release was not because they had thought about the user’s needs. Instead, it was because a programmer had made a decision to initialize the config.ini file with all zeroes. Making a file filled with zeroes is a quick little program, so that’s what he wrote, assuming that, at some point later, someone would tell him what the “real defaults” should be. Nobody ever got around to telling him.<br />
"Since zero in binary means off, the autosave setting, along with a lot of other settings, were automatically disabled. The users’ assumption that Microsoft had given this careful consideration turned out not to be the case."

From 2007: "Summary: Users rarely look at display advertisements on websites. Of the four design elements that do attract a few ad fixations, one is unethical and reduces the value of advertising networks."<br />
<br />
The one that's unethical? Used all the time by scareware scammers. Interesting too for its pointers to what people actually look at on web pages.

Because CSS can be a pain: "GridCalc is a easy to use grid calculator. Just enter the desired width of your page and an aproximate range for your column and gutter width and the calculator will give you all the possible combinations within the limits you entered."<br />
<br />
Don't say we never do anything for you. (Via @katybairstow.) 

Promising a new laptop, says Engadget, "Dell even stated that it would have an 'innovative new form factor' of some sort.<br />
"The company neglected to mention it would look like a MacBook Pro.<br />
"This is the Dell XPS 15z, and we're sorry to say it's not a thin-and-light -- it's actually a few hairs thicker than a 15-inch MacBook Pro, wider, and at 5.54 pounds, it weighs practically the same. It is, however, constructed of aluminum and magnesium alloy and carries some pretty peppy silicon inside, and the base model really does ring up at $999. That's a pretty low price to garner comparisons to Apple's flagship, and yet here we are."<br />
<br />
A little later it says: "But let's get this out of the way right now: though the XPS 15z most definitely looks like a MacBook Pro and sports similar materials, you'll wind up disappointed if you're expecting the same exacting attention to detail."<br />
<br />
Worth reading the review in full for what it does and doesn't do well.

"When most people speak of Math, what they have in mind is more its mechanism than its essence. This "Math" consists of assigning meaning to a set of symbols, blindly shuffling around these symbols according to arcane rules, and then interpreting a meaning from the shuffled result. The process is not unlike casting lots.<br />
"This mechanism of math evolved for a reason: it was the most efficient means of modeling quantitative systems given the constraints of pencil and paper. Unfortunately, most people are not comfortable with bundling up meaning into abstract symbols and making them dance. Thus, the power of math beyond arithmetic is generally reserved for a clergy of scientists and engineers (many of whom struggle with symbolic abstractions more than they'll actually admit).<br />
"We are no longer constrained by pencil and paper. The symbolic shuffle should no longer be taken for granted as the fundamental mechanism for understanding quantity and change. Math needs a new interface."

"Are you a developer or engineer with a passion for building real products and crafting great code? Fresh out of uni, or looking for your next move?<br />
<br />
"Did you know that London's top tech startups are hiring for over 100 technical roles right now?"

"The tough part about focusing on the first-run user experience is that, as a developer, you never see it. You start up your app, start adding data and using it, develop, test, develop, test, debug, use it some more, then launch it. Unless you're consciously thinking about it, you'll probably never see a bunch of blank screens. This is incredibly dangerous because all your users will see a blank screen in the first 10 seconds, and you may not have seen it in weeks, months, or ever."