( I + P )

London-based artist Paul St George recently unveiled an exhibit called The Telectroscope.  In the piece, giant, steam-punk style telescopes embedded in the pedestrian walkways in London and NYC provides onlookers with a real-time view of people on the other side.  Even more impressive is the story as to how this idea came about.

While today's version is done with video streaming technology, it's a whimsical piece and worth checking out if you're in either town. Here's an excerpt from the story page:

Some years ago an artist by the name of Paul St George happened upon a packet of dusty papers in a trunk in his grandmother’s attic. On further inspection he discovered that they had been the property of his great-grandfather, an eccentric Victorian engineer, Alexander Stanhope St George.

Paul began to read through the papers and discovered a veritable treasure trove: diaries, diagrams, correspondence, scribbled calculations, and even one or two photographs. At first, Paul felt a detached interest in this first hand account of social and cultural history. But as he read on, he became more and more absorbed, until, with a sudden thrill, he realised that these papers could have a greater significance than was at first apparent.

The notebooks were full of intricate drawings and passages of writing describing a strange machine. This device looked like an enormous telescope with a strange bee-hive shaped cowl at one end containing a complex configuration of mirrors and lenses. Alexander seemed to be suggesting that this invention, which he called a Telectroscope, would act as a visual amplifier, allowing people to see through a tunnel of immense length… a tunnel, the drawings implied, stretching from one side of the world to the other.

Last week, we developed a basic login widget that will allow anyone to place a Convos login box on their website.

This is great for groups on Convos that already have a website and want to give their visitors a quick way to login to their Convos accounts.  You can even customize the size and color to fit in with aesthetics of your site.

To get the widget, simply click "Get Widget" at the bottom of the login box, customize the size and color of your widget, and embed the code into your website.

This is the first version of the login widget and we will be making updates including a link to retrieve your password, allowing users to signup for Convos right from the widget, and a version designed for dark backgrounds.

Give it a try and let us know what you think. 

An amazing amount of work goes into designing the interior of a car. Everything from the precise use of various controls (buttons, switches, sliders, touchscreens), to materials (plastic, aluminum, chrome, leather), to feedback (lighting, clicks, beeps, etc), to proportions and layout - all play a huge part in the overall experience for the driver.

For anyone designing / developing a web-based application, there is a lot that can be learned from the automobile industry and industrial design in general. The video above from the new Jaguar XF helps demonstrate how much goes into designing an amazing automobile interior.

Overall, one major theme holds true. In both web-apps and automobile interiors, the best experiences achieve a unique balance of high-end aesthetics and convenience.

One of the great benefits of building Convos in Flex is that we (or you!) will be able to do some really amazing things with skins. We've already been impressed with the capabilities of using CSS for the general design of components and color scheme,  but that's just the beginning of what can be done. .  To fully appreciate skinning for Flex web-apps and Apollo desktop apps, you have to interact with some of them.

Click here and interact with the amazing scribble-style skin shown above from Flexray.org.

For more great skins, stop by ScaleNine and be sure to check out Flekscribble or the Mac OS X style.

Writing on a computer today with out distractions can be a real challenge. I came across this great program for Macs that allows you to block out all distractions and type away in full screen, Doogie Houser MD style.

It's called Writeroom and I've found it to be a great way to easily get thoughts into a document on my computer.

Download available here.