Do you know, or have you ever wanted to know, why milk containers are square and soft drink containers are round? This and other questions of design are answered in Robert Frank’s new book The Economic Naturalist: In Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmas.

June 13, 2007January 10, 2011 by Alex

Apple Design Awards 2007 winners

link

Link: Apple Design Awards 2007 winners

Every year Apple celebrates the best of the best developers in it’s Apple Design Awards. Ars has the results for the 2007 edition.

Apple may have the last laugh as Parallels and VMware duke it out

link

Link: Apple may have the last laugh as Parallels and VMware duke it out

Will Leopard’s Boot Camp integration be the end of virtualization? Probably not, at least for most users. But Apple has made Boot Camp significantly more appealing in Leopard, and may give the other two options a run for their money.

Self-Healing Plastic Skin

link

Link: Self-Healing Plastic Skin

An anonymous reader writes “Scientists have developed a form of plastic skin that can heal itself when damaged. The material relies on an underlying network of vessels â€” similar to blood capillaries â€” that carry a healing agent to areas on the material’s surface that sustain damage. Unlike previous self-healing systems that relied on capsules of agent buried in the polymer and which became depleted after one use, the new system can respond to damage at the same point many times over.”

Leopard goodness

regular

Leopard is looking really good, particularly the improvements in Mail.app. Will it be improved enough to make me ditch Thunderbird? If it still stores mail in a proprietary pain-in-the-ass format, then no. But if all the new bells and whistles work with IMAP and nothing stored locally, I’m there, man.

And of course, it’s about damn time they got around to virtual desktops. Looks like they did it pretty well, with a good-looking couple of pager options.

June 12, 2007January 10, 2011 by Alex