The Best New Windows 8.1 Features in 8 GIFs

The Best New Windows 8.1 Features in 8 GIFs

Windows 8.1 just got an update . The changes are mostly tiny but also great. In fact there so small you might even miss a few when they start rolling out next week, so we’ve wrangled our favorites into this series of handy GIFs.

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Who Designed the Hamburger Icon?

Who Designed the Hamburger Icon?

The hamburger icon is a classic. Even if you don’t know it by that name, its three black bars are as familiar as your mouse’s cursor—a constant companion on your cyber journey since the day you got your first computer. But who designed this icon?

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Could an Ignition-Activated “Car Mode” Keep Drivers From Texting?

Could an Ignition-Activated “Car Mode” Keep Drivers From Texting?

Texting while driving accounts for more and more accidents every year, but there’s no clear solution in sight (unless you think these new SMS rest stops will work). New York designer Joey Cofone is proposing another idea: An iOS “Car Mode,” akin to airplane mode, that would prevent you from texting while your car is in motion.

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Check Out How Much Better Twitter Could Look (and Work)

In the early days, Twitter was famous for its dead simple design: a box, some text, a button. But over the years, it’s gotten busier with the hashtags and the @ mentions and the retweets. Some might say say too busy. So why not just start over and rebuild this thing from the ground up?

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Why Do We Keep Making Ebooks Like Paper Books?

Comparing books to ebooks is like comparing mechanical watches to digital watches, or manual cars to automatic cars. No one doubts the convenience, reach, and flexibility of the ebook format, but it will never convincingly replicate the experience of a paper book—nor does it need to. Ebooks are a fundamentally new medium, stuck in an awkward growing stage. More »

How Android’s Multitasking Experience Could Be Even Better

Lately I’ve been thinking about the multitasking experience on Android and I feel like there’s still a lot to improve. I love how the thumbnails come up, but in 4.2.2 they made it so that the current app joined the list of “Recent Apps”. This looks great on phones and small-sized tablets, but it looks really bad on large tablets (ie. Nexus 10) in landscape mode. Here’s how to make it better. More »

The New York Times Gets a Glorious Online Design Overhaul

The New York Times is previewing a new cleaner website design that will roll out slowly in the coming months. The centerpiece of the redesign is the article view, which as you can see in the slider comparison above is completely different. More »

Facebook’s Most Overlooked Design Change

Facebook showed us its new News Feed yesterday. It’s as pretty as anyone could have hoped, and a wonderful update to the design. But lost in the big images and new feeds was a pretty major change that actually started weeks ago: The first thing you look at on Facebook’s page has moved. More »

Bringing iPhone Safari Up to Speed

Safari is technically a platform on its own, separate from the App Store. Until the day that Gatekeeper comes to iOS, it will continue to be the most open way for users to access information on Apple’s mobile devices. But besides iCloud Tabs and Reading List, Mobile Safari has remained basically unchanged since its unveiling, in 2007. More »

UIU Android launcher targets non-techie users with easy cloud management (video)

UIU

Emblaze Mobile’s First Else may be no more, but its legacy lives on. During MWC we caught up with the company’s ex-CEO, Amir Kupervas, who started a company called UIU in June 2011 — only a month after his departure and almost a year after the tantalizing First Else got canned. Over at UIU, Kupervas and UX strategist Itay Levin (who also took part in the First Else project) have a more humble ambition: to offer an Android launcher and an accompanying cloud management platform that are simple enough for non-techie users. “In the US, smartphones generate twice as much the amount of calls to the customer centers than the featurephones,” said Kupervas. “There’s a lot of hustle and a lot of confusion on how to work these guys. People are struggling with them, even existing users.”

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