Conair Consumer Products Inc. (with our assistance) has recently released its newest product with a contest micro-site, driving its line of hair related products to a whole new level.

Conair, Helps You Tame The Beast

For all you lovely ladies out there who can’t seem to take control of that beast we all call “hair”, I introduce to you the Infiniti Nano Silver by Conair. Simply put, it is the #1 most effective hair straightener on the market. The person who thought of adding steam to a hair straightener is an absolute genius. Not only does it make your hair look vibrant and lustrous, removes all frizz and protects it from the humidity, it takes no time at all. Take my words and check out the website to see what other features and benefits this product has to offer, www.conairsteamstraight.com.

Aside from my obsession with this fabulous “life-saver”, you deserve a little S.O.S. too. The “Tame the Beast” website, was a concept conceived by Conair and 76design/Thornley Fallis. It is your gateway to owning one of these magnificent hair straighteners along with other Conair and John Frieda hair related products. The contest closes on December 17th so don’t wait too long, visit the site, watch some videos, enter the contest and most important…don’t forget to tell your friends. The secret needs to be unleashed so go spread the word.

ENJOY!

Seriously brilliant ad from Apple smack dab in the middle of CNet’s guide to Windows Vista.  Very cheeky and very well done.

Thanks to John Wiseman for the Twitter.

Like many a web designer geek, I was glued to macrumors.com‘s live feed from Steve Jobs’ keynote yesterday. I was particularly interested in the possible iPhone announcement. Half because I’m a big fan of Apple’s approach to product design and was keen to see their take on the cell phone, half because I need a new phone. (Anybody find the “buy now” button yet?)

I realize that I’m like the 1 billionth person to blog about this and technically I’m a day late, but after sending the link to the iPhone site to my parents, my in-laws, friends and co-workers and running through all the little interactive guided tours with my wife last night to show her how totally awesome this phone is, I got thinking about how you’d actually use it.

Yes, the graphics are awesome. Based on OSX, core animation and all that jazz. They look fantastic. Yes, it’s small. Yes, it’s slick.

Yes, the user interface is revolutionary. To call it anything short of that would be… um… selling it short. But I think there’s a fault: from what I can tell there’s only 1 actual “key” (if I’m understanding the photos correctly). 99% of the interaction with the device is done via a touchpad. A really amazingly intelligent and intuitive touchpad, but a touchpad nonetheless.

What’s missing? Tactile feedback. Something that I consider a critical part of the user interface: when I press the button, I feel it “click” and then the number appears on screen. How is this feedback compensated for on a touch screen? Maybe it’s just something we’ve all become accustomed to with the current method of inputting information into our computers, phones and just about every other similar device, but I’m not sure how easy a transition it will be for those of us who use one.

I think the biggest “hangup” (pardon the pun) is that using the iPhone will require a lot more concentration to account for the lack of feedback. You really have to fixate on the screen to make sure those virtual “keys” you’re pressing are actually being hit. It’s hard to tell in the demos on the Apple site, but maybe there’s a little click noise or some other auditory cue to compensate for the keyless input method.

Maybe it’s not the most accessible or useable product, but I don’t think Apple really minds. They’re aiming to sell 10 million phones (1% of the North American market). This is a luxury item for those who can afford it. Much like the iPod, it’s meant for those early adopters who “get” Apple’s approach, love gadgets and are willing to forgive little drawbacks as a simple reality of being on the “cutting edge”. Heck, most people will probably embrace this as a great new feature rather than a shortcoming. It’s all how you look at it.

Steve Jobs said this device is 5 years ahead of its time and maybe he’s right. Maybe he’s jumped the gun a bit on calling this a “revolutionary” user interface. But that’s what we (and by we I mean me and the Mac geeks worldwide) love about Steve Jobs: he is THE Mac evangelist. If he doesn’t believe in this stuff, how are we supposed to?

Oh, and I’m not ragging on the iPhone. If these ever make it to Canada I’m definitely grabbing one. Look how awesome they are!!!

I’ve never considered myself a candidate for Apple Fanboy of the Year. I think Apple makes easy to use, innovative products that push other companies to improve their products, which makes the market better for everyone. The thing that I think Apple is really great for is their ability to make technology accessible to everyone. Before the Macintosh, personal computers were impossible for the average consumer to use. Before the iPod, MP3 players were large, clunky boat anchors that only true musi-philes were brave enough to tote around. It’s 2007 and I every single person I know owns at least one personal computer, and more than half of them have an MP3 player.

People have been speculating about the iPhone for over 5 years. I find it interesting that five years of speculation, expert opinions, editorials and just plain old rumour mongering never even came close to what the iPhone actually ended up being. It has surpassed everyone’s expections so fundamentally that I think it’s going to be a few weeks before anyone truly starts seeing the impact a product like this is going to have.

This is the first phone that gets it. The dark days of having to shoehorn full-sized internet technologies onto the diminutive screen of a cellphone are finally over. Full-fledged browser, full-fledged email. Information available anywhere, any time, right at the tips of your fingers.
Are you going to own an iPhone? Maybe not. But I guarantee you that when the rest of the cellphone industry pulls its pants back up, you’re going to own something very similar.

I made the switch to a MacBookPro (my first Mac) about 6 months ago and I’m in love. I seriously doubt that I’ll ever buy a PC again. Instead of going on and on about how great Macs are (and boy are they great), I thought I’d give a bit back to the Mac community… specifically you Mac newbies out there. Since just about everybody at 76design uses a Mac at home – including a couple people that just bought one in the last week – I thought I’d share a short list of the (mostly free) Mac stuff I’ve come across that I’d consider “must have”:

• Quicksilver – absolutely the most useful tool installed on my Mac, hands down. Quicksilver is an application launcher and so much more. Basically you can search for and open anything on your Mac with just a short key command. Open files. Email, copy and compress them. Open an application. Queue up a playlist. Pretty much do anything. With Quicksilver, frequently performed tasks slip into the background. If you’re like me and you tend to do everything via keyboard shortcuts then this one’s for you. (Free)
• Delicious Library – archive your music and movie collection in true Mac fashion. This nifty app converts your iSight (Apple webcam) into a barcode scanner which you then use to scan in all your CDs, books and DVDs. Totally searchable and even has a feature that lets you keep track of which friends are borrowing your stuff. (Free to try, $40 to buy)
• HandBrake – rip DVDs into MPEG-4 movies. Keep them at full resolution or scale them down for your iPod. (Free)
• iBackup – scheduled backups of files, folders, applications (yes, you can do that without a registry!), application settings and computer settings. (Free)
• iSquint – small utility that converts just about any format video to MPEG-4 (specializes in optimizing videos for iPods). (Free)
• MAMP – Mac OSX Tiger already comes with built-in Apache and PHP, but MAMP packages it all up into a tidy application and includes MySQL – a must-have for all the webheads in the crowd. (Free)
• NetNewsWire – FeedDemon’s attractive cousin. NewsGator aquired FeedDemon for PC and then NetNewsWire for Mac. A fantastic feed reader and it plugs into NewsGator’s framework so you can synchronize your feeds across all your machines. (Free to try, $30 to buy)
• On the Job – for anyone billing by the hour, On the Job is a great little app that helps you record time against projects and prepare invoices for clients. (Free to try, $25 to buy)
• Parallels – until Mac integrates OS-switching into OSX, Parallels offers the convenient alternative of allowing you to run Microsoft Windows basically in a window on your Mac. Very useful for those few instances when you need something that a Mac just can’t provide… like connecting to the company VPN or the occasional blue screen of death. (Free to try, $80 to buy)
• Transmit – FTP done the Mac way. (Free to try, $18 to buy)
• VLC – cross-platform multimedia player. Plays just about any kind of audio or video file you throw at it. And unlike the free Quicktime player, it lets you watch videos at full screen without having to dole out $30. (Free)
• Wallet – Rock solid stronghold to store all your sensitive digital information: passwords, credit card numbers, serial numbers and all that kind of important stuff you don’t want to lose or forget. (Free to try, $15 to buy)
• WhatSize – useful utility that lets you see how your disk space is being used. Totally comes in handy when your MP3 collection starts ballooning and you have to figure out how to free up some space. (Free)

I love my Mac but am by no means an expert. Please add to the list if I’ve missed anything that you’d deem “vital”. It’s always great to discover some fantastic little app that scratches that “man I wish I could do that” itch just right.

There’s an interesting contest just getting underway called My Dream App. What is it? The contest hopes to attract hundreds (but likely thousands) of ideas for new Mac applications and have the community – the site’s users and a team of judges – cull the entrants into a short list of finalists. When it’s all said and done, finalists will walk away with prizes like iPods and Macs but three lucky winners will receive a contract to develop their ideas into full-blown shareware applications with royalties for life. Sounds like a great concept and I’m certain more than three new stellar Mac apps will come out of it.

What really attracted me to the contest was one of the first three finalists selected today.� Herald, by Bogumil Giertler, is an RSS feed aggregator (wait – don’t stop reading!) that lets users build “newspapers” out of their feeds using a drag-and-drop technique. Create, share, export to PDA or iPod – brilliant.� I’m a big fan of anything that can help flatten out the RSS learning curve and bring it a bit closer to the masses.

After enduring the frustration of searching around the net for a good tutorial that explains how to burn a Mac/PC hybrid CD, I found this on Roxio’s Toast support site. It’s pretty complete but since I’m a PC person there were a few gaps I wasn’t able to fill in myself. After spitting out more coaster sets than I care to mention, I’ve created a real simple step-by-step guide to burning hybrid CDs. And I’m going to share it with you.

The most important thing you need to know is that you absolutely can not burn a hybrid CD with a PC. It has to be done on a Mac, at least as far as I can tell. Maybe it can be done on a PC, but I couldn’t figure it out. If anybody else can do it, show me how.

So without further ado, here’s the skinny:

1. Launch the Disk Utility in OS X (it’s under Applications / Utilities / Disk Utility)
2. At the top of the Disk Utility window, click on New Image
3. Name the image what you want the CD to be called. Set the Desktop as the destination and adjust the size of the image so that it can fit all the data you’ll be burning.
4. Select Create. This will mount a disk image on the Desktop.
5. Close the Disk Utility
6. Drag the Mac CD contents (i.e. leave out the PC-specific stuff) into the new disk image
7. Launch Toast (I’m using v5.2.3 because the latest version 6 doesn’t seem to support hybrid CDs very well) and select Custom Hybrid from the Other menu at the top.
8. Press the Select Mac… button and then choose the disk image you just created
9. If applicable, choose the file for AutoStart (but be aware that OS X doesn’t support AutoStart and most OS 9 users disable that feature)
10. Press the Select ISO… button (this is the data that will go on the PC) and drag in the same disk image (if you’re sharing data between the Mac/PC versions of the CD) as well as any PC-specific files, like autorun.inf.
11. Burn it!

Simple as that.