Elanso

The “It’s about time” clock
Dan McFarland writes:

I just saw this on about:blank and thought of you guys: The “It’s about time” clock

It’s a clock that just tells you “about” what time it is… “nearly 12”, “quarter past 3”, etc. Most people don’t realize they really don’t need any more detail than that.

The Paige Compositor
Khoi Vinh writes:

If you’ve never written about this before, this short case history of 19th century typesetting is a story tailor-made for the SvN audience.

The Paige Compositor.Mpix
Jamie Stephens writes:

I thought you might appreciate this post on the Mpix blog. Instead of listing all the specs and details of their upcoming [bonded covers] product, (they have already announced that it is coming), they post pictures of how the new books are made.

TextArea limits
Matt McVickar writes:

LinkedIn had a great way to indicate users had reached the limit in the textarea without stopping their progress. I say “had” because since I took the screenshot they’ve removed the limitation (and thus, this validation), but I still think it’s a good model for dealing with this sort of thing.

Frustration with Twitter’s approach got me thinking about this problem, so I went a little further. My writeup is here.

Life-size tracking guide
Jason Turgeon writes:

Check out this field guide to mammal tracking. It’s the size and shape of a small wall calendar, spiral bound with waterproof, rip-resistant pages so you can drag it around outdoors without destroying it. It contains life-size illustrations of mammal tracks and scat. It’s designed so that you can take the book out in the woods on your snowshoes, quickly determine what kind of tracks you might be seeing, and lay the book down in the snow to compare. We have several of these lying around the house. Disclosure: my girlfriend’s mom wrote the book. But I actually use it!

TrekPod
Rob Lifford writes:

The TrekPod is a very nicely designed hiking staff that converts in seconds to sturdy photo tripod as well. My father-in-law, an experienced industrial product designer, is its creator; he started playing with the idea after doing a few Google searches trying to find something like this for himself—he’d first assumed that someone else had already produced one. So he sat down with AutoCAD, showed it to some friends, and now Trek-Tech is a successful and growing full-time pursuit.

Yes, I’m pimping the “family product,” but I did kind of think the DIY roots of the company fit in somehow with Getting Real.