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Chris Noble writer

27 January 2010

producttech

My Pad

Anyone who has hired a graphic designer or other Apple geek today might wonder why it’s all gone a bit quiet. If the bewildered employer asks, they might get told anything but the truth, which is that the designer is too busy wetting himself—a ‘herself’ will likely be much less distracted—over Apple’s new Next Big Gizmo to recycle any second-rate, wishy-washy design right now, sorry.

It’s the iPad’s fault.

The iPad is a whopper iPhone without the Phone, a pumped-up netbook computer without a physical keyboard (though one can be docked on), an eBook—sorry, iBook—reader and something that an awful lot of people are going to accidentally drop on their polished concrete floors because they bumped their elbow on the arm of their original, fibreglass Eames shell rocking chair while looking for what’s hot right now on notcot.org.

It’ll be the next big thing in… er… well, hmm. I can see one on my coffee table. Ah, yes, that’s it, coffee. It’ll be the next big thing in cafés: gone are the days when you can knowingly look down upon those café-wifi Windows 7 users from behind your glowing-Apple-logod screen, for on the next table is someone with an iPad, wiping their fingers clean of lemon-poppyseed-muffin grease before every pinch or swipe of their glorious LED glass screen while they pretend they’re not buzzing soaking up ill-veiled looks of jealousy like a family-pack of Bounty.

Stateside, $499 will see an iPad in your bag. Just be extra-careful securing it in there before you swing your leg over your cafe racer. (Fixies are so last year.)

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art

Love to Haiti

To Haiti With Love is a worthwhile cause with a slight difference: when you donate, you actually get a piece of artwork as a digital file. You can send this on to a friend or simply use the image as your own desktop wallpaper. Each piece of work will be sold as a digital postcard for £1 to raise money to help the situation in Haiti.

There are artists from around the world donating work, with more getting involved daily as this project snowballs. So far, the list includes David Shrigley, Genevieve Gauckler, Bob Kronbauer, Rob Ryan, Simon Peplow, Alex Trochut and Anthony Burrill with photographers Ye Rin Mok, Cass Bird and Valerie Phillips recently signing up.

Lee Basford, 06 February 2010

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photo

Olympic metal

Those cafe racer-riding photo-nerds at Olympus have churned out another iteration of the E-P-series, this time one for the masses. (That is, the masses that would have bought an E-P1 or -2 if only it weren’t for their fiddliness and pricey price tags.) The new E-PL1 is the iMac of the bunch, it doing most of the things its fancier brothers do—take quality shots, shoot 720p video, feel P-R-O-hip while you swap lenses—only more simply, for a few hundred quid cheaper, and with the backup of a built-in flash.

And you can get it in red.

Chris Noble, 05 February 2010

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business

Restacked

Michael Leon (him again) has moved from Portland, Oregon back to LA to start a skateboard company. Rather than start a brand from scratch, he’s reusing the good name of his long-running, somewhat mothballed, as-seen-in-print-Level, pet project clothing company Commonwealth Stacks—Stacks for short.
“It will be a departure from where Stacks has been in the past, toward a more clean/refined approach with maximum attention to detail when it comes to product design, graphics and packaging,” says Leon. “I guess we just want to up the level of craft you would usually associate with a board company.”
Product arrives in autumn.

Chris Noble, 18 January 2010

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