[x] to Escape

Remembering Robin Williams and Lauren Bacall, the USPS' long-overdue rebrand, smartphones charged by sound and more in our weekly look at the web

While today it seems like second nature to click the [x] symbol to close a computer program or browser window, this wasn’t always the case. In fact, early operating systems lacked the simple symbol all together. Medium digs deeper into the mysterious origins of this now ubiquitous and all-essential part of Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) design, and the findings are pretty surprising (including an insightful …

Siri, Charge My Phone

Remembering Robin Williams and Lauren Bacall, the USPS' long-overdue rebrand, smartphones charged by sound and more in our weekly look at the web

A team of researchers at the Queen Mary University of London, with help from Nokia, has developed a prototype cellphone that charges using sound waves in the atmosphere. The secret is super-sensitive zinc oxide nanowires, which convert those sound vibrations into electrical currents. This means, hopefully in the nearer future, cellphones can be charged—sans cable—merely by the sound of your voice during a phone call, …

POV Hyperlapse

Remembering Robin Williams and Lauren Bacall, the USPS' long-overdue rebrand, smartphones charged by sound and more in our weekly look at the web

Though GoPro has made an amateur videographer out of everyone, the fact is, nobody wants to watch your hour-long POV video. To make these films digestible—and enjoyable—a new Microsoft Research project has introduced hyperlapse, a software system that uses an algorithm to reconstruct the scenes and effectively blend frames at 10 times the speed of the original video, and without any shaking.