Stanford scientists develop new type of solar structure that cools buildings in full sunlight

Homes and buildings chilled without air conditioners. Car interiors that don’t heat up in the summer sun. Tapping the frigid expanses of outer space to cool the planet. Science fiction, you say? Well, maybe not any more.
A team of researchers at Stanford has designed an entirely new form of cooling structure that cools even when the sun is shining. Such a structure could vastly improve the daylight cooling of buildings, cars and other structures by reflecting sunlight back into the chilly vacuum of space.

See on news.stanford.edu

Is the Next Xbox the One?

Matt Buchanan on the Xbox One: It’s “the most forceful attempt of any company yet to colonize your living room—to be the single most important box attached to your television, if not the only box.” http://nyr.kr/10jxM4A

While everyone else was scrambling to get stories written as quickly as possible following the Xbox One unveiling, Wired’s Peter Rubin got the “exclusive” early look. And Wired’s presentation is quite nice.

I’m still not sure what to think of the new Xbox. Certainly, Microsoft did a better job presenting it to the world than Sony did a few weeks back with the Playstation 4. But even Rubin’s thoughtful walk-through makes the whole thing sound fairly complicated. I’m still just not sure that tablets and smartphones haven’t changed the gaming and living room space more than any of the old guard in the console arena cares to admit. (Though it’s looking like Nintendo will have to sooner rather than later.)

I had both the original Xbox and the Xbox 360. Overall, I found them to be solid systems with a number of UI/UX frustrations that I simply don’t think I have the patience for anymore. And then, of course, the red ring of death. Maybe Microsoft has greatly improved the experience here. We’ll see.

Certainly some of the new Kinect stuff sounds interesting. But the “wow” factor of the first Kinect seemed to subside faster than anyone thought it would. Just like the Wii before it. I’ll take simplicity and great user experience over something that gives good demo any day.

With that in mind, I’m still more optimistic about whatever Apple brings to the table here whether it’s later this year or early next year. Surprise, surprise, I know. But there is zero chance I’m going to deal with IR-blasters to have a “seamless” experience.

#design

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Introducing Sprint.ly 1.5

We’re excited to announce the release of Sprint.ly 1.5. This release has been in the works for months and was entirely focused on speed, quality, and polish. From the core backend query interface to the way we handle Backbone collections on the frontend, Sprint.ly is now leaner, meaner, and more fun.

Despite all the refactoring that’s been going on, the team did manage to sneak in a slew of new features and polish that you all have been asking for. Let’s take a look at a few of the new features in Sprint.ly.

File Uploads

Probably the most noticeable update is that you can now attach files to an item when you create it. Simply drag files into the item description and drop.

New Filters

We’ve also added two new filters: “Loved by” and “Mentioning”. The “Loved by” filter lets you filter for items that have been marked as a favorite by a specific person on your team. The “Mentioning” filter will show items in which a specific person has been mentioned in a comment.

Quick Sort Bar

The Quick Sort Bar, or QSB as we refer to it, has gotten a number of much needed improvements. Here’s a quick rundown of what you can now do with the QSB:

You can now drag items from Backlog and Someday columns directly into the QSB.
You can now click and drag the individual boxes within the QSB to resort an item without having to drag its card from the Backlog column.
The QSB is now on the permalink page for items in the Backlog. This means you can now prioritize an item within the Backlog from its permalink page.

Performance Enhancements

The real action in Sprint.ly 1.5 is largely behind the scenes. We completely rewrote the backend to query the DB more efficiently and do better/smarter caching.

In addition to this, we’ve almost entirely rewritten how the frontend talks to the backend. We now have a single shared collection that is cached in local storage. In addition to this, each item is stored in local storage, which makes loading permalink pages super snappy.

Optimistic UI

We’ve gone over the UI with a fine toothed comb and made as much of the UI optimistic as possible. Bulk edit, making comments, sorting, dragging, deleting, scoring, etc. are all rendered the second you click.

When I first saw the optimistic UI on the bulk edit I was like:

Item Mentions & Card Popups

We’ve also freshened up our Markdown processor so that it does two things:

When you mention an item it now shows up in the activity feed for the item that was mentioned.
We now show the item card on hover for any item numbers that are mentioned in a comment or description. No need to surf to the new item just to take a quick glance or reassign it (all item cards are in-line editable)!