Spend/Save Bank Leaves Financial Planning to Chance

If you're the type who already makes most of your decisions with the aid of a magic 8-ball, here's another cheap gadget to help take the burden off your brain: the Spend / Save Bank from Taylor gifts "rewards you one way or another" by randomly deflecting your coins into trays marked SPEND and SAVE. At first glance it seems like SAVE is larger than SPEND, which is good messaging - but if the sorting is really random, then it's false reassurance. And ironically, the first sign that you need someone or something else to make your financial decisions for you may be the fact that you wasted 20 bucks on something like this...?
[via Gizmodo]

Text Area Resizer - Give yourself room to type!

"Web 2.0" is the term that's been coined to indicate the vast shift to user-generated, social content on the internet. That means hundreds of millions of users are out there composing text, image, and video content for websites - and they're doing that composition on the websites themselves. To make this easy, site designers need to make sure that the content-generation experience is as smooth as possible - but some are still stuck in Web 1.0 design principles. One telltale sign: a text box too small for the content it's going to receive, which leads to lots of scrolling and a frustrated user. NettiCat comes to the rescue with a text-area resizer extension for Firefox, letting users pull, stretch, and move the text box any which way they like. And hey - users improving sites with add-ons, that's Web 2.0 in action itself! The system works!!
[via Lifehacker]

Phonewords on a Blackberry...?

Pop quiz, techies: how do you dial phonewords (of the format "1-800-LETTERS") on a Blackberry keyboard like the one in the photo? It's a problem deftly identified by fellow usability blogger Jasper of Uselog a few months back. Remarkably, it turns out that Blackberry provides a solution: Geekberry points out that you simply press "shift" and then spell out the word - the Blackberry will do the conversion and dial the right number itself. Of course, that trick isn't exactly obvious - it definitely requires you to RTFM. Usable enough? Doubtful - it will completely evade anyone who's not in the know, and even those who read about it may dial phonewords so infrequently that they'll forget the trick in between uses. Advantage, iPhone...

Bikes Triggering Stoplight Car Sensors

You're a cyclist - good for you! You're getting exercise, conserving energy, and reducing traffic. And what thanks do you get for it? Waiting an eternity at stoplights because your little bike doesn't trip the car sensor, so it thinks nobody's there. Grr. Turns out, there's a fix for that - it's not exactly elegant, but it works, and it's well-documented and patented. That's it in the image - well, part of it, the rest of the electronics are up by the handlebars. It's definitely a workaround for a poorly-designed system - the real design fault lies with those who engineered the car sensors without considering cyclists. Moral of the story: it's tough to do the right thing in a world designed to help people do the wrong thing!
[via Make]

Gmail Double-Checks Your To: Line...

Google is at it again, making computers smarter and smarter to make your life more convenient and eventually take over the world. This time, the uncanny intelligence is being applied to the To: line on your Gmail, with a Google Labs feature called "Got the wrong Bob?" It works by analyzing what groups of people you usually email together, and flags any unusual-but-similar address you may accidentally add to such groups. It's something that's happened to all of us at some time, and it's nice (if a bit creepy) to know that Gmail has your back. This joins other ingenious Gmail features I've covered, like the decency filter for ads, automatic unsubscribe, time zone help, and my favorite the forgotten attachment detector. Keep it up, Google - I, for one, welcome our pending computer overlords...
[via Esquire & Gizmodo]

Color-Coding Your Fuel Efficiency

With a new emphasis on fuel efficiency in consumer cars comes a new design challenge: how to communicate feedback to the driver. Most feedback in cars is either numeric (speedometer), analog (engine heat), or visceral (feeling and hearing the engine). So, if the driving style affects fuel efficiency, which of these is the best way to supply that information to the driver? The Prius has always gone for numeric, displaying instantaneous gas mileage and discrete units of energy recovered from braking. But Honda has decided to add color-coded feedback - which I might call visceral (even though it's visual) because it's ambient. Drivers will be conditioned to feel like they want to the display shown in the image to stay green - not blue-green or blue, which indicate less efficient driving. It's one thing to let a number creep a little higher, but it's a whole different feeling to have a color change to rebuke your driving! I wouldn't be surprised if this technique turns out to be impressively effective. It could be great proof that efficiency can be accomplished by feats of usable psychology in product design...
[via AutoBlog, Engadget, & Gizmodo]

Remove Gmail Ads with "Decency Filter"

Gmail makes an income for the Google mothership by putting contextual ads alongside your messages - eh, nothing new with that. But it turns out Gmail has a built-in conscience, and that conscience (like most) can be used against it! Joe McKay figured out that by adding a few words to any message, all ads would disappear - specifically, words that would suggest tragedy. Iterating one more step by integrating the necessary words into a self-explanatory sentence, Lifehacker suggests the following ad-killing signature: "I enjoy the massacre of ads. This sentence will slaughter ads without a messy bloodbath." Nice. Of course, Gmail and Google are nothing if not smart, so it's only a matter of time before their algorithms compensate for this trick. But in the meantime, we humans can enjoy a brief lead in the advertising arms race!