Well That’s Cool… May 2018 Edition
This story is part of Matter Supply Co’s ongoing Inspirational Site Series. Once a month, we get together to share those experiences, old and new, that pique our interest, inspire us, and make us think.
Eastern European Movies
This site brings to light a cinematic world once hidden behind the Iron Curtain, by studios like the Soviet, state-owned East German DEFA. See movies from Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the rest of the Eastern Blok with English, French, German or other subtitles. Filters like view by country, genre and sort by IMDB rating make us wish Netflix would step up their game. On rainy day, Slavic absurdism enjoys you.
CryptoCountries
In this month’s episode of “ What Will They Do With The Blockchain Next?”: CryptoCountries works a like a world map version of Monopoly running on the Ethereum. You start by purchasing a country with Ether and then the price for the land goes up. If a user decides they want your country, you get the difference to your wallet, essentially earning you Ether.
Pets n Flats
Airbnb allows you to get the most authentic travel experience by staying at a local host’s home. Now, imagine Airbnb — but you get to stay for free! All you have to do is set the dates you want lodging, look at the map with available properties in your desired area, book and take care of someone’s wonderful pets while you enjoy your vacation.
Casa En El Agua
Right off the northwest coast of Colombia, in the middle of the ocean in the San Bernardo National Park is a dreamy, wooden oasis called Casa en el Agua. Every morning fishermen bring freshly caught seafood to the bar, where there’s no such thing as a bad view.
“best hangover cure in South America: a bed-to-ocean dive from the first floor deck into clear Caribbean waters.”
Hang out in a hammock in the ocean with a cool drink or take a midnight dip and play with bioluminescent plankton. We like to daydream.
An Introduction to Interaction Flows
Up there with the Nazca lines, the communication divide between designers and developers is one of the great unsolved mysteries. Havana Nguyen sheds a little light with a visual method for experience designers to better explain functionality to programmers. By clearly outlining triggers, feedback, rules and loops/modes, development teams can better understand what every interface element is meant to do.
Songwriter Fonts
Songwriter Fonts is a collection of typefaces created from the handwritten journals of musical legends David Bowie, Kurt Cobain, Leonard Cohen, John Lennon and Serge Gainsbourg. Graphologists rejoice.
UPDATE: All good things must come to an end. The site got shut down due to vague copyright issues (but we found the Internet Archive link that will let you still download all the mentioned fonts — you’re welcome).
WorldDraw
Google cut their teeth on AutoDraw and QuickDraw to create scary-smart AI that can guess what people are drawing. WorldDraw takes your toddler-on-a-wooden rollercoaster level illustration skills and turns your drawings into perfect, little 3D models in built in WebGL. Once you’re satisfied with your creation, it becomes a permanent resident of an equally perfect, infinitely expanding world.
Intuitive Math
Remember all those summers you had to pass on river float adventures with your friends to lug around a 50lb book that could be classified as a weapon, in the sizzling heat cause you sucked at math?
Anyone?
No one?
…Fine, be like that y’all — but taking dense, often abstract concepts that are incredibly hard to visualize is doing God’s work. Here is my favorite squiggle.
Handheld Archive
Before Nintendo’s Gameboy released in 1989, handheld gaming was dominated by little devices with lcd screens with static backgrounds, speakers and all the controls in a neat, little package. Procrastinate with these classics and enjoy some midi masterpieces.
One of the highlights of this year’s Google IO presentation is a new feature for Google Assistant, Duplex. The AI uses Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to make task-oriented phone calls. The demo showcased Duplex making a hair salon appointment and a restaurant reservation. What blew our minds was the life like latency, moments of considerations and the scary-real “uhm”s that punctuated Duplex’s responses.
Duplex falls into a grey area, it aims to pass as human. This brings up a number of privacy and ethical transparency concerns. We’ve got a lot of feelings. Should we pull the plug on Skynet before it becomes self aware? Does Google need to let people know they’re speaking with Duplex?
Let us know what you think in the comments!
Feel free to join in and share with us some sites you love.
That wraps up our May 2018 Edition of Well, That’s Cool…
We can’t wait to share more things we love. Let us know your favorite experiences or if you like what you see here in the comments below!
Matter Supply Co is dedicated to the craft of creating purposeful products and experiences that matter. Say hello next time you’re in Portland, OR or Medellin, Colombia or find us on LinkedIn.
