THE COSMONAUTS

In this video Timo gives us an update on the iPad app for Planetaki and shows us a preview of what’s to come. We hope to have it ready in a month.

In short:

• new design
• improved legibility
• ability to read posts offline
• fixed theme but customizable backgrounds

Most of you know that we collaborate closely with Floresfrescas.com. So it won’t come as a surprise to you that we received a beautiful assortment of flowers the other day and we couldn’t help but make a video of the unboxing. Perhaps some of you already know what it feels like to receive one of these babies. By the way, we designed and defined the identity of Floresfrescas.com and how it’s applied to their boxes.

Alicia Chen did the Chinese (Mandarin) translation of Planetaki and now it’s available for you to use.  You can switch languages from the “preferences” link on the top right-hand of your planet. FYI: Planetaki is also available in Spanish, English, French, Italian, Galician and Romanian.

Here’s the announcement in video. Enjoy (especially after 32s).

Thank you Alicia :)

We want to build the best list of design (interaction, information, industrial, product design and architecture) movies and documentaries of all times. Here’s the deal: write down in the comment section the name of a film or doc that’s somehow design related and, in return, we’ll give you a code to watch any movie in Filmin‘s (Spain’s best streaming service for indie film) catalog for free.

We also have a promo code for a premium account at Filmin (any movie, any time anywhere) which we’ll give to the person who makes the best list (it’s ok to repeat some movie suggested by someone else). Easy peasy japanesey. A neat gift for little effort.

These are the movies/docs we have so far:

Kitchen Stories (Bent Hamer, 2003)

The Fountainhead (King Vidor, 1949)

Tucker: The Man and his Dream (Francis Ford Coppola, 1988)

Helvetica (Gary Hustwit, 2007)

Powers of 10 (and other films by Ray y Charles Eames, 1977)

The RTVE series ‘Elogio de la luz‘, each episode covering an architect

The Belly of an Architect (Peter Greenaway, 1987)

Sketches of Frank Gehry (Sydney Pollack, 2005)

Play Time (Jacques Tati, 1967)

Full disclosure: We’ve done Filmin’s web redesign and we love it (the service, not the redesign. Well… both). We’ll go into details in a future post.

It all came to be  with one of those ‘on the spur of the moment’ Twitter event kinda things. We ended up hosting a private reunion to talk about interaction design with some of the best senior designers out there and had loads of fun in the process. How cooler can it get?

Here’s video proof:

What does Wall Street look like in 8-bits?

Our partners and friends at Riot Cinema (they make movies) just did this amazing video for Unience, a social network of investors. We love it not just becuse of the aesthetics but also because the script is so well written it makes you open an account right away:

Sam Lown has been recently tweaking the web version of Planetaki. He has made some improvements and minor alterations for a new version that’ll be released this Summer. Watch the video for more info.

Senior designer Mark MacKay and Vostok’s most recent acquisition, Timo Taglieber, are working hard to develop an iPad version for Planetaki. None of the feed readers out there are up to par with the iPad. We’re hoping to change that. Watch the video for more.

Vostok’s senior designer, Mark MacKay, was one of the four professionals involved in developing Misparadas.com, a simple but efficient web app to get around Madrid by bus. The app was submitted to the 48-hour hackathon AbreDatos. We’ve asked Mark to tell us a bit more about how it works here:

Misparadas.com was developed by  Sam Lown, Fernando Blat, Christos Zisopoulos, and Mark MacKay for AbreDatos.

We invited Aitor García and Roberto Salicio for a chat a couple of days ago. These guys have lately been up to some serious business with AbreDatos: a 48-hour contest they launched to gather new and interesting ideas to digest raw government data. The winners will soon be announced. Here’s an excerpt of that conversation:

The idea behind open data is that of accountability, enabling a system to work for it’s people and not the other way around. In the U.S. the wheel has already began to turn, initiatives such as the Obama’s administration Data.gov or a society that finds concepts such as democratizing data and e-government more and more familiar, are all important steps towards the right direction.

In Spain the wheel is turning a bit more slowly, but turning nevertheless.  The people behind AbreDatos and all of those who’ve participated are leading the way.