Design

Everyone most likely knows about that little shack in the woods in the Seattle suburb of Medina on the shores of Lake Washington that Bill Gates created in 1997, but have you ever been inside?

The $53 Million dollar, 66,000 square foot estate has all the technological goodies that you might not even be able dream up. With tons of centrally controlled music, lighting and video you can bet that this is the one of the most technologically advanced homes in the world. US News has put together a tour of the estate, from the pool building, to the library, to the underground garage so that you can drool over where the Forbes number one billionaire lives.

Some interesting tidbits:

• 104 electricians used
• All timber used in the house are perfectly finished and nearly perfect with almost no knots.
• All woodwork is flawless
• Acoustics were a big concern. Woods and fabrics were used to ensure perfect acoustics throughout the house.
• Flooring is heated, even in the driveway and walkways throughout the estate.
• Security system is monitored from the Microsoft campus.
• There is a salmon hatchery on the estate.
• 52 miles of communication cable
• Hidden cameras are everywhere, including some hidden inside stone walls.
• Floor sensors can track a person within 6 inches.
• The bathtub can be filled and temperature can be controlled by Gates as he drives home from work.

Was the Bill Gates estate designed on a PC? Well, not exactly, we can thank rival Apple for having a hand in it. (Not to worry, doesn’t Microsoft own a small % of Apple anyway.) Check out some additional pictures of the estate here.

Also, check out the money face off, Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates on Blogging Stocks.

There’s a really cool video that’s been making the rounds on the interwebs for the past week or so. It shows a next generation image resizing method that lets you stretch or shrink a picture without greatly altering its composition.

One of the guys behind this technology is Shai Avidan, a former staff member of the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories. Adobe’s John Nack writes that the company has hired Avidan, which we hope means we’ll be seeing this sort of image resizing in Photoshop and other consumer applications soon.

We’re pretty certain that if Adobe hadn’t snatched up Avidan, Match.com would have done so. Just imagine the potential for tweaking profile pictures in personal ads. A little too short, or a little too round in the belly? Go ahead and make yourself thinner and taller with just a click of the mouse.

[via TechCrunch]

[Update: As readers are pointing out, the iPhone is appearing in various other, though sometimes obscure, areas of AT&T's site. We stated in our post that this could simply be nothing, so that fact should probably be reiterated given that this does seem to be a false alarm. Guess the version of the site in our screenshot could have easily been a fluke, capped in the middle of a redesign or who knows what else. Thanks for keeping us on our game everyone, as for now, there doesn't seem to be anything else to see here. Let's all move along.]

Rumors that Apple is wearing the pants a little too often in their iPhone relationship with AT&T have received a boost, now that the wireless carrier seems to have stopped promoting the pricey phone on their main page barely a month after its June 29th launch. While we know that Apple negotiated an unprecedented deal for a percentage of every iPhone customer’s monthly contract, many suspect AT&T is becoming less and less happy with the rest of Apple’s plans. Note, for example, the iPhone’s lack of any integration with AT&T’s profitable video, audio and ringtone offerings - all things that Apple either sells through their iTunes Store right now or, in the case of ringtones, is widely expected to with a future software update. The more software and media-based services Apple prepares to unleash, the more monthly, revolving revenue passes by AT&T’s bottom line.

Of course, another possibility here is that the iPhone has received all the promotion it needs from AT&T. The device has arguably succeeded in Apple’s marketing efforts to get it inserted into all the major media hubs, from the Today Show to Steven Colbert. Still, after adorning the pages of Cingular-turned-AT&T during the six month period since its announcement in January of this year, the iPhone’s sudden disappearance from the main page and even the phone-specific page is raising our eyebrows.

We love contests, and that goes double for contests that take skill and effort to pull off. Macthemes2 is sponsoring an all out battle to the death over Mac Themes, and they’re inviting you to throw your well-Photoshopped hat in the ring.

They write, “So without further ado, we’re ecstatic to announce the MacThemes Theme For a Week Contest. With over 13,000 elements to theme in OSX the grueling task of creating and producing a theme takes the right kind of artist. That’s why we decided to shake things up a bit. Instead of a long, drawn out development period, with little interaction from users and meager rewards at the end, the Theme For a Week Contest, as its name implies, lasts a week, with a (mock-up) development process as clear as glass and rewards fit for a king”
They’re giving away a ton of cool gizmos and chotchkys for the skillful designer with a flare for all things desktop.

When you’re trying to knock together a decent looking website and short on time, open source templates and tools can be a real godsend. This list of 100 great tools, templates and resources is a great start for any simple web project, and could even provide a framework for larger projects where you don’t have time for design.

Chock full o’goodies like template directories, open source tools, complete templates, CSS layouts and even a few blog themes, you’ll surely find something here you can use.

Pimptastic icons can really make a highly customized desktop environment feel, well, cozy. If you’re the sort of person who gets all squiggly inside over rendered 3d icon love, Iconfinder is a definite must see.

Just back online after an unspecified absence, Iconfinder lets you search for all sorts of icons just like you’d search for any other web content. You won’t find everything you’re looking for, but hopefully as they work to relaunch the site we’ll see more icons for common tools we all know and love.

Those wonderful folks over at DAZ 3D are doing it again by making Bryce 5.5, a 3D landscape and animation tool, available as a free download. The latest version of their software is at 6.1, but with version 5.5 you get a free, fully functional version of the software with no time-limit or disabled features to worry about. If you’ve been itching to play around in the 3D world you should check this out. The software is available for both Mac and PC platforms.

[via Creative Cow]

Ubuntu comes with loads of fonts pre-installed, and if you’ve goosed the power of your Ubuntu install with Automatix, you’ve already added several more. For the casual graphic designer though, more fonts are always welcome. Ubuntu Blog has compiled an incredible roundup of easily installable and freely available fonts for Ubuntu; all of which can be downloaded and installed with just a quick cut and paste at the command line.

[via Digg]

Adobe has slowly been adding to that chip on many people’s shoulders for some time now, and lately they seem to be upping their game. Certainly, comments from their CEO like “our customer is not typically price sensitive” don’t help matters, but it seems that even the very software their company is so well known for is beginning to suffer from poor, nay - dreadful - design and management.

Take this rant from Gus Mueller of Flying Meat software on how much trouble it is to simply update Adobe Reader. Gus had to download a disk image containing an installer package which does nothing but download the actual installer application - ironic, especially since you would be hard pressed to find a browser these days that doesn’t have its own download manager, sometimes even with bleeding-edge features like pausing and resuming downloads. But the fun doesn’t stop there, as Mac developers Rogue Amoeba noted on their own blog last September: for some reason that we’re sure would elude even The Oracle herself, Adobe Reader needed to launch an updater upon first run that needed to download updates for itself before checking on any updates for Adobe Reader…

Shouldn’t all this software already be at their latest latest versions? Do we really need to download something that downloads something that downloads something just to check if it has to download something? Who manages this software, and what did they do with our dear friend, sensibility?

Please Adobe - this needs to stop.

Looking for vector art to use for a project? Vecteezy is a brand new repository of free vector art, licensed under variants of the Creative Commons, ready to browse, download, open in Adobe Illustrator and go.

The selection isn’t enormous but, what is there is mighty useful. Also worth a look is Vecteezy’s sister-site, Brusheezy, which hosts a large selection of free Photoshop brushes.