Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

If you’ve ever thought about getting a Pink iPhone for yourself, look no further than Colorware PC, who will let you pick out a custom paint job for your iPhone in the colors you want. For example, a classic AdSense like blue/green/white job looks like this:

The cost? Just $200 and 2-3 weeks of processing time, plus additional time to ship it there and back. Looking at their gallery of samples, the painting appears extremely high quality, precise, and on-color. They even off pantone matching for those colors you absolutely need to have. Behind the scenes, they use a custom UV resistant plastic coating they call “X2″ and (probably) paint robots to precisely paint your device.

They also can paint notebooks, macbooks, iPods, PC computers, the Sony PSP, your blackberry, an xBox or PS3, and a host of other commercial products.

Aviary, aka a.viary, a suite of Web 2.0 office and graphic design products, has the most beautiful front page that I’ve seen in a very long time. It features a simple flash panel with overlapping layers that zoom in perspective with the motion of your mouse. You absolutely need to see it if you already haven’t:

Here is a little sample of the kind of “photoshops” their editor can do:

For those of you new to this blog, this was not created in Photoshop. It was created in Aviary, a suite of online web applications.

For more, you should check out their blog, which features additional demos. The company is in direct competition with Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo online applications, Adobe, the makers of Photoshop, Flash, Flex and other web and image editing software, as well as Apple’s video editing software and other startups in the web application toolkits game, like the infamous Zoho.

I don’t know if this is new or old, but check out the latest design of Twitter, which features three panels for the questions “What?”, “Why?”, and “How?”. They look really quite nice, so I thought I’d drop a couple screenshots here for you:

I know I complained about the reliability and uptime of Twitter recently, but I’d really like to applaud the designer and company here for producing such clear concise work. I love the washed out colors and ultra-minimalist style. The large type and boxiness also work well.

So imagine for some reason that you wanted to know if tourists really rode horse-drawn “carriages” through central park. Google Maps with a new Street View option lets you do just that, and even hyperlink it:

I was wondering when the footage of the streets was taken, so I decided to look for signs in Times Square. I found a tickertape that read Aaron Carter Breaks Off…, a piece of news that came out on 9/25/2006, or almost exactly 9 months ago. Their data supplier is quite old!

TechCrunch reports that Immersive Media is Google’s provider, while BoingBoing hilights privacy concerns, some of which are real. For example, would you want a truck taking pictures of you while sunbathing?

Perhaps, perhaps not. When these photos become high-resolution, and closer to real time, with a viewable history, then the privacy angle will become more important. Here’s a page on Immersive Media and their weird, but cool, 360 cameras. They claim to have “40,000 miles of storefront images for 25 cities.”

Facebook redesigned yet again. The main change is moving the menus around, so that their applications (photos, notes, groups, events, and items) are on the left sidebar, while their content-areas (friends, networks, inbox) have drop-down menus on the top. This is confusing:

They’ve enhanced their status updates pages to directly compete with Twitter, allowing you to subscribe to friends’ status update via sms:

You can see them all beautifully arranged on a single page, subscribe to an RSS feed of status updates, and pick whose you want to get Twitter-style SMS’d. This is a big deal because it obsoletes almost all of Twitter’s functionality and makes Facebook’s acquisition price rise that much more. Who’s going to buy / use Twitter when millions of facebook users already have the observer pattern via SMS integrated into their favorite social site?

Note that there are some intermittent problems with the new Facebook, such as:

• Random but transient deletion of some user accounts
• A bizarre error message in the messages interface, which reads “Your messages are being reindexed and may not appear for awhile. Please come back in a few hours.”
• The death of the facebook guy, our best friend of old

Update: Mashable has just noticed that Facebook just pwnd Twitter.