Time for another round of apps that cover the spectrum of your beloved mobile device, be it iPhone, Android or Windows! The Weekly App Smack is the best of design and productivity apps (and maybe a couple of fun ones, too) for the busy design or engineering professional and this week we have a list sure to make you more efficient. This week we have a new all-in-one scanning app for iPhone, a fresh new take on the classic photo filter apps with a focus on color, the introduction of the new YouTube Gaming app, the introduction of Freeletics for Android and more… Do you have an app suggestion that…

With the average individual expected to move nearly a dozen times over the course of their life, you would think that somebody might have figured out by now how to make the moving experience slightly easier – yet many still suffer from the experience of awkwardly hauling their sofas and tables up and down stairwells, around corners and through doorways. Among others who think that people are doing this wrong is former Apple design and manufacturing engineer Brad Sewell – and he’s on a mission to ensure that people forego the large and awkward living room centerpieces in favor of his more streamlined designs that not only look cool and…

After being forced to hold his ear to the chests of victims due to a lack of stethoscopes at medical facilities in the Gaza strip, where he works as an emergency physician, Tarek Loubani decided that it was time to take matters into his own hands. With no formal training in product design or engineering, Loubani – together with a team of other medical and technology specialists – designed a 3D printable stethoscope that costs just $5 in materials and supplies. Soon after testing the design against the global standard benchmarks of significantly more expensive traditional stethoscopes, they determined that its performance not only met the benchmarks set by the…

After searching for two years for a globe for his father’s 80th birthday present, Peter Bellerby was faced with gifting his father either a modern political globe (of the mass manufactured variety) or a very fragile (and expensive) antique globe. Like most other plans that are hatched in a pub, Bellerby decided that rather than settle with something he didn’t like, he would take matters into his own hands and create two globes from scratch: one for his father for his upcoming birthday and one for himself. “After all how difficult can it be to make a ball and put a map on it?” explains Bellerby. Unsurprisingly, making a globe…

This week’s Spotify-powered SolidSmack Radio Playlist brings an entirely new playlist of face-melting great music to help propel you through those laborious, tedious design tasks for the next few days. So whether you find yourself inking markers until they’re dry, grinding material through a bandsaw or flying through a CAD model, consider these tracks as a tool for your process. This week we’ll start off with “Slumlord” from the latest Neon Indian and work our way through some Silk Rhodes, Mos Def, Papadosio, Bibio, Hyperstory and others before wrapping up with “Sparks” from Beach House. As always – do you have any suggestions for next week’s playlist? How about a…

Don your favorite bath robe, cream that coffee and get comfortable with this weekend’s SolidSmack Weekend Reader. This week we saw everything from a new iPhone battery concept designed to last a week or more, a new multi-material 3D printer from MIT that costs just $7K to build, a new bicycle tire that never goes flat, how imaging firm TB&O created an immersive web campaign for Specialized Bicycles using Luxion’s KeyShot and more… So lay back, relax and take a load off while reading the top ten stories on SolidSmack this past week. Oh and uh…don’t forget to shed some much-needed sunlight on your face, too.