The Ugliest Color (and a good use for it)

Want to make cigarettes as unappealing as possible? You can put warnings on the box, show photos of smoke-ravaged lungs and other organs - and you can find the ugliest color in the world and swaddle the packaging in that, too. Market research firm Gfk Bluemoon determined that Pantone 448C, delightfully named "Opaque Couche," was deemed least attractive in a poll of over a thousand smokers. It's now on duty in Australia, UK, France, and Ireland, making cigarettes look just as repulsive as they are.
[via Core77 & The Evening Standard]

Visual Voicemail on Android: An Unfulfilled Promise

Another reason I'm relieved to be going back from Android to iPhone: Visual Voicemail on Android hasn't worked out. It was a truly innovative part of the original iPhone, forced by Apple on carriers as a condition for carrying the must-have handset (and removing a sneaky profit-making annoyance in the process). As Apple tends to do, it took full control of the feature and implemented it with high quality.
Android is different, with the vision that "carriers are free to implement their own vision of Visual Voicemail!" But with nobody enforcing it, the task was met with near-apathy by carriers who know the feature isn't central to their profits. And so we have the sad, half-baked abomination that is AT&T Visual Voicemail, guilty of the following sins:

• The phone will double-notify of voicemails: once with a prompt to dial the non-visual voicemail number (what am I, a caveman?), and once much later to notify that the visual version is available. Separate apps, of course.
• For a loooong time, the app didn't use the proximity sensor to turn off the touchscreen when listening to a message without headphones or speakerphone. My ear usually triggered the notification shade and pressed god-knows-what buttons up there.
• The current version of the app doesn't keep the screen alive while playing back a message over headphones or speakerphone. So the phone falls asleep halfway into playing the message - which also causes the audio to stop (unlike most audio-playing apps). I have to wake the damn phone up and press "play" again to resume the message.

Bugs are bugs, and the first issue may be more related to insufficient integration at the OS level. But the prox-sensor and stay-awake behavior are basic, easy design issues that shouldn't have made it past a single design review - if there ever was one. So in this case, it'll be a relief to go back to an ecosystem overseen by a zealous tyrant obsessed with user experience - it's better than a wild-west where nobody's motivated to offer something competent.

Lolo Lids for Sneaky Drinking

Sneaky drinking may be mostly in my past (well, except for golf courses), but it's still nice to see some innovation in the area. Lolo Lids are the latest clever iteration: looking just like the Solo lids used on to-go coffees everywhere, they attach to your choice of disposable coffee cup. But secretly inside that cup, they're holding a beer can with plastic clips and a spill-proof silicone seal. Pretty convenient - and preferable (for reasons I can't quite seem to enumerate?) to just pouring the beer into the coffee cup. Cheers!
[via Gizmodo]