Designer Denis Stewart has designed and executed a beautiful multitool that uses both Imperial and Metric measurements for tightening some of the most commonly used sizes of small nuts and screws. He’s launched a Kickstarter campaign to finance the mass production of the tool so geeks like you and me can have one of these relatively inexpensively.
This very small tool packs a strong punch. Literally. You can use it as a punch, you can break a window to escape your crashed car and use the same tool to cut your seatbelt if you’re trapped. It cuts wire, strips wire, scribes into metal, chisels into wood and loosens and tightens just about anything on a bicycle and wants to be the survivalist tool you carry everywhere. You’ve got to see the video below to see just a smidgen of what this baby can do.
The metperial survivalist tool would make a pretty nifty Chanukah or Christmas gift for your favorite geek.
This is not Stewart’s first rodeo. He previously successfully funded a much simpler multitool. This multitool has a similar form factor, but it’s a lot more robust and feature packed.
Shockingly, Stewart doesn’t have a website or any social media – but his previous Kickstarter shows a lot of comments from people who received the finished product as promised.
This deceptively simple illustration was created by Ng in a matter of seconds using his Paper Simple app. The same illustration would have taken 5-10 minutes for someone experienced with Adobe Illustrator to accomplish.
William Ng has created a cool piece of software I have fantasized about for some time. In addition to being a geek who is into blinking lights, sci-fi and shiny metal objects, I’m also into marketing and vector illustrations. If you’ve ever used Adobe Flash to create an animation, then Ng’s illustration tool will not look foreign to you. He has taken the simplicity of what resides inside of a fairly complex and expensive software package and put it into a stand-alone app.
He’s already got a working version available for Android and has launched a Kickstarter to finance the improvement of the app, as well as to make it available for iOS and for Windows.
The illustrations you create can be exported to vector formats which can be used in Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, Microsoft Vizio, Inkscape and others.
There are only 12 days to go on this Kickstarter and it’s not doing so well – for only a couple of reasons, I believe. It’s a great looking product. Look at the video below and if you’ve ever needed to create a quick and dirty illustration, you will be impressed. Firstly – the name of this product makes no sense. The name should be Easy Vector or Vector Simple or something like that. The marketing is all wrong. The other big flaw is lack of support for Mac OS. While Windows users outnumber Mac users 10:1, those who use Adobe Illustrator professionally on Mac significantly outnumber those that are on Windows. Walk into any advertising agency of note – their creative team is on Macs – period. This app is screaming for Mac support. I hope Ng will hear the cry of Mac users and take a crack at this on the Mac platform. If this was featured in the Mac App store – it would sell like hotcakes. There are a few vector programs out there for Mac on the cheap – but not one with the simplistic tools of Paper Simple. For me, personally, I would buy this in an instant if it was on the Mac platform and start cranking out simple illustrations to add to my iStockphoto portfolio.
This re-make of the Google logo was done by the creator of this software in 52 seconds. There is no way you could pull that off that fast in Adobe Illustrator. Really cool software.
Before Macromedia bought Flash from FutureWave for $1 million, a lot of people didn’t get it. Macromedia got it and got a crazy insane bargain with Flash… which was called Splash at the time. Later, Adobe bought Macromedia for $1 billion, including Flash – which was really the big thing they wanted in addition to Dreamweaver. I’m not saying Ng has a million dollar product here – but I’m saying that his marketing in this campaign (or lack thereof) is why it’s not doing well. It is really an insanely cool product – but not everyone is going to “get it.” I’d like to see Ng launch this again one day – after supporting Mac OS – and have some really nice videos – having seasoned illustrators give demos and testimonials on video – and the product needs a name change. In a world where ‘Google’ is a word people take seriously, things certainly can have goofy names – but Paper Simple makes zero sense. This whole shooting match needs a new logo, a new name and a new video to get people to dive in. Everyone has a DVR today – but TiVo had commercials for TEN YEARS before most people comprehended what the heck the TiVo did. Paper Simple (or whatever its future name will be – hopefully something more intuitive) should have its own Facebook page and an Instagram account. This product only suffers for a lack of proper naming, marketing and use of social media. The product is there, but this is a product that needs the whole package to get off the ground properly.
If you’re one of those rare geeks who does vector illustrations on Windows, this is really worthy of your attention. While it’s possible I might use a touch app for iOS to create an illustration, there are so many apps out there to create cute sketches (even though they don’t export as a vector format), that I just don’t see this app having a practical application on that platform. Disagree? Agree? I’d love it if you illustrators would share your comments below.
You can follow Paper Simple on Twitter and their website.
Designer Denis Stewart has designed and executed a beautiful multitool that uses both Imperial and Metric measurements for tightening some of the most commonly used sizes of small nuts and screws. He’s launched a Kickstarter campaign to finance the mass production of the tool so geeks like you and me can have one of these relatively inexpensively.
