It has been raining off and on in Minneapolis for five days straight. Last night the city dipped into the low 50s, which exacerbated the needling wind and drizzle. It’s the end of June. What happened to the glorious summer? Weatherman, if we’re going to have the few tolerable, fleeting months stolen, could you lie to us? Or at least pretend to be a little optimistic?

That’s the motivation behind Optimistic Weather, a new Android application designed by Nation that glosses over the daily forecast’s more disheartening details. And what’s more, whenever you scope out the next day’s forecast, the app always predicts a splendorous sunny day.

“The idea for the app came out of a conversation we were having in the studio about how wrong some online weather services appeared to be, and that it would be interesting if there was a service that lied to you when the weather was going to be rubbish,” Nation designer Tom Hartshorn told Fast Company. The design firm is fittingly based in London, a city known for its dismal weather, dry wit, and delusional positivism.

When a massive thunderstorm is on the way, for example, the app muses: “What? Is this the end of the world? Any chance the thunder gods will get tired and this will just go away?”

You can download Optimistic Weather for free from the Android Market. 

Source: Fast Company 

Images courtesy of Nation. 

What’s the point of learning a second (or third, or fourth) language if you can just have your iPhone translate it on the fly? A new augmented reality app called Word Lens is capable of translating signs written in Spanish to English, or vice versa, reports Technology Review. Word Lens scans the input from your smartphone’s camera and, after decoding the Spanish, will repaint the picture in English.

According to the Technology Review, Word Lens was actually a programming tangent: It “pushes the boundaries of handheld computing, given that optical character recognition—a trick it performs in real time—was designed for the less challenging task of reading scans of paper documents.”

All of the bugs aren’t worked out yet, per Wired’s field test. “In our tests, it worked smoothly, although the words had a tendency to wiggle around a bit, switching between English and Spanish and flipping between alternate translations,” writes Charlie Sorrel at Wired. “You could get the gist of a sentence, but not read it clearly. Holding the camera very steady helped mitigate the ‘wiggling’ effect.” Ultimately, though, the magazine’s technofuturists were impressed:

Word Lens is a taste of science fiction, something like a visual version of the universal translator or the Babelfish. Only instead of being a convenient device to avoid movie subtitles, it’s a real, functioning tool.

Of course, the app doesn’t solve the problem of actually being able to speak to people from exotic locales. But until we’ve caught that Babelfish, Word Lens will inch us closer to speaking a digital Esperanto.

Sources: Technology Review(free registration required), Wired