desk
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IKEA teamed up with Swedish House Mafia on a turntable
IKEA has teamed up with Swedish House Mafia on a series of products, including a record player and a desk for music producers.
IKEA's new $40 wireless charging pad mounts underneath your desk or table
If you've ever thought, "hey, it would be great if I could charge my phone or tablet just by laying it on a regular desk," then IKEA has the gadget for you.
Panasonic's $835 cubicle offers authentic office hell in your home
Panasonic's Komoru is a depressing, $835 cubicle for your living room.
The 'Station' desk cradles your body and gut-punches your wallet
Our computers have rapidly shrunk from room-size behemoths to hulking desktops to the svelte laptops that now dominate modern offices. What haven't changed much are the tables and chairs that the computers (and we) sit on. A new integrated workspace from the Altwork company, appropriately named the Station, has been designed to replace both pieces of furniture while giving you more flexibility in how you interact with your computer. I was recently able to get a butts-on demo of the Station, and the only contortion I had to perform was wrapping my mind around its massive price tag.
The best standing desks
By Mark Lukach and Nathan Edwards This post was done in partnership with The Wirecutter, a buyer's guide to the best technology. Read the full article here. Three years ago, The Wirecutter was the first publication to pit all of the major standing desks against one another in a head-to-head test. After spending hundreds of hours testing 13 desks over the years, we can say that the Ergo Depot Jarvis Bamboo (configured with a 60-inch bamboo desktop, cable management, and the handset upgrade) is the best standing desk for most people. It's as reliable as desks costing more than $1,500, but it provides more stability, sells for half the price, and comes with a seven-year warranty that eclipses the one- to five-year policies its competitors offer.
The Edge Desk transforms so you can get work done anywhere
Who still uses a desk? Better question: Who still needs a desk, given that so much of our work today takes place on laptops, phones and tablets? Those devices don't need to be put on a flat surface, so a lot of people don't bother. Instead, they work from the comfort of a couch, bed or maybe even the floor. And yet, many still insist on keeping a desk around "just in case." We've come to accept that a desk is something you should have, even if you don't actually use it.
Stir now sells just the bases for its sit-stand desks
Every time we write about Stir's kinetic standing desks, we always point out how damn expensive the things are. In a world where you can buy a manually-operated standing desk from Ikea for a couple of bucks, spending three grand on a smart one can seem excessive. Thankfully, Stir knows this and is now offering a way for folks to just buy the legs without spending big on the top. The Base L1 is, as you can guess, a height-adjustable desk base that'll let you attach any topper of your choosing. Should you want to get in on the action, it'll set you back between $1,000 and $1,500 depending on what you can haggle with your local dealer. Plus, obviously, the price of a base on top.
Convert your tired table into a powered standing desk for $400
NextDesk has long offered standing desks, which are argued to have health benefits over regular desks that you sit at. Its latest product is a powered desktop solution that can "convert" your regular desk to a standing one.
The Altwork Station is an expensive marvel of desk engineering
Standing desks are all the rage in modern offices these days, thanks in large part to plenty of research that claims sitting all day is detrimental to your long-term health. And you can spend a lot of money finding the right one -- take the just-announced Altwork Station that goes up for pre-order today for $3,900. It's a tremendous amount of money, but the Altwork Station is far more than your average adjustable standing desk. It's a somewhat crazy but intriguing vision for giving users a totally customizable workstation, whether you want to sit, stand or even recline, and there's some very impressive engineering behind all this. As a product for the average consumer, it might not make sense -- but that doesn't detract from the five years of work that went into the Altwork Station.
'How to gross out coworkers,' or my time with the FitDesk 2.0
It seemed like a good idea at the time. I'd been meaning to lose some weight for a while and all the recent news about how sitting for extended periods of time is terrible for your health convinced me that a drastic change was necessary. So, the best way to accomplish both goals simultaneously was with a double-duty exercise bike-workstation like the FitDesk 2.0, right? Boy, was I wrong.
How the Mac App Store made money for this indie developer's "side project"
A number of independent iOS developers have "opened the kimono" over the past few months, giving insight into exactly how much work and effort pays off - or sometimes fails to pay off - when an app hits the App Store. John Saddington, the indie developer behind the successful blogging app Desk (US$29.99) pointed a spotlight at his creation today, showing how his "side project" made a profit of $35,000 with only 63 days of sales in 2014. Saddington's post is one of the few that has shown what it's like for a Mac developer to make it "big". He notes that for him, success of Desk was dependent on two things: A working product he could use daily, and a profitable app - as long as it didn't deviate from the primary goal of Desk being something he was happy to use. I won't divulge too many of Saddington's secrets - I'd rather have you read his full post - but some of the takeaways include: The app's net daily revenue over the 63 days it was in the App Store in 2014 was $1,010 (after Apple's cut, before taxes or marketing costs) Sponsoring John Gruber's Daring Fireball was pricy, but well worth it in terms of sales generated He had about one return per day, and only one educational sale over the first two months Indie development "works". Saddington says he won't "be quitting my 'day job' any time soon", but this shows that it can be a "fun, sustainable, and profitable side project" Desk was ultimately awarded "Best App of 2014" by Apple, and I find it to be a powerful tool for personal blogging. Let's hope that more Mac and iOS fans decide to create tools for their own use and then pass them along to us; Saddington's "side project" has made a lot of Mac users very happy.
Stir's new smart desk is a relative bargain at $2,990
We poke fun at Stir sometimes, but that's mostly because $3,900 is a ridiculous amount of money to pay for a standing desk -- yes, even a "smart" one. But once you get past the sticker shock, it's clear the company is doing some cool things: The existing Kinetic Desk has a sleek design and can learn your sitting and standing habits. (The fact that there are built-in outlets to keep your stuff from falling over is also a plus.) Again, though, four grand is a lot to spend, especially if you're a company looking to issue several of these to your employees. With that in mind, Stir is releasing another desk that's relatively more affordable. Which is to say, it costs $2,990. Still not cheap, exactly, but a thousand-dollar price cut is a start.
Desk: A painless writing and blogging tool for Mac
For writers and bloggers, the choice of a text editor can make a huge difference in productivity. The best tools simply fade out of the way and let you write, then magically transform your work into published format with a click. That's the case with developer John Saddington's new app, simply named Desk (US$29.99). After using it for a few days, it has become my default text editor, replacing a half dozen other apps that were clogging my Applications folder. My apologies to all of those other developers... When you're typing, user interface items simply disappear from Desk - you're actually typing on a blank page. Move your pointer with mouse or trackpad, and you begin to see some of the elements. At the bottom of the page you'll see exactly when the current document was last saved, a character count, a word count, and reading time. That last statistic gives you an idea of how long it will take an average reader to fully digest your post. In the right sidebar is the typical scroll bar as well as a vertical toolbar that provides useful functions - a tool for creating new local posts and seeing your local drafts, a way to publish your work to a number of different blogging systems including the ever-popular WordPress with one click, a preview mode so you can see how your document converts over to published formats, and a help button. Many bloggers are probably asking themselves right now "So what about Markdown support?" What's fascinating about Desk is that it doesn't force you to use Markdown for text formatting (sorry, John Gruber) although you can if you are familiar with Markdown syntax and wish to use it. Double-clicking any word or phrase in a document brings up a WYSIWYG text ornamentation pop-up with such common items as bold, italic, underlined, headings 1-6, block quote, links, numeric or bulleted lists, and justification. You can have numerous documents open at any time, each in its own resizable window, or just toggle the current window between your drafts. Desk supports full-screen mode, a transparency mode (not sure why, as the window floating against my Yosemite wallpaper was unreadable), a day/night mode if you want to toggle between black text on a white background or vice-versa, and a "float window" mode that keeps a window foremost on the screen even when you're not actively typing in it. Adding images to a WordPress post was too simple - all I needed to do was grab the local image and drop it onto the post, then use the alignment popup to get it where I wanted it. When publishing to WordPress, it uploaded the image and placed it in the correct location. Resizing an image is as simple as dragging the corner of the image, and Desk gives you the pixel dimensions of the image as you resize. I did run into an issue when I tried to connect Desk to some WordPress blogs that I have. Desk somehow calls the xmlrpc.php file in WordPress to authenticate itself, and my hosting provider initially saw that as a denial of service attack and locked me out of my sites. A quick email to the developer pointed me to a help page and video on how to capture some UserAgent info in Terminal, which was passed along to both the developer and the hosting provider. I can't guarantee that every Desk user will receive the same amazing support I did (after all, I am a tech blogger!) but I was quite impressed. It also helped immensely that John Saddington knew the WordPress expert at my hosting provider... Using Desk for blogging, you can actually set up one site for "quick publish" so that you just have to click the quick publish button on the toolbar and your post is published in seconds. Selecting a specific blog rather than using quick publish, you can add a category and tags to a post from within the app. Need to make changes after you've published? No problem - there's an "update post" menu item. Desk plays nice with iCloud, too. I've chosen to save my drafts and documents in iCloud, something you can select from the title bar of the document. I should point out that at present, Desk doesn't work with iCloud Drive, but that's one of many things on the developer's to-do list. Desk has worked flawlessly for me with WordPress; not so with our proprietary CMS here at TUAW. I've actually had to resort to exporting my Desk document as HTML, then opening it in another text editor to copy and paste into our CMS. Awkward... The app isn't perfect, but it's darned close and considering that this is a first release, I'm impressed. There are no unnecessary "features", and it's obvious that Saddington practices what he preaches by blogging - with Desk, of course - about his development process. The Mac App Store is currently featuring Desk as a Best New App, so it's apparent that the App Store editors feel the same way about Desk as I do. I look forward to seeing how Desk evolves in the future, and hope that Saddington can stay away from the "creeping featuritis" that seems to hit so many Mac and iOS text editors.
Portable cardboard desk keeps you standing while you type
Many will tell you that it's unhealthy to sit in front of your computer for hours at a time, but you can't usually bring a standing desk with you to a remote studio or the park. However, you won't have to make do with chairs and laps now that Refold's cardboard standing desk is on the way. Think of it as origami office furniture -- so long as you're willing to lug about 14 pounds with you, you can set up a leg-friendly workstation in about two minutes. It's sturdy enough to handle the weight of many desktop PCs, and there are different sizes to accommodate both kids and taller adults. Like the concept of computing anywhere? You can pledge $160 NZD (about $125 US) to Refold's already-funded Kickstarter to get the American-made desk, which should arrive sometime in June.
Adventures with a homemade standing desk
I, Dan Cooper, am today going to review some cardboard boxes. Not Google Cardboard, nor Luckies' Cardboard Smartphone Projector (which is coming in a few weeks), but some honest-to-goodness cardboard. More precisely, the box for my Nintendo Wii + Wii Fit starter pack, the packaging for a Dyson DC19 T2 Exclusive and an Image Business five-ream printer-paper box. I should add that I haven't been paid by any of the above companies, and each one came with the implement it was purchased with -- oh, except for the paper box, which my wife brought home from her office one day.
Stir's 'smart desk' now works with Fitbit, shows how many calories you've burned while standing
Remember the Stir Kinetic, that $3,890 "smart desk" we showed you last fall? You know, the sleek-looking one made by someone who used to work on Apple's iPod team? Yep, that's the one. In any case, it's about to get a few more features to help justify that insane price tag. Stir just announced that the desk will now integrate with Fitbit's fitness-tracking platform, allowing you to tally up all the calories you've burned while standing.
An up close look at the giant gaming PC that's also a desk
Lian Li usually deals in computer towers, but it occasionally dabbles in incredible (or mad) desks built specifically to house desktop PCs. We even got to see one of these monstrosities in person, the top-end model above, spotted right in the epicenter of Computex, Asia's biggest tech show. Given the trend toward tablets, phones and wearables this year, it could well be the most... Computex thing here. We just wish there was some kind of award for that.
Stir Kinetic smart desk selling for $3,890, New Yorkers can try before buying
Remember the Stir Kinetic, the standing desk that learns your sitting habits and adjusts the height automatically? Well, it's going up for sale today and yes, it's as expensive as we said it would be. As promised, the hardwood desk starts at $3,890, though for now you'll only need to pay a $300 deposit; the rest will get charged to your account when it ships in April. (The first 50 customers will actually get it in February.) Just so you know what you're getting into, the desk has a super-minimal design, adorned only by a touchscreen, which you'll use to lower the desk over its 26-inch range. You can also tap the screen to see how many calories you've burned and keep track of how much time you've spent standing. There's also an "Active Mode" that allows the desk to move periodically, encouraging you to take a break. Additionally, the desk has built-in WiFi and Bluetooth, along with four USB ports and eight AC sockets -- a neat way of ensuring your cables stay put as you move the desk up and down. As we've been saying all along, $3,890 is a heckuva a lot to pay for a desk, so in addition to having deep pockets, you better be sold on the idea that working while standing up is good for your health. If not, the company will be showcasing the desk at an in-person store, but just one: the Wired Web Store at 353 West 14th St. in New York. If you happen to live in the area, you can mosey on down starting December 4th and check it out in person (no purchase necessary if you just wanna get your kicks). As for everyone else, you might just want to revisit our hands-on video and call it a day.
Former iPod engineer designs kinetic desk
Former iPod engineer JP Labrosse has unveiled his company's first product: the Stir Kinetic Desk. The desk has a small touchscreen in the corner that you tap twice to activate standing mode. The desk rises so you can stand at it and do your work, instead of sitting through your day. Tap the touchscreen again to lower the desk into "sitting" mode. But the desk is more than just a fancy mechanical thing with a touchscreen button. It also has a feature called "Whisper Breath" that enables the desk to literally give you a slight nudge to alert you to get up and walk around a bit. The desk also offers WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity, so it can talk to your health apps on your iPhone, as well as tracking the number of calories you burn while sitting and standing. The desk may be technologically advanced, but it's not cheap, coming in at US$3,890. Want one? You can register your interest here.
Stir's Kinetic Desk is a standing desk that learns your sitting habits, moves when you need a break (video)
If Apple were to build a desk, it would look like this. Much like Nest, maker of the world's sexiest thermostat, Stir is a company founded by someone who worked on the first iPods, and, it too is trying to make a mundane household item fashionable. In this case, of course, the product in question isn't a thermostat or even a home appliance, but a standing desk. The Kinetic Desk, which will ship in the first half of 2014, has a thermal sensor that can tell when you've arrived, and over time, it learns how long you prefer to be on your feet before taking a break. To lower the desk over its 26-inch range, just double-tap the built-in touchscreen, located on the left end. From there, you can can set goals, like standing for 25 percent of the day, as well as see how many extra calories you've burned, or monitor how much time you've spent sitting. CEO and founder JP Labrosse tells us that the desk might eventually integrate with fitness-tracking services like Fitbit, though it won't at launch. Still, the desk has WiFi and Bluetooth radios baked in, so if Stir ever did want to share data with third-party services, the hardware would at least be able to support it. The Kinetic Desk has just one button. Press it and you'll be telling the desk to enter "active mode," which will remind you to take periodic breaks by rising up and down ever so gently when it's time for you to stop what you're doing and walk around. (It's less distracting then it sounds; in fact, Stir is using the name "WhisperBreath" to describe it.) Also like an Apple product, the desk has a stark design: it's powered by a single cable, with eight AC ports and four USB sockets tucked into two hidden panels at the top of the desk. That makes for a minimalist look, of course, but it also means you don't have to worry about dragging cables (and knocking things over) when you adjust the height of the desk. Once this starts shipping, you'll have two color options for the lacquered wood surface, and four choices of accent colors for the underside and in the two charging drawers. As for the starting price, you're looking at $3,890 and up -- suffice to say, you'd better already be a standing desk convert before taking the plunge.
