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This is wild -- a new startup called GearBox is working on making "smart toys," and one of their first products is a prototype rolling ball that's controlled with your iPhone. Not only can you move the ball around on the ground with your phone's touchscreen, but the ball has gadgetry inside that can affect and monitor its motion, so you can do things like play "Office Golf" (and the ball can notify you when it's reached the hole), try some virtual curling, or play a multi-ball game. There's lots of gadgetry inside, too, so the ball could be made to travel slower or in a strange pattern, or even glow with ambient information. It's also wirelessly connected to the iPhone (and thus to the Internet), so you could have it monitor online resources like Facebook or Twitter, and then react to that data as well.

Unfortunately, this is still just a prototype -- there's no information about a price or release date at all. But it's obviously a really intriguing idea, and depending on actual implementation, it could be a really amazing product. We'll have to keep an eye out for how GearBox eventually decides to put this together in the future.

[via TouchArcade]

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Although I don't get a chance to do as much geocaching as I'd like to, I still check the Geocaching.com cache maps on occasion to see what's new in the area. Usually, I do this by checking with the US$9.99 Geocaching app, but sometimes I find myself logging into the Geocaching.com website to do my searching.

Carlos Fonseca has developed a nice Safari extension that smooths out the rough edges on the Geocaching.com site. Better Geocaching, as the extension is called, adds two features when you're visiting Geocaching.com. First, a click on the View Map link immediately displays a fullscreen map instead of the usual partial page map. The second feature adds a Tweet This button near the cache code on the description page, so you can share your find with friends.

The extension is also supposed to revert the map back to normal view by clicking a Better Geocaching button, but no matter how hard I looked, I couldn't find that button. Fortunately, the Safari Extensions Gallery includes links to developer pages, so I quickly determined that that button was simply a small arrow in the upper right corner of the fullscreen map.

The extension adds nothing to your toolbar and works silently behind the scenes. If you're a geocacher who uses Safari, you'll definitely want to head out to the Safari Extensions Gallery and install Better Geocaching.

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