I've been running across the occasional item that serves a particular purpose and serves it particularly well. Like many of the Unix tools, these everyday items are well-designed and do their job well. I'm collecting my experience with well-designed items here. While I generally like a prettily decorated item, I'm not considering that part here, just the functionality.

Eventually, I will have pictures here.

The IKEA garlic squisher.

Many garlic squishers squish at an angle, causing the garlic to squirt out instead of getting squished. Those that don't have been hard to clean and doesn't get all the garlic through. This one has little spikes on the presser that causes more of the garlic to go through. While not self-cleaning, the garlic is generally pressed enough into a thin shell of the hard outer layers that it comes out easily.

The IKEA Groggy corkscrew.

This corkscrew is a very simple design, yet it entirely avoids the eternal problem of having to use brute force to pull out the cork. I also have yet to see a broken cork with this corkscrew. And unlike other similar designs, this has a little knife on the side to cut the cover.

Rawlplugs

A simple but brilliant invention for putting screws into non-wood walls. Not only does the rawlplug provide for something for the screw to take hold on, screwing the screw in expands the rawlplug and extends hooks to make it stick better in the hole. Just brilliant.

Dough squisher (or whatever it's called)

A handle with curved metal bars on it, used for crumbling things in dough. Much handier than trying to use knifes or forks, but takes having a knife in the other hand to periodically scrape off the dough. Still a lot faster than the alternatives.

-- LarsClausen - 14 Dec 2004
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