Well… the 2009 Tour de France just wrapped up yesterday and I am already starting to experience withdrawals. No more live feeds or up to the minute tweets to follow each morning…how am I going to get by? It was an exciting Tour to watch this year, but now I can move on to some of the other content that I have neglected to post for the last three weeks. First though, I will mention just a few more “Tour Tech” articles that recently caught my attention. VeloNews wrote about some of the new and prototype Shimano products that were seen on the Skil-Shimano team bikes at this year’s Tour. CyclingNews points out “Wheels and gadgets from the world’s best.” As always, click through to see the gallery of images that accompany the post. CyclingNews also has a preview of some new 2010 products from Press Camp 2009. The water-cooled helmet from Lazer immediately caught my attention. That is an idea that I played around with many years ago…probably should have done something with it at the time.

I have mentioned Mark Sanders’ IF Mode design on the blog a few times. The July issue of Metropolis Magazine features a short article about the development of that bike.

Gary Fisher tweeted about a “beta version” Trek e-bike that will apparently be test marketed, with a selling price of $2,200, in a few select bike shops in August (see a prototype model in the photo above). I can’t wait to find out more about this bike from Trek and I really look forward to seeing more electric bike development from all of the big bike companies in the near future. On the subject of electric bikes, check out this Bike Hugger post from earlier today and this older Bicycle Design guest post by Michael Downes.

Dave sent me a link to another bent-ply frame design. This one was spotted at Salone Satellite during design week in Milan earlier this year. On the subject of wooden bikes, another reader pointed me to Sylvan Cycles. I like the way the main “tubes” are faceted…kind of like giant pencils.

Adaptive Path, a user experience strategy, research and design firm, recently created a retail experience for Mission Bicycle in San Francisco, a company that had previously only sold its custom bikes online. You can watch a video about the project and read more on the Adaptive Path blog.

Finally, I will mention that Apartment Therapy has a roundup post featuring bikes as décor. Thanks to Yokota Fritz for the tip on that one.

Photo credit: Gary_Fisher on Twitter– “San Francisco supervisors Ross Mirkarimi and Eric Mar check out the beta version Trek E bike”