iHologram - iPhone application from David OReilly on Vimeo.
This video simulates a 3D animation art-as-iPhone-app that responds to rotation of the iPhone on a flat surface. It’s clearly a fake because the iPhone can’t actually measure rotation on a flat surface like this, but the video is very well executed.
09/05/08 by mark in art, technology. No Comments »
So most of the coverage of Google’s new browser, Chrome, centers on it as a “Windows killer.” But this framing is a little off. Google isn’t trying to compete with Explorer or kill Windows, although I’m sure they’d love to. Google released a webcomic by the infinitely talented Scott McCloud to illustrate the story of Chrome, its goals, and what fundamentally differentiates it from existing browsers.
Chrome enables better memory allocation by treating processes separately (more like a modern os than a browser) and it’s open source. Handling processes separately is very important for Google because their web applications place more demands on memory usage than traditional browsers. And there’s a payoff for users too. If one web page or web app hangs, anything else you have open in Chrome won’t.
Google is investing in Chrome as an open source product not to compete with existing browsers but to encourage them to innovate with Chrome’s code to be able to better support the memory demands of Google apps.
Also, Google can now leverage their own browser on their mobile platform, Android, much like Apple is leveraging Safari on the iPhone. Hopefully this integration will result in a cohesive user experience across the new platform.
The fact that media coverage has overlooked Google’s stated positioning of Chrome, reflects the awkward choice of promoting the product with a 30+ page webcomic. I still think McCloud is a genius as a visual communicator (if you haven’t read Understanding Comics I highly recommend it), but come on Google. Why pick this medium that demands time to read and attentiveness for such an important product promotion?
09/03/08 by mark in technology, web. No Comments »
This morning I downloaded Intua’s BeatMaker iPhone app. This is the first and only iPhone app I’ve paid for, and it’s crazy. It has 16 pad sample triggering, sample wave editing, a sequencer, live performance capabilities (live pattern triggering and recording), a few effects, and the ability to import and export audio. I’m so excited about this app: I can finally make beats on the subway on my phone!
Some screenshots I took of the application’s various interface states are below. This is by far the most robust iPhone app I’ve installed, and the interface paradigms are inspired more by Reason and other sequencers than by Apple.
07/15/08 by mark in music, technology. No Comments »
With the addition of applications for the iPhone and iPod touch in the new iTunes store there are many new social apps that leverage location aware technology. Techcrunch has a nice overview of several, including Loopt and Limbo:
Think of Loopt as a simple social network to find local businesses, message friends and send status updates with where you are (using the iPhones location technology). And a key difference with Loopt and many of the other networks below: you can meet new people who are nearby, if they choose to share that information. If everyone used this, you could see who’s single in a bar before you approach them (and flirt with them by phone first), and know the first name and job of everyone at that cocktail hour at the tech conference.…
Limbo - Limbo is another geo-aware social network that behaves like a mashup of Twitter, Loopt, and Whrrl. One of the app’s most compelling features is its grid-like diagram that visually groups your friends according to what they’re doing (for example, all of your friends that are Out Drinking will be lumped together, even if they aren’t necessarily drinking in the same place). The app accomplishes this feat by forcing users to select from a predefined hierarchal list of activities (while this might sound restrictive, the list is pretty comprehensive). This categorization allows users to see what they’re friends are up to without having to sift through each of their messages.
On the geo-positioning front, Limbo allows users to interact users who are within a close radius (about a quarter mile), in a manner that is similar to Loopt.
I think of both as the 2008 versions of Dodgeball, a mobile social networking service developed by two guys at ITP years ago, that was acquired by Google in 2005, and left to dwindle until the founders quit Google in 2007:
It’s no real secret that Google wasn’t supporting dodgeball the way we expected. The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us - especially as we couldn’t convince them that dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space.
Back in 2005, Clay Shirky broke down why Google’s acquisition of Dodgeball made sense:
* Dodgeball uses the mobile phone as its native platform, someplace Google wants to further extend it’s reach.* Dodgeball does a better job mapping to real-world social networks than Orkut, since there’s an actual reason *not* to friend someone in db, namely that you don’t want to get spammed with 100 SMSes a night.
* Google’s mapping work is good at “Where am I?” and “Where is the gas
station?” but not so good at the question “Where are my friends?” Dodgeball is really good at that.Given that the core Dodgeball proposition — we can mix fixed information about places and fluid information about people to create new value — improves a) the more information you have upfront and b) the more people are using it, the addition of db to Google is really good news for db, and will provide a really interesting platform for G to experiment with.
Three years later, with the explosion of location aware social applications, Google sure looks like it slept on a great idea.
07/10/08 by mark in social media, technology, web. No Comments »
A huge (and long overdue) update from Adobe enables search engines to better index content within multi-state swfs.
Although search engines already index static text and links within SWF files, RIAs and dynamic Web content have been generally difficult to fully expose to search engines because of their changing states — a problem also inherent in other RIA technologies.
“Until now it has been extremely challenging to search the millions of RIAs and dynamic content on the Web, so we are leading the charge in improving search of content that runs in Adobe Flash Player,” said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe. “We are initially working with Google and Yahoo! to significantly improve search of this rich content on the Web, and we intend to broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all content publishers, developers and end users.”
As Michelle Turner, vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe Systems, notes:
The great thing is that this is retrospective - the millions of SWF files out on the web will be indexed by this new player, and content and app developers don’t have to do anything for their Flash-based sites to be picked up. Google is rolling this out on their production servers right now, and while it will likely take a while for the impact of this to propagate into search results, improvement should start to be seen in weeks. Yahoo doesn’t have this live yet, but is committed to using the technology and releasing it at a later date.
I think this is a really exciting technology release. Dynamic content searchability has been an issue for search engines for years. Flash content is so pervasive on the web, the fact that it couldn’t be thoroughly crawled and indexed in the past kept search engines from being able to access an enormous amount of web content. This will be great for increasing search accuracy over time, particularly as Google and Yahoo apply their secret sauce to the SWF results. This also has major implications for SEO companies, and I can imagine the new work springing up around optimization of Flash content. Many creative agencies have been asking for this for a long time, so we’re thrilled to see Google roll this out.
This is terrific news for rich media content publishers. I can’t wait to read more about how it works.
07/01/08 by mark in technology, web. No Comments »
Today was supposed to be a day for the record books: Mozilla hopes to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. Unfortunately the Mozilla site wasn’t ready for the million or so users who pledged to download Firefox 3 today. For several hours after the scheduled 1pm release the site wouldn’t even load.
And then there’s the odd moment when the Firefox 3 page was up, but still linked to Firefox 2. Read that fine print.. By 5pm EST on Tuesday, the Firefox 3 download page was down, and was back to Firefox 2. By 8pm EST they seem to have finally sorted things out.. What happened?
06/17/08 by mark in technology, web. No Comments »
I make music as Day Might Same. My new album is available now.
