The final year buzz shown on here as well as a whole lot of other digital media stuff, talks and ideas. Be warned I got digital waves coming left, right and centre, so they may be head banging, broken computers, war torn keyboards, information overload but above all, a whole lot of work on here (one hopes)!!!
My partner has the iPad, so I’ve been making the most of it. My rule of buying apple things is, wait till the second (if I’m impatient) or the third revision when I buy it… As much I adore my mac, my apple loyalty is slowly being diminished by the presence and focus of iPads and iPhones, I always feel the first two revisions tend to be not quite right. Take the current iPhone, with their signal drop for left handed users… Sure I’m right handed, won’t affect me - but its still a problem. Or even when the 1st intel macbook pro came out - 3GB ram, leaving red marks on my legs?! It felt like a windows laptop - come on, I didn’t sign up for that! I will also add, my lecturer after 25yrs has given up on apple! I cannot imagine him without an apple, but are times changing? Are apple losing their faithful core customers and replacing them with the new ipad and iphoine savvy customers?
Anyway, back to the matter in hand… The iPad and the The Times app. Its suppose be a revolutionary in so many ways, well that was what the impression I got! The Times app, like all the other newspaper app, is to signal a new way of reading the paper. A paper that’s interactive, allowing readers view photo’s is crisp quality, high def video content, get access to the latest news without the need to use paper. For The Times, it signalled a new method of online publication - subscription! Newspapers like The Guardian and the likes have resisted this in the hope that online advertisements will pave the way for free subscription. However, the times - bold went where no newspaper has gone before and said want to see it online or on the ipad… Pay up!
Now normally I have no qualms in paying for good quality content, despite my jobless graduate status (ok so my partner paid for it!), what I do have a problem is that it shouldn’t crash the IPad in the process. So here’s the deal - the way the app works is like this…
You download each edition, each day and you can view whenever you like as and when you like. You can flick though the pages via the gestures and view multimedia content such as video etc. Its feels flexible and highly engaging in this sense. So what went wrong?
The app keeps crashing the iPad. Whenever you read a content for awhile and you subsequently flick through the paper quickly or go back to the main page, it either stutters,slows down or crashes the iPad. I know I’ve said it so many times, but I just don’t get it. Why should a newspaper crash an ipad? A game I could understand, another intensive application sure… But a newspaper? After contacting the developers about the problem - the advice, you should avoid using memory intensive apps prior to using the times app and that they are working on a patch. Ok maybe I’m being harsh, the developers are working on a patch… But then we’ve had this app for a month and have experienced the crashing quite regularly and paid for the app and ok we got an offer in the subscription - but come on!!! Its just a newspaper!
So my advice on how not to read a newspaper? Use The Times app on the iPad, which is at the moment a bit of an epic fail.
"Chrome officially overtakes Safari: http://www.geek-juice.net/2010/06/chrome-overtakes-safari.html"
Before I continue, I realise I may come across as OCD but I can assure you I’m not, but if I am it’s because of this phone.
I upgraded my old blackberry to a HTC desire a couple of weeks ago, but after a week, I decided it wasn’t for me at all. HTC Desire, visually is a lovely piece of kit, but there were several things I found quite annoying. The touchscreen is very responsive, however if you make a mistake or you want to go back and add something earlier in the sentence, it is extremely difficult to move cursor back to it. I checked with five of my friends and asked if I had chubby fingers and they agreed I don’t. Even if I put the screen in landscape mode it’s not much better. However, if I am writing a text it is great and very intuitive, in the sense it learns the way you text as you go. Also I do wish the screen was a bit wider, I don’t know it does seem a bit squished for my liking.
I found having the 5 home screen spaces, exceptionally annoying, I don’t want to use all 5 screens so why should I have to have all 5 screens? Ok, the iphone had the same feature - i.e. you could put your apps all on the screen. If that’s the case why do we have a separate menu for the other apps? Hmm, sounds like a bit of a waste to me, tbh. Also I was a bit confused which was an android app and what was the HTC app. Is the clutter between android and HTC stuff necessary. I mean Android has been upgraded and improved upon, I’d like to see what is exactly is android. Maybe this is me being a bit OCD but do I really need the HTC apps bundled with Android’s app.
My biggest pet peeve/hate is the mac synchronicity. HTC does not synchronise with a mac, it’s saving grace is Google and third party applications - despite what carphonewarehouse says, it doesn’t. In order to do the sync, I need to sync my mac with google, and then google syncs with HTC. WHY? I mean really, why would you need to sync through google and then HTC, why can’t I do it direct to the HTC. Ok so I have a cloud that has all my details, and if I ever lose or my mac gets messed up I can always turn to google, but I don’t really want Google having my details.
So all in all, I decided to give the phone back and go back to my blackberry. Just a word of advice, or sentence for that matter… if your blackberry battery is so dead, take the battery out, plug the phone into the charger and leave for about 30 seconds. Then at the same time whilst the phone is plugged in, put the battery back in and the blackberry starts charging it. I had to do this because the blackberry kept trying to turn on and give an empty battery, with a blue lightning cross on it, symbol and it wouldn’t charge when I plugged it in… felt like I was jumpstarting it.
Those are my thoughts for the day…
Testing of projections onto a balloon for my final year project. What you see is a wind speed (from Arch-OS) visualisation projected onto the balloons.
Saw this video, where they use $1 lycra gloves to detect realtime hand gestures movements. Very good use for augmented reality methinks.
As I have been working on an idea involving augmented reality, implementing the ARToolkit has proved to be very difficult. Then it got me thinking, do I really need an ARToolkit. What I want to be able to achieve is something that will allow me to move a visualisation as I move… so why not use a wii or some sorts to implement the motion sensor. This link allows people to paint using the sensors within a wii! so why not try it with this…
Cool holograms feat. Beardyman!
