Tuesday: November 24, 2009
Five materials that will make the world as we know it obsolete.Researchers say metamaterials could eventually be used to divert matter the same way the invisibility cloak redirects light waves (feel free to read researcher Shuang Zhang's paper on the matter). At that point pretty much anybody who wears it is a wizard.
Tuesday: December 18, 2012
Why Google's GMail outage may be a sign of things to come.The answer is that most of the coders behind today’s popular websites and services are deploying their code when it’s ready—not at some pre-determined point when downtime may not be noticed. It’s called continuous code deployment, or some variation on that theme, and everyone from Facebook and Netflix to smaller services do it. While it may occasionally cause a few blips, those blips should be shorter and less catastrophic.
Monday: November 21, 2011
Apple's new store at Grand Central Station may be opening in the very near future.9to5Mac has heard that Apple will officially announce the opening of the Grand Central Apple store this Tuesday and presumably pull the black boards to reveal the announcement. This store garners extra special attention because it will be Apple’s largest in the world by square footage and resides in a building where 750,000 people pass daily and over 1,000,000 people during the holidays.
Monday: November 14, 2011
Apple pulls the curtain back on iTunes 10.5.1 with iTunes Match.Unlike competing cloud storage music services from Amazon and Google, iTunes Match saves a lot of bandwidth and time in your initial synchronization, because Apple can identify which songs in your iTunes library are already available in the iTunes Store. If Apple can positively match a song in your library with any of the 20 million tracks for sale in the iTunes Store, it won’t bother uploading that song; only unmatched songs get uploaded to the cloud.
Wednesday: November 9, 2011
Bret Victor's not-so-brief rant on the future of interaction design.If you haven't seen Microsoft's video entailing what they think the future of technology holds, you should watch it (readily available on source URL as an embedded clip). So watch that video and then read Victor's thoughts on the matter. That being said, I do have a minor point of contention. I did get some hands-on time with a Kinect-enabled Xbox 360 this past weekend and it was a fun, dare I say, semi-magical experience. I highly reccomend Double Fine's Once Upon a Monster (even the demo is fun).
Adobe gives up on trying to get Flash to work on mobile devices.Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations.
Wednesday: August 3, 2011
Push Pop Press is the latest acquisition in Facebook's growing design talent roster.Mike Matas, one of the co-founders of Push Pop Press, is one of the designers behind some of the most familiar iPhone and iPad user interfaces that you've come to know and love. This kind of talent acquisition doesn't come along simply to tweak the look of an iPhone app. They must be working on something big. On a sadder note, Push Pop Press has announced that they have abandoned their planned publishing platform. However, their one offering is still available in the App Store - search for Al Gore's 'Our World'.
An interesting video showing off the impressive CGI used in Game of Thrones.Andy Gavin has written a post with a behind the scenes video from HBO's Game of Thrones depicting how most of the locations are built using modern CGI and clever scouting. If you've watched the show (and I highly recommend that you do) some of the per-CGI moments in the video may actually take you by surprise, once you see their post-CGI counterparts.
Monday: August 1, 2011
Turns out that coin tosses don't really provide fifty-fifty odds.As usual, it's humanity that messes things up. When flipped by a machine, coins come up heads a solid fifty percent of the time, and tails the other fifty percent. Put the fate of the coin in grubby human hands and the odds tip slightly in favor of the side that faces up just before the coin is flipped. The side that was face up at the beginning of the flip has a fifty-one percent chance of landing face-up at the end. Humans are not as precise as machines, and so the coin rotates around several axes instead of one.
Thursday: July 28, 2011
Fourteen hilarious photos of dog faces to brighten up your afternoon.I'm going to preface this link description with the following advisory message: if you have found that your afternoon is sufficiently bright enough already than by all means feel free to bookmark this link for later. Otherwise, if the brightness levels are not at the required level of preferred enjoyability then go ahead and view some dog-foolery with this collection of canine camera work. OMG, cupcake!
Monday: July 18, 2011
Final Harry Potter movie breaks box office records worldwide.Here in the states, Harry and friends (and enemies) took over the top spot from 'The Dark Knight' for best opening weekend. According to Box Office Mojo, the final Potter film took in $168.55 million. Christopher Nolan's second Batman grossed a robust $158.4 million when it opened in 2008. Around the world, the cumulative Potter numbers were even larger. The movie grossed about $307 million, outgrossing the previous world box office record holder, 'Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides,' by almost 20 percent.