Monday: December 7, 2009
Five 2009 predicitions that widely missed the mark.A slew of nutty tech predictions that as the headline states, were just way off. Google is still quite strong, 2009 was certainly not the last year of the retail CD (thanks in part to The Beatles remasters), and no - we're not immortal yet.
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 14, 2011
Best Buy has the current generation Apple TV for $89 with free shipping.Posting this here because I've grown to love this product in the few short weeks I've had it. It's a great implementation for getting your Internet media as close to your television as you would need it. My kids love watching clips on YouTube and Vimeo so having that readily available in the living room is a big plus. Also, having the entire media contents of your Mac is just great as well. Bonus: using the Apple Remote app for any of the iDevices may make you want to chuck the included remote.
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.
Tuesday: July 12, 2011
Google would like you to know that they will easily pass ten million G+ users soon.My latest estimate tonight shows approximately 9.5 million users. This suggests that 2.2 million people have joined Google+ in the past 32-34 hours. I project that Google will easily pass 10 million users tomorrow and could reach 20 million user by this coming weekend if they keep the Invite Button available. As one G+ user put it, it is easy to underestimate the power of exponential growth.
Friday: July 8, 2011
Ten reasons why we hate Facebook as presented by puppet comedy duo Glove and Boots.And I now have a new favorite show on YouTube. My favorite part of this video probably has to be the gorilla shouting BLOG to start it all off (the origins of which can be traced back to their video called 'What is Blog?'). To view more of Glove and Boots follow along on their channel.
Wednesday: July 6, 2011
Facebook gets a healthy dose of Skype and adds a helping of group chat for good measure.Good news to those of you who spend all day on Facebook. You now have even more reason to hang out there thanks to the inclusion of video conference calling and group chats. Facebook bills this new feature as 'bringing conversations to life'. I think they would have better served had they gone with my way of marketing it as 'enhanced procrastination'.
Tuesday: May 18, 2010
Brand new computer algorithm actually capable of detecting sarcasm....the team scanned 66,000 Amazon.com product reviews, with three different human annotators tagging sentences for sarcasm. The team then identified certain sarcastic patterns that emerged in the reviews and created a classification algorithm that puts each statement into a sarcastic class.