Category Technology

Entries 43 Total Description

Tools and crafts used to manipulate and adapt to one’s environment.

Adobe and Flash vs. Apple, the iPad and HTML5

Oct 29, ’10 7:08 PM

So it would seem Apple is help­ing to win the battle for an open web based on HTML5.

Mefee­dia, a video search engine, is report­ing that “54% of web video is now avail­able for play­back in HTML5 (H.264 mostly)”. Up from 10% in January.

Mean­while Adobe has bit­ten the bul­let and is build­ing HTML5 export cap­ab­il­ity into Flash Pro, their Flash author­ing tool. And not a moment too soon.

Nack makes a per­tin­ent point about Adobe’s motives:

Flash is great for a lot of things … It’s not the only game in town, how­ever, and Adobe makes its money selling tools, not giv­ing away players.

Indeed indeed. And what they’ll be pissed about is that any­one can build HTML5 author­ing tools, which means they’re not the only game in town either. With Flash, Adobe is the only game in town and they were well on the way to com­pletely con­trolling rich con­tent on the web. Con­trol this and Flash Pro would have become a money tree for Adobe, degrad­ing the web in the process.

What does Apple have to gain from an open web and the demise of Flash? The same thing as every­body else, a level play­ing field.

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Apple’s attention to detail

Aug 26, ’10 7:13 PM

People often falsely assume I advoc­ate and use Apple products because I think they’re trendy or because I’m some kind of gad­get freak.

The truth is our world is awash with badly designed, badly craf­ted things. Apple is one of the few havens in a sea of people and organ­isa­tions that don’t give a fuck about the details. Atten­tion to detail is why I use Apple products:

In July 2002, Apple filed a pat­ent for a “Breath­ing Status LED Indic­ator” …They described it as a “blink­ing effect of the sleep-mode indic­ator in accord­ance with the present inven­tion mim­ics the rhythm of breath­ing which is psy­cho­lo­gic­ally appealing.”

The other day, I noticed that my friend’s Dell laptop had a sim­ilar fea­ture but with a shorter fade-in-fade-out period. Its rate was around 40 blinks per second, or the aver­age res­pir­at­ory rate for adults dur­ing strenu­ous exer­cise — not very indic­at­ive of some­thing in sleep-mode.

It’s inter­est­ing how a lot of com­pan­ies try to copy Apple but never seem to get it right. This is yet another example of Apple’s obsess­ive atten­tion to detail.

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Toxic legacy of US assault on Fallujah ‘worse than Hiroshima’

Aug 25, ’10 7:39 PM

Amer­ica, kick­ing ass:

Dra­matic increases in infant mor­tal­ity, can­cer and leuk­aemia in the Iraqi city of Fal­lu­jah, which was bom­barded by US Mar­ines in 2004, exceed those repor­ted by sur­viv­ors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Naga­saki in 1945, accord­ing to a new study.

Dr Busby says that while he can­not identify the type of arma­ments used by the Mar­ines, the extent of genetic dam­age suffered by inhab­it­ants sug­gests the use of uranium in some form. He said: “My guess is that they used a new weapon against build­ings to break through walls and kill those inside.”

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New website for iPhone photographers

Aug 2, ’10 7:56 PM

iPhon­ific. TUAW has the low-down:

The idea is that you shoot, edit and upload your pho­tos entirely with the iPhone.

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YummySoup 2 recipe management software

Jul 15, ’10 8:03 AM

HungrySeacow Soft­ware has just released ver­sion 2 of Yummy­Soup, my favour­ite recipe man­age­ment soft­ware for the Mac.

With this ver­sion they’ve intro­duced a weekly meal plan­ner and the abil­ity to eas­ily share recipes (sub­scribe to my favour­ite recipes).

They say they have an iPad and iPhone ver­sion in the works too.

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The new face of computing

Apr 1, ’10 7:06 AM

iPad guided tour videos.

The Key­note, Pages and Num­bers videos are par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing as these are full blown pro­ductiv­ity apps. Make no mis­take about it, this is a replace­ment for the soon to be old school of Mac OS, Win­dows and GNU/Linux. And not a moment too soon.

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Snake Oil? Scientific evidence for popular health supplements

Feb 25, ’10 1:55 PM

Great chart by Inform­a­tion is Beau­ti­ful:

It’s a “bal­loon race”. The higher a bubble, the greater the evid­ence for its effect­ive­ness. But the sup­ple­ments are only effect­ive for the con­di­tions lis­ted inside the bubble. You might also see mul­tiple bubbles for cer­tain sup­ple­ments. These is because some sup­ple­ments affect a range of con­di­tions, but the evid­ence qual­ity var­ies from con­di­tion to con­di­tion. For example, there’s strong evid­ence that Green Tea is good for cho­les­terol levels. But evid­ence for its anti-cancer effects is conflicting.

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Bloom Energy

Feb 23, ’10 1:33 PM

A com­pany called Bloom Energy and foun­ded by K.R. Srid­har is set to launch a new energy device tomor­row that he says is a break­through in fuel cell tech­no­logy — namely mak­ing it afford­able (the Holy Grail of fuel cell research) and thus provid­ing a loc­al­ised and com­par­at­ively cleaner and cheaper form of elec­tri­city than that which we cur­rently get from the grid.

There was a seg­ment cov­er­ing the topic on CBS’s 60 minutes Sunday night, includ­ing an inter­view with K.R. Srid­har, which can watch online here.

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Impressive augmented reality coming to Bing Maps

Feb 15, ’10 12:16 PM

Demon­stra­tion by Blaise Aguera at TED of the impress­ive work they’ve been doing behind the scenes on Bing Maps. (click through for the video)

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How to confuse a Facebook user

Feb 12, ’10 7:39 AM

Read­WriteWeb, a pop­u­lar tech­no­logy web­site, has a page that ranks highly in Google’s search res­ults for “Face­book login”.

Check out the com­ments on the page. They’re filled with com­plaints from con­fused Face­book users who think that this is the new Face­book login page.

Quite clearly many people do not use book­marks, or simply type “facebook.com” in the address bar but instead they Google for what they’re after and click on the first res­ult assum­ing it is correct.

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