A 9 year old boy's imagination runs wild.
Caine's Arcade from Nirvan Mullick.
The website for this and a worldwide project is here. The project goes from September until October 5th. Their goal this year is to engage 1 Million Kids in 70 Countries in Creative Play.
Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle from CUSEC.
Bret Victor invents tools that enable people to understand and create. He has designed experimental UI concepts at Apple, interactive data graphics for Al Gore, and musical instruments at Alesis.
This is an inspirational video. There are many good ideas and demonstrations in this video. At around 29:25, Bret shows the creation of an animation sequence both with Flash and an iPad app that shows some remarkable insights into a possible animation UI.
Bret's personal site is here.
Kahn Academy has opened a new section of the educational website to teach computer science here. It is reminiscent of the instructional approach of Seymour Paper's Logo language teaching from 1967. The key here is the use of generated animation to teach programming skills. The fact that Kahn Academy's system used JavaScript is brilliant in that the programming and display environment is available in any web browser.
As seen in a Mashable article here, the Japanese Ministry of Defense has invented a spherical flying machine. It is a beatiful concept.
As pointed to by a tweet from @brucesharpe, automatic modification of photographs has reached an awsome level as indicated by this:
From the Korea JoongAng Daily in association with the International Herald Tribune here comes an article about Korean film director Park Chan-wook who just won best short film in the Berlin International Film Festival for his 25 minute film "Night Fishing" which was shot on an iPhone.
The film's $136,363 budget was funded by KT, the exclusive iPhone service provider for Korea.
Kodak stopped making Kodachrome film last year. The last facility to process the film in the world will process the last roll today because they have run out of the chemicals. I would not know about this story except for a tweet by David Pogue here.
This was the film that recorded many moments of my family's life growing up. My father shot Kodachrome slides mostly with a Kodak 35mm camera and we spent many evenings looking at them being projected in a darkened room. He used Kodachrome all of his adult life. With my father's great skill at correctly guessing exposures it captured many fond memories. His camera did not have a light meter. He used his eye and many years of experience.
RIP Kodachrome.
In 2007 Hans Rosling appeared at TED and showed an amazing display of stats that were actually interesting. That video is here. Below is another, more beautiful example of a similar idea with higher production values.
The video is from a BBC show called "The Joy of Stats."
Don't tell David Hockney.
He has an exhibit of his iPad work at the Pierre Berge-Yves St. Laurent Foundation in Paris.
Shop Vac from Jarrett Heather.
For some interactive installations that most people might think require Flash, some people using Macs use Quartz Composer instead. The most sophisticated example I've ever seen is shown
. It has 10 40" touchscreens, each run by a 27" iMac. I've used Quartz Composer to create simple graphic composites but I've never seen anything like this.
Gruber here points to a fantastic Isarithmic* visualization by David B. Sparks here of how the national distribution of presidential Republican and Democratic votes shifted from 1920 to 2008. The video captures the transitions in a way that illustrates the power of well designed time based media and taught me something about our political history.
* Yeah, I had to look it up too, here.
From Bruce Sharpe here comes a link to an article on cnet here about HDR video. Soviet Montage Productions of San Francisco has found a way to combine video from two Canon 5D mark II's, one over exposed and one under exposed into HDR video. While we wait for true HDR imagers, maybe someone will rediscover the techniques used by Technicolor for film and older video cameras of using a prism to split an image to 3 imagers with different settings or simply use neutral density filters. Video with dynamic range that exceeds the human eye can't be far off.
Tom A. Warner shows us what lightning looks like when you slow it down an incredible amount.
From Gruber here is a mention of another product (this one is the ASUS Eee Pad) that is dropping Windows CE in favor of Android. Gruber points out that you can see the same graphic (minus robots) in Steve Ballmer's presentation slide here. A couple of thoughts:
1) there will be many iPad rivals
2) most of them will probably not use Windows
The new competition is between Apple and Google. We will see some astounding products come to market in the next few years. Almost as many will dissapear as this rapid evolution runs its course. The winner in this competition will be consumers no matter who captures the most hearts and minds.
Shawn Blanc here suggests that CSS is the new Photoshop and points to some great examples. I argue that CSS is not the new Photoshop. CSS and HTML5 and Javascript together form the new PostScript. What PostScript was for desktop publishing, CSS, HTML5, and Javascript are for the modern web page. What is missing is the new PageMaker.
Most people don't know much about PostScript except maybe that it was Adobe's first product. The founders of Adobe wrote this powerful graphic programming language to describe pages for printers. Their first customer was Apple. PostScript was used as the page description language for Apple's first laser printer. It enabled the desktop publishing revolution by becoming the lingua franca of printers and publishing systems. Very few people directly wrote PostScript. (I did, but that is another story.) It was usually generated by publishing applications like PageMaker or Quark. It was also generated by print drivers on Mac, Windows and Unix. In those days, mostly programmers who wrote printer drivers wrote PostScript code. The point here is that designers did their layout by drawing and moving objects on a screen, not by writing code.
CSS, HTML5, and Javascript combine to form the way to describe pages on modern browsers much like PostScript was the way to describe pages on printers. In some cases PostScript was even used to drive displays. Steve Jobs licensed Display PostScript from Adobe as the display language for the NeXT computer before he returned to Apple.
What is missing today is the modern day equivalent of Illustrator and PageMaker for CSS, HTML5 and Javascript. Designers and artists should not need to directly write code to express art or layout. I suspect that many are working in this area. Any day now, I'm hoping that someone or some company will start to release products that bridge this huge gap.
Part of the problem is how to make a tool that will have the universal appeal of a PageMaker or Illustrator. Those applications were massively popular because of how well they solved the problems of laying out a page and drawing in vectors. Given the broad and somewhat disjointed characteristics of CSS, HTML5, and Javascript, coming up with a UI to rule them all is a big opportunity for UI gurus. How to make the result efficient enough to be useful in a production environment represents a significant programming challenge.
Adobe is the most likely to succeed in this if they can figure out how to market such a thing without undercutting Flash. Apple may also do something here.
