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Thursday, March 6, 2008

iPhone Getting Multitouch Games, Including Spore, Super Monkey Ball

Want to Add to Chis's Post:
iphonespore.jpgI've got good news and better news. The good news is that the iPhone is getting multitouch games that use the accelerometer and every bell and whistle of the iPhone for controls. The better news? Developers such as EA and Sega are on board. EA is bringing the insanely anticipated game Spore to it. All 18 levels. Yes, this is real. Oh mercy. Sega is also bringing Super Monkey Ball, and the App Store looks like it'll have a bunch of casual games available as well. Does this bring the iPhone up to DS and PSP levels? We'll have to see just how these games look and play, but it's pretty exciting stuff.
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22 Arcade Machines + 1 House = Awesome Party


Interview with Brian Saur who currently hosts huge gaming parties from his own home for Los Angeles gamers.

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Live Transcript for Apple Enterprise and new SDK developments

Steve: We're really excited to share great news with you about the iPhone software roadmap. A few stats in the first 8 months:

28% share, second only to RIM.

That's of the smartphone market

And mobile browser usage: Safari has 71% of the US mobile browser usage.

Let's get on with what we have to talk about today.

Phil Schiller and Scott Forstall will talk mostly today.

Schiller here to talk about Enterprise.

Schiller:

From the beginning, we've had some great customers wanting to use the iPhone in the enterprise. Like Genentech. They have thousands of iPhones in the company.
And it's not just business. Universities as well. Stanford University, hundreds of iPhones deployed.

There are a lot of things that Enterprise customers have told us are holding it back from the next level. First — push email integration. Directly from servers. Push calendar integration.

Directly from servers. Push calendar integration. Push contacts. Global address lists. Cisco IPsec VPN. Certificates 802.1X. Enforced security policies. Device configuration. Remote wipe. That's the long list of features that enterprise customers have asked for.
We are doing all of these things in the next release of the iPhone software.

They don't just ask for push email and calendaring, they've asked for Exchange support in the phone. We've licensed ActiveSync, and will build it into the iPhone. There's an older way to do this.

(Running through a schematic on how RIM does it.)

MSFT has built a way where the iPhone can work directly with the Exchange server using ActiveSync. We're building support right into the iPhone. Email, Calendar, Contacts, Addresses, Remote Wipe.

All of them will be built into the apps as they run on the phone now.The mail, calendar, contacts apps will talk to Exchange. Built into the phone.

Demo Time!

Showing a phone that's not set up in any way.

Under settings, there's a way to manage your exchange accounts.

Now demoing how quick things push back and forth to the Exchange server.

Really is super fast updating.

10:15 am

Full Exchange integration. calendar does meetings using the server...

All the push happens within seconds.

We've been working hard on this, and we've started to test onsite with some companies.

Nike has been testing the iPhone with Exchange.

Also, testing with Disney.

These are the features that enterprise customers have asked for, and I think when we release them, I think people will be blown away. That's the news today on the Enterprise.

Here's Scott Forstall to talk about the SDK.

Forstall: I'm here to tell you how developers can build great applications for the iPhone.
Before we talk about native, let's talk about webapps. Over 1000 available.

There's a lot of great web apps.

First, Facebook. It's dynamic, it's interactive.

Next, Bank of America. Largest bank in US. Industry leader in mobile banking. Let's users bank right from the iPhone. iPhone is the most popular device on their site — 25% of all mobile banking for BofA.

Next release — more features to make them better. But today, want to talk about the native SDK. Starting today, opening up the same API and tools we use to build iPhone apps.

There are a lot of pieces to an SDK. But the APIs are the most important. Cocoa is based on mouse and keyboard for the Mac. CocoaTouch is our UI framework for the iPhone.

There are four layers for the iPhone OS. Core OS, Core Services, Media, and CocoaTouch.

The Core OS is the same kernel as on the Mac. The networking layer is the same on Mac OS X. Power management — the core OS handles it automatically. Core Services: Address Book — your app can talk to it.

SQLite is included.

Core Location — location aware apps included. Media Layer: Core Audio, low level API on Mac OS X, same on iPhone.

OpenAL, 3D audio rendering on the phone
Video playback, H.264. Core Animation — easily create layered animations — almost every animation you see on the phone, is built on Core Animation. Media layer is all hardware accelerated.

CocoaTouch: Multi touch evens, and controls, accelerometer.

Web view — the Safari engine can be imbedded in an application. We think we're years ahead of any other platform for mobile devices. Comprehensive set of tools. Xcode — our dev environment. Enhanced to support the iPhone.

Xcode knows the API in the SDK.

So it code completes.

Xcode will do remote debugging for the iPhone.

Next tool: interface builder.

GUI interface design. Can do it in drag and drop. Have a library of UI controls and drag them into your canvas. Can connect UI to code from within Interface builder.

Next: Instruments. Our suite of performance analysis tools. Does it remotely to the Mac.

These three tools we've had running on OS X. We've enhanced each for the iPhone.

New tool: iPhone simulator. Simulates the entire API stack of the phone on a Macintosh.

Connects up with Xcode.

Here's a demo.

(Programming demo, yo!)

Building "Hello World" in Xcode.

We challenged ourselves to do write an application in two days. We call it touch FX. Fun with photos and touch.

10:40 am:

Mess around with photos, showing how APIs interact with apps.

So, then, what could we do in two weeks?

We wrote a game, Touch Fighter. Open GL game for graphics, Open AL for Audio. Steer with accelerometer, shoot by touching.

That's what we could do in two weeks.

10:45 am:

I don't want you to take my word. A few weeks ago, we called up some companies to see what their engineers could do in two week with an SDK they'd never seen before.

I've asked the engineers to talk about their applications. First, EA.
Travis Boatman to talk about it.

Did a version of Spore.

Touch screen editing of the spore. Control with accelerometer.

Took us two days to get CocoaTouch running, and then could import the whole game. We have the whole thing up. Also, cutscenes with video.

Really looks great.

Two weeks of work.

Next, salesforce.com. World leader of CRM services. Chuck Dietrich to talk about what they did in two weeks.

10:50 am

Mark McClusky: These look nice, but wow, it's kinda dull. CRM isn't exciting.

Only one developer. Built a lot of stuff. Looks nice. Next, AOL. Here comes an AIM demo, one would guess. Rizwan Sattar up to demo.

Sattar:

We're so excited to show you what we've done in two weeks. AIM for iPhone.

10:55 am:

First time we sent a live AIM on the device, we felt like it was a "Come here Watson" moment. Swap through active chats by swiping.

Really, really nicely done.We're do excited to see what we can do with more time. Next: Epocraties. One in four doctors use it in the US. one in four doctors use it in the US.
Clinical reference applications.

11:00 am

(Again, this is a guy who's really geeked out about the phone and developing for it, but it's kinda niche.)

Last: Sega Ethan Einhorn to show us what they did in two weeks.

It's Super Monkey Ball. This shit is bananas.

Einhorn:

Controlled with tilt. This feels like it was the way that the game was meant to be played.
I'm a console developer. We've been used to create the kind of game we're used to making. We totally underestimated what the phone could do.

The next question: How do you get them on your phone. Back to Steve for that.

Steve: If you've a developer, your dream is to get your app in front of every iPhone user.
We're going to solve that problem.

The App Store. An application we've written to deliver applications to the iPhone.
It will be installed on the iPhone.

Looks like the music store. Can sort by categories as well.

11:05 am

Top 50 lists. Search Wireless download to the phone. Using cell or WiFi. Also, a section in iTunes where you can look for them, and then sideload onto the phone as well.
If you've downloaded an app, the App Store will tell you if there are updates available.

App Store: Exclusive way to distribute applications. But what's the business deal?
Developer picks price. Dev gets 70%. We keep 30%. No credit card fees or hosting fees.
No marketing fees.70%, paid monthly. No charge for distrobution for free apps. We'll pay for everything.

Limitations? Yes. No porn, illegal, malicious apps.

(No porn???? Come on!!!)

So, we've talked about enterprise and SDK. How we gonna deliver. Both are going to be in iPhone 2.0 software update. Beta release today.

Beta release today. Thousands of developers and hundreds of companies will get it. Shipping in late June. Free software update. (Free? They must have read the March issue of Wired!)

11:10 am

In just a few months, every iPhone user will have everything you saw today for free.

It's not just the iPhone. the same software will run on the Touch. Enterprise will be there, SDK will be there. There will be a nominal charge for the Touch update, because we account for them differently. We think a lot of folks will want to become an iPhone developer. D/L SDK for free from our site. Develop on your Mac.

Join iPhone dev program to run code on the phone. $99 to join the dev program.

developer.apple.com. We hope you're as excited about it as we are. So thank you very much for coming today.

But there's one more thing...

The premier VC firm in the world is Kleiner Perkins, here's John Doerr.

Doerr: I'm here because we love apple products, and because I love apple entrepreneurs.

(Telling us how wonderful Jobs is.)

On this day, join me in a salute to the world's greatest entrepreneur, Steve Jobs.

(Seriously?)

11:15 am

Today, we're announcing the iFund for the iPhone platform. 100 million bucks.

"The iPhone is bigger than the personal computer." Matt Murphy will lead the fund.

There's never been a better time to create a new company for a revolutionary new platform like the iPhone.

(Wrapping up, but asked the press to day here for just a few more minutes.)

Special Q&A With Jobs and Co.

Q: What does the 100 million do for the community?

Steve: I think that KP thinks that there are ways to build businesses. We love that these guys can get funded. I think it helps the whole ecosystem.

Q: Do you think RIM should be worried?

Steve: You could ask them. We're not sending them a message. We're sending customers a message.
Phil: We're trying to listen to them and make a great product.

Steve: This stuff will ship right around the one year anniversary. We've been moving really fast.

Q: Safeguards for security?

Steve: This is a big concern. It's a dangerous world. We've tried to strike a good path — on one side, you have a closed device like the iPod which always works. On the other side, you've got a Windows PC, where it takes time to make it usable. We want to strike a balance. Developers have to register with us. They get a certificate. We can track them fi they write a malicious app. If we're alerted to something, we can turn it off at the app store. We're putting control into place. We put a lot of thought into this.

Scott: We're putting things into place, sandboxing,

Q: VOIP application?

Steve: We will only limit VOIP applications over the cell net, but you can use them on Wi-FI.

Q: Can people choose multiple sync methods for the phone? Exchange and iCal as well?

Phil: Yes.

Scott: One exchange account at once, but other accounts as well.

Q: What if a dev doesn't want to distribute through store?

Steve: They won't be able to get them on the phone, then.

Scott: Web apps still supported.

Steve: We don't intend to make that much money on the app store.

Q: Will SIM or carrier unlock software be allowed in the store?

Steve: Yes, that won't be allowed.

Q: Cost for Touch?

Steve: iPhone revenue is over two years. With Touch, we take it at once. So we do have to take a nominal fee. we dn't look at this as a profit opportunity.

Q: IT ease of use?

Phil: Exchange and active sync, they know how to use it. Less servers to manage. Tools for IT that let them configure those devices. Email or secure website to manage profiles.

Exchange, VPN, PIN codes, certificates. All managed by IT. Know it's your phone. All configures. At the heart, it's a single profile.

Steve: Blackberry gets really slow when the NOC gets down. Every email sent goes through a NOC in canada. That's a security situation too. No one seems to be focused on that. International rollout. This is not an open source project.

Q: How would internal apps be distributed?

Phil: Working on a model for enterprise, just to their end users.

Q: Will IT be able to disable functions on the phone?

Scott: Parental controls are in there. could be used in that way.

Q: What made you change your mind? How will apps be managed in the store?

Steve: We all at apple change our minds a lot. I think the web apps have worked well, but the devs wanted to do even more. To create an SDK is a lot of work — you want to live with it for 20 years. We've created an elegant, pristine API. Apps have usually been through the carrier.
Steve: We have great relationships with our carriers. We're responsible for the software on the phone.

Q: Do you have plans to let developers interface with dock connectors

Scott: Not in 2.0

Steve: Thank you very much for joining us today.

(Release the hounds?)

Software helps soldiers





Baghdad route planner: A new map-based application allows patrol leaders in Iraq to learn about city landmarks and past events and enter new data. In this mock-up provided by DARPA (the map does not reflect actual events), the purple line shows a possible Baghdad patrol route. Past events in a 300-meter buffer are noted. Hostile actions, such as IED attacks or shootings, appear as various red icons; friendly actions, such as visits to schools, appear as blue icons. Clicking the icons brings up text, photos, even videos.
Credit: Courtesy of DARPA

First Lieutenant Brian Slaughter wanted his comrades to learn from the insurgent attack that could have killed him on May 21, 2004. Before dawn, the 30-year-old had been leading 12 men in three armored Humvees along a canal in Baghdad's al-Dora district when a massive blast from an improvised explosive device (IED) lifted his vehicle off the ground. Concealed attackers followed with a volley of rocket-propelled grenades and machine-gun fire. But the IED had been buried too deep to kill, a second IED detonated too early to hit the patrol, and a third failed to explode. When the brief battle ended, two insurgents were dead, and ten were prisoners. On the American side, one man had been injured, with a bullet to the leg.

Slaughter knew that information about the encounter could help his fellow soldiers--especially green replacements arriving from Fort Stewart, GA--avoid getting killed or maimed. It might help them capture insurgents, too. So when dawn broke, he explored the blast site with a digital camera. He took pictures of the mound of brown earth concealing the still-unexploded second IED, and of a red-and-white detonator cord that led to the device. He took pictures of a berm and a copse of palm trees that had concealed the enemy. He took pictures of the improvised weapon: a 155-­millimeter artillery shell that had been drilled out and fitted with a fuse.

But his attempts to share the information ran into a technological roadblock. Back at Camp Falcon, a facility on the southern outskirts of Baghdad that's one of a handful of so-called forward operating bases around the city, he typed up a document in Microsoft Word and appended his photos. The report went to a battalion intelligence officer swamped by two or three dozen such reports daily. The intelligence officer's summaries went into a database called ASAS-L. A product of Cold War thinking, the database allows top commanders to monitor and coördinate troop movements--but it's not easily accessible to patrol leaders like Slaughter.

So for practical purposes, his report didn't exist. Even the version that stayed on his computer at Camp Falcon eventually vanished. "It went home with my unit. There was no server. No continuity. Nothing," he says. The pictures survive­--on his laptop in Nashville, TN. He showed them to me, along with lots of other pictures that might have had some value to his fellow soldiers, including one of the smiling principal of a girls' school in Baghdad and one of an Iraqi translator--later killed, Slaughter says--interviewing someone who Slaughter says was believed to be an imam with ties to al-Qaeda in Iraq.

But the days of patrol leaders operating half-blind on the deadly streets of Iraq are drawing to a close. After a two-year rush program by the Pentagon's research arm, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, troops are now getting what might be described as Google Maps for the Iraq counterinsurgency. There is nothing cutting-edge about the underlying technology: software that runs on PCs and taps multiple distributed databases. But the trove of information the system delivers is of central importance in the daily lives of soldiers.

The new technology--called the Tactical Ground Reporting System, or TIGR--is a map-centric application that junior officers (the young sergeants and lieutenants who command patrols) can study before going on patrol and add to upon returning. By clicking on icons and lists, they can see the locations of key buildings, like mosques, schools, and hospitals, and retrieve information such as location data on past attacks, geotagged photos of houses and other buildings (taken with cameras equipped with Global Positioning System technology), and photos of suspected insurgents and neighborhood leaders. They can even listen to civilian interviews and watch videos of past maneuvers. It is just the kind of information that soldiers need to learn about Iraq and its perils.


Rest of story here

Microsoft Photosynth




You are here: Photosynth, an application in development at Microsoft’s Live Labs, offers an immersive way to view photos of a given thing or place. The software has not yet been released, but Microsoft is demonstrating it online with photo collections such as this one of Venice’s St. Mark’s Square.
Credit: Courtesy of Microsoft Live Labs
Multimedia
View images from Photosynth and see how it works.
Watch Photosynth stitch photos together.

At last March's Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference in Monterey, CA, a summit that's been described as "Davos for the digerati," the calm-voiced software architect from Microsoft began his demonstration abruptly, navigating rapidly across a sea of images displayed on a large screen. Using Seadragon, a technology that enables smooth, speedy exploration of large sets of text and image data, he dove effortlessly into a 300-megapixel map, zooming in to reveal a date stamp from the Library of Congress in one corner. Then he turned to an image that looked like a bar code but was actually the complete text of Charles Dickens's Bleak House, zooming in until two crisp-edged typeset characters filled the screen, before breezily reverse-zooming back to the giant quilt of text and images.

Microsoft had acquired Seadragon the previous year--and with it the presenter, Blaise Agüera y Arcas. But Agüera y Arcas had not come to TED just to show off Seadragon. Soon he cut to a pano­rama tiled together from photos of the Canadian ­Rockies; the mosaic shifted as he panned across it, revealing a dramatic ridgeline. Next came an aerial view of what appeared to be a model of a ­familiar building: Notre Dame Cathedral. The model, Agüera y Arcas explained, had been assembled from hundreds of separate images gathered from Flickr. It was a "point cloud"--a set of points in three-dimensional space.

As he talked, Agüera y Arcas navigated teasingly around the periphery of Notre Dame, which repeatedly came alive and dimmed again. The effect of hurtling through shifting images and focal points was softened by subtle transitional effects. It felt like a deliberately slowed reel of frame-by-frame animation; the effect was jolting. The crowd watched in wonder as Agüera y Arcas pushed deeper into the front view of the building's archway, ending with a tight close-up of a gargoyle. Some of the images the technology had drawn on were not even strictly photographic: it had searched Flickr for all relevant images, including a poster of the cathedral. What Agüera y Arcas was demonstrating wasn't video, but neither was it merely a collection of photos, even a gargantuan one. It was also like a map, but an immersive one animated by the dream logic of blurring shapes and shifting perspectives.

This was Photosynth--a technology that analyzes related images and links them together to re-create physical environments in a dazzling virtual space. The technology creates a "metaverse," Agüera y Arcas said (for more on the nascent blending of mapping technolo­gies like Google Earth and the fantastic realms of games like Second Life, see "Second Earth," July/August 2007); but it also constitutes the "long tail" of Virtual Earth, Microsoft's competitor to Google Earth, because of its ability to draw from and contribute to the wealth of local mapping and image data available online. It could provide "immensely rich virtual models of every interesting part of the earth," he said, "collected not just from overhead flights and from satellite images and so on, but from the collective memory." At which point the presentation ended as abruptly as it had begun some six minutes earlier. Agüera y Arcas's concluding statement met with a thunder of applause.

Beyond Image Stitching
Photosynth was born from what Agüera y Arcas calls the marriage of Seadragon and Photo Tourism, a Microsoft project intended to revolutionize the way photo sets are packaged and displayed. Photo Tourism had begun as the doctoral thesis of a zealous 26-year-old University of Washington graduate student named Noah Snavely. One of Snavely's advisors was Rick ­Szeliski, a computer-vision researcher at Microsoft Research, the company's R&D arm. "I described the need for the good elements of a strong slide show, like great composition," recalls Szeliski, whose earlier work at Microsoft had helped develop the image-stitching technology now commonly used in digital cameras to fill a wider or taller frame. He also sought fluidity between images and a sense of inter­activity in viewing them.

Modern Floating Villa - Villa Nackros

Villa Nackros” was designed by Swedish architect, Staffan Strindberg, and is situated in the town of Kalmar on the east coast of Sweden. Villa Nackros offers a spacious, contemporary living environment that combines all the luxuries of the modern day home with the spatial freedom and unrivalled views that only waterfront living can provide. The 12×12 metre Villa has six rooms and a kitchen, a total of 178 m² of living area, 125 m² of terrace and 74 m² of windows but is crammed with technologies to enhance your lifestyle and create an ambience of tranquillity and harmony with nature. Nackros Villa sits securely and stably in the water with its 165 ton constructed weight and is impervious to wind, waves and winter ice. In conclusion a floating home like this is great. Just image yourself right now …waking up and taking a morning swim or just sitting on your floating home deck sipping a glass of wine while the sun sets on the water.

Villa NackrosVilla Nackros Boat.Villa Nackros Night ViewVilla Nackros Interior ViewVilla Nackros InteriorVilla Nackros Floatingfloating villaHouse Plan

Via - Arkinetia ( Spanish )

Get paid $500 for your next job interview. Honestly

New site really pays you to interview, you set your own price

read more | digg story

Ultimate Celebrity in Aviary

phoenix
By Avi Muchnick on March 05, 2008 |


We've been getting a ton of press at Worth1000 over our Ultimate Celebrity contest, where the goal is to take the best physical features of multiple celebrities and merge them into one super celebrity. One of the requests we got from a prominent newspaper was to prove that Aviary (a web app) could really be used to create an ultimate celebrity. Piece of cake.

This time around Aviary's resident plastic surgeon Meowza performs illegal skin grafts on Catherine Zeta-Jones, Keira Knightly, Angelina Jolie and Charlize Theron, creating the beautiful Catheinize Zightly-Jeliens. I hope his malpractice insurance is paid up.

<a href='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TrzN0P8nzM' class='author' target='_blank' rel='nofollow'><b>flash video</b></a>




View the sources and full layered file

This work made heavy use of painting, blending and layering effects.

Sources:





Kudos to INXS for providing the beautiful accompaniment!

Standard disclaimer: For those of you new to this blog, this was not created in Photoshop. It was created in Aviary, a suite of online web applications. You can sign up for the current beta at http://a.viary.com.

Robert Downey Jr. to Play Black Man in Satire


In the film, which takes aim at the egos of big Hollywood actors (like the three pictured), Downey plays Kirk Lazarus, an Oscar caliber actor who ends up with a part that was originally written for a black man. Instead of recasting, Lazarus decides to dye his skin to play the character of Osiris, well, authentically.

read more | digg story

Lightway- Revolutionary Lighting System 4

Lightway- Futuristic Lighting System
Lightway is a recently launched window and lighting system which permits sun rays to enter the house in the daytime and after dusk it will fill the house with light. Based on Breezeway, this innovative technology uses the latest OLED’s (Organic Light Emitting Diodes) and transparent Photovoltaic Nanoscale technology which allows the lightway to become special.

Lightway is first of its kind in the world which assimilates the necessary solar energy during the daytime and then using its inner devices it enlightens the area (for instance, house or streets) during the nights. Portability is one of the attractive features attached to this technology followed by cutting the electricity expenses for households and if used in streets and shopping centers by a whooping 22%. Thus, these features make Lightway eco-friendly as well.

Lightway - Collects solar energy

Honored by Australian Design Award, Lightway is a concept combining two advanced technologies and using it in the simplest way to make a useful product. On its way to make a revolution, Lightway can be widely used in homes, streets, shopping arcades, museums, art galleries etc. Operating Lightway is very easy you can simply rotate the louver handle for opening and closing the system. The system also meets Australian Standards in terms both of construction and voltage, remaining below the high risk 32v category.

Lightway can be widely used in homes, streets, shopping arcades, museums, art galleries

User friendly design interface of Lightway is safe to use and is bright in colors as well. The art and graphics used on the application enlightens it to look attractive. Functional-wise, Lightway is exclusive which is capable enough to produce 60wt of lights by intaking just 50 wt in comparison.

Lightway- Concept Power Saving Technology

Lightway product is sold in the markets by Breezeway in a display style where users can come and choose the product as per their requirement and then order them as specified.
We can conclude that this proven conceptualized product is sure to make a revolution in the market.

Designer : Mr Damian Savio