Sk-etchbook

I received this from Google Apps. Great move is all I can say, I like many developers have dropped support for IE6. It can add a ridiculous amount of time to projects just because a few people don't know how to or are scared of updating. It's not complicated to click on a button and make people move with the times.

Evolve or be fossilized...

Dear Google Apps admin,​

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 ​as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team

This popped up at the top of a search listings the other day.

http://www.google.com/explanation.html

This got me thinking. In a society of free speech and via a medium which is difficult, nigh impossible to moderate what kind of filtering is actually going on in search results? I image specific words are filtered out for the purpose of safe searches but filtering of obnoxious and offensive opinions can not be simple.

Furthermore should it be done? In a developed society surely all are entitled to their opinions. It would be the responsibility of the offender to justify his stance point yet to refrain from persisting to the point of forcing their unwelcome views on others. The offended then should equally respect the offenders view and not take offence. Rather it is the offendeds responsibility to offer their contrasting opinions and justify them. Disagreement is likely but should be respected.

Total comprehension and through understanding of any situation or element requires complete information. Positive, negative, objective and subjective.

There is a limit of course when these views are acted upon where it does become immoral, turns to bullying and can degrade the quality lives however this is not the topic here.

To me, offensive opinions are not offensive. They are mealy the results of the individuals life experiences and the influence of their exterior. A mind ravaged with hate and anger is the worse prison of all. There are no bars, no doors and no windows. You remain trapped for as long as they exist.

Would it not then be the right thing to help these people escape their prisons. Censorship and condemnation has no positive returns.

The manifestation of conciousness at a sentient level is a truly miraculous thing. We all possess the ability to manage, construct and reconstruct our own realities, our personalities and perceptions can be moulded. The only way to overcome the negative aspects of our own psyches to to question our beliefs. Questions which sometimes need to be offered others.

Negative, spiteful opinions towards generalised groups or stereotypes, even ones based on our own experiences or "what we have been told" are nothing more than childhood monsters.

What may initially appear to be a hideous, evil and scary monster lurking in the darkened corner of your room turns out to be nothing more than teddy bear once viewed in the light.

Freaky little article here on Wired. Looks like in the future technology really will be getting under your skin.

Adobe recently announced that Flash CS5 will support the creation of iPhone applications.

Read more on this fromAdobe News or Labs.

Is this a good thing or will it create a flood of badly designed badly thought out, generally bad apps?

The iPhone experienced phenomenal success however, now the other communications companies are coming out with their own versions (copycats!) they do need to be evolve in some manner.

Is opening up the platform the best approach, will this lead to a greater amount of good quality, useful or entertaining apps. Are Apple hoping to generate a new interest in the iPhone and cling to their market share or are they ahead of the game, do they have something better up their sleeves.

It seems a logical move anyway whatever their motives. Be it to maintain market position or just that there's no longer any benefit to restricting the development environment.

The one thing I am sure of is that the overnight iPhone app millionaires are a thing of the past, well, at least to the same degree. I'm sure as with anything there is always the potential to make money however with a growing number of handhold platforms and easier ways to develop for them the competition has never been so tough.

I imagine Apple will need to take a look at the way apps are sold in iTunes if the number does grow exponentially. Just look at Youtube, a vast amount of media which is made useful because of the effective and intuitive search functionality. To date iPhone app search functionality is not the greatest.

Until recently I belonged firmly to the camp of believers disillusioned that mobile phones could simply be targeted like so:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="handheld" href="styles.css">

Unfortunately this may have been true at one point, prior to the advent of smart phones, specifically iPhones. It seems as though the death of the handheld style sheet was forecast even before these little beauties hit the shelves. As far back as 2007 the matter is discussed here on Green Beast and also, giving more weight to CSS3 and Opera Mini here on Russel Beattie and Unintentionally Blank.

The issue has arisen due to the fact that the new smart phones aim to give users the full browsing experience. So no need for limiting the amount of images or layouts used, no need for a handheld style sheet.

Or is there?

Just because you can doesn't mean you should. The user may still have limited bandwidth or not gain anything from seeing scaled down versions of your pretty images. They may even have the browser set to mobile browsing.

So whats' the answer?

As usual, no sooner then one source is pronouncing the death another is declaring the return. There is a very good article here on A List Apart covering this very subject.

Hence the solution is yet again down to common sense. What is the site in question like, is it graphically rich, layout or Flash dependent. If so then it may be beneficial to offer a handheld style sheet for non-smart phones and devices or smart phones browsing in mobile-web mode.

However, problem not solved. Mobile browsers still aren't as fast at rendering as desktop versions, the user could be using 3G or using low bandwidth Wi-Fi. You may just think that zooming in on sections of your page destroys the aesthetics anyway so there is no point on serving up full screen versions to tiny little screens.

If this is the case then handheld style sheets are useless. iPhones and other smart phones ignore them.

Therefore, to target these devices you need to use CSS3 media queries.

The solution given on Code Cookbook is:

<!--[if !IE]>
<link media="only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)"
    href="iPhone.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" />
<![endif]-->

However there are a few comments saying this technique does not work so you may want to try Googling it for yourself. Here is another article to start you off.

I've just been writing a bio and this entertained me so I thought I would share.

What kind of world were you born into. What events, music, trends or fashions have played a part in shaping the person you are?

I was born in 1982, I've just been having a look at what was in the charts that year and they were some reet choons indeed! Funny thing is most of them are still reasonably well known and the majority of the number 1's spent 3-7 weeks at the top. I seriously doubt as much of the chart music out at the moment will be remembered twenty seven years down the road.

www.number-ones.co.uk

www.chartmagic.co.uk

According to these web sites my unholy arrival was accompanied by a bit of reggae from Musical Youth with their 'Pass the Dutchie' number closely followed by Culture Club's 'Do You Really Want to Hurt Me'.

Check out these videos...

I just stumbled accross this product. Ring and bracelet watches using e-paper. It still seems pretty cutting edge yet they have been out since 2007. Maybe t-shirts with downloadable designs are closer than we think.

Original article on Popgadget

More Info at www.seikowatches.com

I was in London a few weeks back and a friend was talking about this restaurant with interactive menus projecting the dishes onto the tables. He said you could also interact further by placing orders via the interface and viewing webcams which were set up in different areas of the kitchen.

It stuck in my mind as Dally did a presentation last year about a similar concept. Check out the videos on the website, might just have to try it out for myself next time I'm in town.

Inamo
C4 Technology & Restaurants

The European Future Technologies Conference and Exhibition is a new European forum dedicated to frontier research in future and emerging information technologies. More than 700 scientists, policy-makers, industry representatives and science journalists convened over 3 days to discuss today's frontier science, tomorrow's technologies and the impact of both on tomorrow's society.

Science Beyond Fiction

A while ago I started studying Philosophy of Mind, one of the sub categories being artificial intelligence.

Brains and computers function in very different ways yet there are now many parellels drawn between the size/power of the intenet and the human brain. I'm not going to go into too much detail about this now, or throw in my own oppinions however for those who are interested here is some material to get you walmed up for the debate.




Guardian - Does the internet's processing power rival the brain's?


Journal of Evolution & Technology

Present Computing Technology
Times Article about ASCI Purple

IBM Road Runner Super Computer #1
Top 500 Supercomputers

Analogue Computing

Developing Technologies
Quantum Computing
DNA Computing

Recently I've been thinking more about navigation and how to make it more of a user friendly and natural experience rather than just button pushing. This also got me thinking about how we perceive and interact with our regular surroundings, how technology could be effectively used to manipulate and interact with a digitally enhanced location.

Wearable Metadata
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/03/wearable_metadata.html

Bluetooth Proximity Detection
http://web.mac.com/jhollington/technocrat/The_Technocrat/Entries/2007/3/18_Bluetooth_Proximity_Detection_on_OS_X.html

Sixth Sense - Gestural Interface
http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense/index.htm

http://www.robotcub.org/

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1150446/Meet-iCub--robot-moves-learns-like-child.html

Thing and Delicious actually. These are a couple of sites/apps I've been recently introduced to. Things is a To Do list app, it's good but not decided if it's a worthwhile expense as it doesn't do that much more than most To Do or list type things ie. iCal. It does have better methods for sorting and organizing your tasks, you can arrange by date, projects etc. but it costs about £30 plus another £5 for the iPhone version. I'm also not sure if I want a completely separate app just as a To Do list, something incorporating a calendar would be better or maybe some kind of project management app would be more suitable. Mind you I'll probably just ignore it what ever it is!
Delicious has to be my preferred new toy. This is an online bookmarking site. Store and organize all you bookmarks then access them from anywhere. This is perfect for me as I work on 2 different computers at home and on the college machines and I have hundreds of bookmarks! I've only managed to transfer a fraction of my bookmarks as I'm rearranging them as I go but when I'm done I'm sure it will be a timesaver.

The site below is also worth a quick ganders, just a listing of useful apps.
http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/25Tools/

This was an Apple commercial featuring Paul McCartney. Think I found it when we started the animation brief. I was impressed by the style, not sure if this effect is retroscoping or not tho. I also like the soft almost comforting properties of the pastel colours which have a good contrast with the black central figure in the video.


Came across this when I was researching for the Digital Cultures brief. I wanted to stylize the design to mimic 50's palio paleofuture designs. Really liked this picture on a personal level because it seems to capture many of the elements I wanted to reproduce. On a bit of a tangent I also got tied up researching all sorts of future technologies during this brief, very interesting stuff and it's amazing what we can already do but many of these creations are prevented from going mainstream due to cost/funding issues.

http://www.privateislandsblog.com/2007/11/19/eco-islands-of-the-near-future/





As for these lot. I've had the Starry Starry night on my computer for a while and cannot remember why now? The reproduction, although the general idea is nothing new I still like the choice of adding the robot from Forbidden Planet. Well clashed!
As for the Room at Arles. This just looks like the room I'm staying in at the moment so I thought I'd add it.

Over the past few weeks I have been getting an advertisement for Leedscast via bluetooth when passing through the train station. The advertisement gave little away apart from saying it will be a guide to Leeds on your mobile. This in now live and yesterday I received the working application, I have to say I'm impressed.
It is been promoted as the worlds first fully interactive city guide. The layout & design is really user friendly, the content is a perfect balance of useful information without been too text heavy and gives the user details of where to find out more. Although I'm not a tourist I think this is great, entertainment & events listings, restaurants, places of interest, taxi numbers, discounts etc. all in one place on your mobile! Even the photographic content is well composed and elegant.
Top marks for innovation & design...

http://www.leedsliveitloveit.com/Visitors/News/NewsArticle/tabid/424/ItemId/1557/Details/Default.aspx

http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/18836/

After hours of debating with call centre staff virgin media finally delivered my TV box today (only 3 weeks after placing the original order). This is relevant because I had to go with virgin at my new house or pay for a new phone line & TV Ariel however while looking for the best deal I saw some companies are now providing wireless access without the home installation (http://www.mynow.co.uk) and while chatting with a friend he said he gets broadband from T-mobile, they provide a usb dongle and you just plug this in to your laptop/desktop to get broadband!!!

The internet is truly becoming a net, everything is connecting. Will all future technologies be connected and synchronized wirelessly? The possibilities are inspiring but also a little frightening.

Here is my final piece produced for the 2020 brief. Overall I am happy with the image, there is definitely room for improvement however I feel I have managed to impersonate the 1950's style and communicate the purpose adequately. Admittedly the message could be a little clearer but as this is an ad for the future we have to take into account that 12 years from now the public will have a different knowledge base so they will be more familiar with the relevant technologies. I ended up leaving the image as it was instead of applying effects to reproduce the poster print style. I did experiment with several filters, effects, brushes & adjustments but I preferred the image as it was originally, plus as it was an advert for vision the clarity of the vista image acts a relevant signifier. My major crit of this project was time management, I was in Barcelona for a week then had to find a new house and move all in the fortnight before the deadline. Although some things were beyond my control in future projects I am going to try do as much work as I can earlier on and leave myself time for contingencies.

Just Imagine (1930) film (insta babies clip)


Man and the Moon Filmstrip


Power Macintosh - Jet Pack (1994)

So I chose to do my piece on cybernetic upgrades. Now at first I thought this sounded very far-fetched but after researching the issue and discovering what was already possible it started to sound more viable. The main issue at the moment seems to be peoples opinions about how unnatural it sounds and the general paranoia involved with any technologies the conspiracy nuts could accuse of being government spying/mind control devices. There are also numerous films which warn of a future where humans have been enslaved by robotic forces, another issue which doesn't help promote the idea of replacing bits of yourself with machines however societies do evolve. What seems incredible today will become everyday in the future, at first cybernetics will have medical benefits but then there will be people who will be happy to pay enormous amounts to gain superhuman abilities. Once the first few hop onboard the normalization process will begin, the price will lower and the ever fearful general public will become less freaked out by the idea, undoubtedly there will continue to be sceptics but this remains true for most things.

So why is this relevant? Digital media can be applied to a plethora of mediums at the moment but with the evolution of technologies like this where people could be capable of full spectrum vision, night vision, tele/microscopic vision or even live streaming internet TV and 3D environments the possibilities are endless. Advertisements could be heat or sound rather than visual, microscopic commercials could be on the rim of a wine glass or web popup in full 3D colour which would appear to surround and interact with the end user... I could rant on with many more possibilities but so sum up, in my opinion any technology like this will most definitely be relevant to any future digital designer!