News Hub
Bibliography System
MTV Music API Implementation
WML Creator And Wap Hosting
.. more coming soon ..
To see my full printable CV please visit www.pavlin.nl
From the most scenic locations and biggest events to shoot, to corner camera shops and rental houses, our photographer’s guide to Houston puts the legendary Texan city in focus.
Brendan“I made an iTunes icon for you” Alan Clarke
Iain “I am better than Steve Jobs because my icons have even more photoshop effects” Henderson
Kanwa “iTunes10 icon from JAPAN” Nagafuji
Mike “Steve Jobs is colorblind” Potra
Daniel “Steve Jobs has more money than me, but only because I refuse to wear mock turtlenecks” Reneer
EyeTunes (get it?) logo by reader who wanted to remain anonymous.
Dario” iRaptor” Fisher
Claes “vinylTunes 2.0” Kallarsson
Alessio “I am better than Steve Jobs — Not really” Zito Rossi
Chris“The Replacement” Carlossi
Is it just me or has there been a lot of logo hate going around lately? Apparently hell hath no fury like an armchair graphic designer scorned, if you go by some of the comments on the “Hate The iTunes 10 Logo? Think You Can Do Better?” post. Along with haters doing what they do best (hint: it’s hating) we also got a ton of alternative submissions. Here are ten of the most noteworthy above. And in case you want to switch the current iTunes 10 logo out, here’s how to do it on a Mac and on a PC.
AFP - The government Tuesday announced the appointment of a new chief negotiator and ambassador for climate change whose mandate will be to try implement agreements made at the talks in Copenhagen.
Apple today released a small software update for Safari, bringing it up to version 5.0.2. The update contains "improvements to compatibility and security" and includes the following:
- Fi...
I remember my first iPod very well. Shockingly, I was a little late to the party, waiting until the fourth generation iPod (now called the “iPod classic”) in 2004 to join the revolution. And I only bought one because I was planning to drive out to California (from Ohio) and I wanted enough music storage to last me the entire trip. I remember unboxing it and thinking: “wow, I can store all my music on this tiny device?”
Today, six years later, I still have that old iPod. But I no longer consider it “tiny.” In fact, it’s more of a “brick” both in size and weight. It held 40 gigabytes of my music on its miniature hard drive platters. Today, the latest high-end iPod touch holds 24 more gigabytes and is a sliver of the size and a fraction of the weight. And it plays music for 28 more consecutive hours. Oh, and it has a color screen. One you can touch. One you can multi-touch.
With the unveiling of its new iPod line last week, Apple has made it very clear what the future is: touch. The iPod classic, while still around, wasn’t updated at all for the first time in nine years. At the other end of the spectrum, the iPod shuffle underwent a return to form — literally — as in, its form factor is now the same as it was two generations ago.
These are now the last two remaining iPods without touch screen integration. And both are clearly moving out to the pasture.
That’s not to say the shuffle is dying yet. It still fills an important niche for Apple — the cheap niche. At $49, it is by far the cheapest iPod available — by $100. But it’s clear that if it was feasible, Apple would put a touch-screen in this device too. Amazingly, it’s now almost the exact same size as the iPod nano (more on that in a bit), the major difference is the lack of a screen. Instead, the shuffle focuses on its VoiceOver capabilities (the carry-over from the last generation, which fully relied on them).
But again, this iPod refresh, which Apple CEO Steve Jobs called their biggest one yet, clearly points to the future of the line — and really, the future of Apple in general: touch.
The two big updates in the iPod lines this time around are the iPod nano and the iPod touch. First, let’s talk about the nano.
The iPod nano
The previous version of the nano was nice with its elongated form factor. That said, every time I used one, I had to fight the urge to touch its screen to navigate through it. Finally, I can do that. And just as the way Apple killed off the need for a physical keyboard with the iPhone’s touchscreen, here, they’ve killed off the need for the old standard click wheel. As such, they’ve been able to make the nano much, much smaller.
As I noted above, it’s crazy but the nano is now almost the same size as the shuffle. It’s now the same square form factor, just a bit bigger. And it’s a good thing it’s a little bigger because Apple needs the room to squeeze four different apps on the various nano pages.
Yes, like the iPhone and iPod touch, the nano now has apps — sort of. Don’t get too excited, Apple says there will be no third-party apps for the nano (at least not yet), instead, they have some standard apps they created to use on the device. These include “Now Playing,” “Playlists,” “Radio,” “Clock,” “Photos,” “Fitness,” and a few others mainly to give you quick access to your content.
So how do you control a touch screen device with such a small screen? It’s quite simple, actually. Most of the time you’ll be traveling through music which is done with the on-screen controls. But when you need to return to the main menu, you simply hold one finger down for a few seconds on the screen and the main screen fades in. Just as with the iPhone/iPod touch, you flick left and right to get to other pages of “apps.”
Album artwork is nicely displayed when music is playing, and touching the screen once will bring up controls. Swiping to the right here gives you more options (such as Genius and Shuffle).
But the most interesting little feature of this nano is that you can use multi-touch to rotate the album artwork. Why would you want to do this? Because like the shuffle, the nano now comes with a clip on the back to easily attach it to a piece of clothing you have on. By putting two fingers on the screen and rotating, you’ll ensure your controls and/or album artwork are just the way you want them. This is one of the little things that makes Apple, Apple.
The sound quality on the device is solid — in line with previous generations of nanos. And the 24 hour audio playback that Apple lists in the specs seems about right. I have been unable to wear the battery down all the way over several days.
One unfortunate side effect of this new tiny size is that Apple had to remove video support. This means the iPod nano can no longer play videos, nor can it record them (there is no longer a camera). I suspect people may be disappointed by this until they see the actual device. Can you imagine watching a video on this screen? Because I sure can’t.
The removal of the camera itself will disappoint some people, but it was always a bit odd anyway as it only recorded video and not still images. I think the new size and touch screen in exchange for the video capabilities is a good tradeoff. Especially when you consider the new iPod touch.
The iPod touch
What the new nano lost in video capabilities, the iPod touch gained — and then some. The latest version of this device is not only the first with a camera — it has two cameras, one in the front and one in the back. And the one in the back shoots 720p HD video.
For some people, that alone will be reason enough to part with at least $229 for the 8 gigabyte version. But when you add in the fact that it has the same “Retina” display that Apple made for the iPhone 4, and the A4 chip which Apple included in both the iPhone 4 and the iPad, and of course, FaceTime support, there’s no question that this thing is going to be a massive hit for Apple.
Obviously, everything I said in my review of the iPhone 4’s 960-by-640 resolution Retina display is the same here. Simply put: it looks amazing. What’s great is that despite the same basic specs, the iPod touch is tiny when compared to the iPhone 4. Putting them side-by-side, the iPod touch is significantly thinner and also a little shorter.
It also trades the all-glass back and controversial antenna siding for a more conventional silver metal backing. While obviously the iPod touch doesn’t need the cellular components of the iPhone, it still is interesting that Apple has done away with the outside antenna (which also handled the WiFi, which the iPod touch does have).
The metal back is also slightly curved around the edges on the iPod touch, this makes it feel even slimmer. As with previous generations of the device, the headphone jack is at the bottom, while the top only contains the screen on/off button (which is actually a little easier to hit thanks to the curved sides).
People are now likely to use the iPod touch for three main reasons: music, gaming, and video.
For music, the song remains the same. This iPod touch seems inline with previous iPod touches. Apple says it has upped the battery life a bit (about 10 hours more of audio playback and 1 hour more for video playback), which is likely a result of the power saving techniques of the A4 chip. I wasn’t able to run the battery into the ground; it seemed solid — not iPad-good, but better than the iPhone.
For gaming, the combination of the A4 chip and the Retina display makes this an awesome machine. Jobs noted during the keynote that when you consider iOS devices as portable gaming devices, they’re outselling the entries by rivals Nintendo and Sony — combined. That’s likely to continue, if not accelerate from here. Every game I tried ran smoothly and looks brilliant with this screen.
Video is the big new addition here though, obviously. When taken outside (or in good light), the 720p videos look excellent. Inside, in low light, at things things can be a bit murky, but that’s probably to be expected (and there is no flash on the iPod touch). Just as with the iPhone, you can use the iMovie application (sold separately) to edit videos right on the device. All in all, it’s a great little HD movie machine — one that’s insanely small.
Photos, however, are a different story. Sadly, the lens in the iPod touch is not the same 5 megapixel variety found in the iPhone 4. Because of that, Apple limits still-image resolution of 960 by 720 pixels — very low. I found still pictures taken with the iPod touch to be grainy — again, especially in low light. The iPhone 4 performs much, much better as a camera.
When I asked Apple why they were limiting the camera to such a low resolution, they noted that the focus here was primarily video. The picture-taking capability was simply a bonus feature they tacked on for people who wanted the ability to take some quick shots, they said.
With that in mind, it may have been wise for Apple to make video capture the default mode for the camera on the iPod touch (it is still picture capture).
(Above: An image taken with the new iPod touch in medium light.)
Having a full 5 megapixel camera that is as good as the iPhone 4’s would have also undoubtedly required Apple to make the iPod touch a bit bulkier (and added a little bit to the manufacturing costs, undoubtedly). To me, it would have been worth it, but they clearly felt it wasn’t.
The other big component of the camera is FaceTime. On the iPod touch, things work a little differently because there is no cellular service to latch on to (that’s how it works on the iPhone 4 — you first place a call to the person you wish to FaceTime with). To work around this, Apple has made email addresses the new way of doing this with the iOS 4.1 update (due this week). Sadly, I wasn’t able to test this new link-up ability on my demo unit, but I did try it in the demo area right after the Apple event last week, and everything seemed to work fine. Once you establish the initial FaceTime connection (in this case, via email address), the device remembers connections so it’s one-click from then on.
This addition of a second device that does FaceTime is important for Apple. Clearly, they feel this is a major feature their portable devices will have going forward (they sure are promoting it enough). And by making it an open standard, they hope others will adopt it. With FaceTime on the iPod touch, millions more people will have access to the feature. In my opinion, Apple still needs a better management system for FaceTime calls (something like FacePlant), but when you connect, it’s very, very impressive.
Touching
The transition is taking place before our eyes. The click wheel, once the signature of the iPod line, is all but extinct now. Instead, Apple is continuing their march forward into touch.
This shouldn’t be surprising give that last week, Jobs revealed on stage that the iPod touch is now the most popular iPod Apple makes. As sales of other iPod models have been in decline for some time, the iPod touch was going the other direction. With its new touch capabilities, Apple undoubtedly hopes the same will be true for the new nano as well.
And with the iPod touch, the iPod nano, the iPhone, the iPad, and Macs (with the Magic Mouse or Magic Trackpad or MacBook trackpads) all now using multi-touch in one way or another, Apple is slowly but surely aligning itself to be the leader in touch computing going forward. The writing is on the wall — it’s hand-written.
Since just after the release of Zombieland, we’ve known that a sequel is likely to be made. Director Ruben Fleischer is set to return, and writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wenick were put to work on a script for the follow-up. The original cast (Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone and Abagail Breslin) are expected to appear, though no deals are inked.
Now we know that the film has been written, and Fleischer is praising the first draft as ‘amazing’ to sites that visited the set of his currently-shooting film 30 Minutes or Less.
Fleischer told CinemaBlend that a draft of the script is done, but the sequel still sounds as if it is in early stages. And Fleischer has a couple of different film options at the moment, so Zombieland 2 may not be the film he makes after 30 Minutes or Less. He’s got a buddy cop movie at Dreamworks and Babe in the Woods, with writer/actor Mike White.
The director’s comments to MTV underline the fact that the sequel is far from ready to go:
What’s fun about the sequel is we have freedom and flexibility to show different periods. We might have scenes before the zombies, or we might have some months after, or potentially stuff further down the road. Through the voice-over and the way the movie is structured, we can really explore all different sides of it.
A lot of uncertainty in there, unless he was just being particularly coy. Fleischer also told MTV that in-camera 3D is the way to go:
When it comes to 3-D, I feel pretty strongly that you should shoot it in camera,” he said. “I feel like it just looks so much better. If you’re going to make a 3-D movie, go ahead and make a 3-D movie. I would definitely, if we do ‘Zombieland 2,’ make it in 3-D and want to shoot it in 3-D.
AP - A second nanny testifying at the drug conspiracy trial of Anna Nicole Smith's two doctors and lawyer-boyfriend said Tuesday that she kept a list of drugs given to the model and that it numbered 18 at one point.
AP - More AP Top 25 voters are buying into Boise State as the No. 1 team in the country. Boise State gained seven first-place votes and closed in on No. 1 Alabama and No. 2 Ohio State as the top three teams in the first regular season Associated Press football poll held their spots from the preseason.
AP - The Los Angeles sheriff's deputy who arrested Mel Gibson for drunken driving in 2006 sued his department on Tuesday, claiming he has since been ostracized and passed over for promotions by the agency.
AP - American movie star Angelina Jolie met flood victims in northwestern Pakistan and appealed to the international community to provide aid needed to help the country recover from its worst natural disaster.
Drops 60s psychedelia API
Mozilla has released a fifth Firefox 4 beta, offering graphics hardware acceleration on Windows and a new API that lets site developers code pages that visually display audio data inside the browser.…
According to recent SEC filings, it appears that Chris Sacca’s newly launched fund, Lowercase Capital, has raised over $20 million in funding. Under the name Lowercase Industry Fund, Sacca has quietly raised over $11 million in a filing from early August and $10 million in a filing from June. It’s unclear who the investors are from the SEC filings.
This funding adds to Lowercase Capital’s $8.5 million raised earlier this year at the launch of the angel fund. Some of the fund’s previous investments include SimpleGeo, Fanbridge, DailyBooth, Posterous and Stickybits. And Lowercase has been on an investment roll lately, participating in a number of recent rounds in hot startups, including Embed.ly, Chartbeat, and Backupify.
As we wrote in our initial coverage of Lowercase, Sacca’s investment philosophy is fairly simple – It’s cheap to create new companies relative to ten years ago, and there are lots of investors to choose from. He promises to invest more than money, though and will take on a larger role than simply an investor. From the fund’s mission statement, “Rolling up our sleeves, we help design front pages, invent new services, prioritize product features, negotiate partnerships, and deal with the everyday professional and personal challenges of startup life.”
Besides the early-stage fund, Sacca also operates a four other funds, so the $20 million could be used in his other investment vehicles.
For more entertainment from Lowercase, check out this witty call for an intern.
When infringement is big business
A copyright enforcement service has filed a lawsuit seeking $150,000 from Nevada Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle for posting two newspaper articles without authorization.…
The cast is coming together for Journey 2: The Sequel You Might Not Be Keen to See. (OK, the actual subtitle to the Journey to the Center of the Earth sequel is The Mysterious Island.) Josh Hutcherson, returning from the first film, will be joined by Dwayne Johnson, and now Michael Caine will play the grandfather of Hutcherson’s character.
If you remember the story synopsis from when Johnson’s involvement was announced, you’ll recall that the script is loosely based on the Jules Verne novel The Mysterious Island and that Johnson and Hutcherson journey to a mystical island in search of the grandfather.
So, as THR says, this isn’t a cameo, and it’ll even see Caine in full-on athletic mode. Or something close to it. He’ll be in “several chase sequences,” one of which involves giant bees.
And those bees will be in 3D, naturally. Brad Peyton directs from a script by Richard Outten and Brian and Mark Gunn. The shoot (in Hawaii and North Carolina) starts in October.
To recap some details about the Jules Verne novel on which the story is vaguely based: Verne’s The Mysterious Island follows five prisoners of war who who escape the Confederate-controlled city of Richmond, Virginia via hot air balloon. They crash land on a volcanic island east of New Zealand. Eventually the group finds a castaway on a nearby island, and has to deal with his former pirate crew. There are more secrets on the island, including one that harkens back to Verne’s earlier novel featuring Captain Nemo and the Nautilus.
The University of Kentucky has adopted Facebook Places for a marketing campaign encouraging undergraduate recruitment.
Advertising Age reports that the southern college is encouraging students to check-in to Facebook Places while on campus. The university has planted giant, wooden pointers – like the tab that marks the map in the Facebook Places logo except in the university’s signature blue – around the campus as a reminder.
The thinking is that college students will check in and their high-school friends will see the updates on Facebook, helping to boost recruitment efforts. The campaign was designed by Lexington-based ad agency Cornett-IMS and did not involve Facebook.
Marketing director Kelley Bozeman said the university did think about privacy. “But this is about check-ins during the day, when you’re on campus, in the classrooms and going to athletic events,” she said. “Adults use good judgment. It’s not about checking in at home.”
It seems like a clever marketing campaign that could well reach the target audience with the right message. However, I can’t dismiss the privacy concerns quite so easily. Incidents of sexual assault and date rape are already high enough on university campuses, especially when combined with drinking, whether underage or not. Students might be adults but that doesn’t mean they always have good judgment – they are still finding their way in life. I think it would be very easy for an 18-year-old to put too much information about their location data out there and simultaneously become Facebook friends with too many people. This sort of data in the wrong hands could easily encourage stalker-like behavior.
I think Places is a great tool and the University of Kentucky can use it for a fun and effective marketing campaign. It’s just if they are going to encourage students to use Places, they bear some responsibility too. I hope that college staff are putting sufficient effort into educating students about how to use Places safely and also focusing sufficiently on campus safety more generally.
Apparently some of Digg’s employees aren’t super happy that their main source of news about Digg is TechCrunch – probably referring to the news that VP of Engineering John Quinn is out.
Digg Designer Danny Trinh Twitters “I love finding out about @digg company news via @techcrunch. Wonder if they’ll post our lunch menu too..”
Yes, we will.
Digg engineer Mark Lewandowski posted it as a response to Trinh’s Twitter (via Ben Standefer’s Facebook). Tomorrow is Greek for lunch and Sushi for dinner, Danny. Thursday though is more complicated. There’s a three hour lunch and people are told when to come out based on a wristband to avoid overcrowding.
Given Digg’s trouble’s with scaling in general we’re not surprised they have to stagger “traffic” to the lunch line too. Ok, bad joke.
Mozilla announced Mozilla Labs Gaming today, a push to get developers to make use of new Open Web technologies to build "awesome games" that can be played in a Web browser.
The move was timed to coincide with the latest update to Firefox 4, now in beta development, which promises better graphics and a new application programming interface (API) that will let developers read and write raw audio data in the browser. Together, the two announcements are aimed to let users and developers know there are still reasons to be pumped about the Web in this age of native apps.
Sponsor
"Modern Open Web technologies introduced a complete stack of technologies such as Open Video, audio, WebGL, touch events, device orientation, geo location, and fast JavaScript engines which make it possible to build complex (and not so complex) games on the Web," Mozilla Labs wrote on its blog. "With these technologies being delivered through modern browsers today, the time is ripe for pushing the platform. And what better way than through games?"
Mozilla neglected to explain how these games will be distributed, a crucial detail for developers. Will there be a Firefox store similar to Google's Web app store, the Chrome Web Store? If so, will developers be able to charge money for these games?
Mozilla did announce an international game developer competition, Game On 2010, to open at the end of September. It's likely that the cash-flush Mozilla Foundation will put up some prize money for the best Web games.
Firefox's new audio API introduces new possibilities for game developers.
Mozilla hasn't explicitly pushed Firefox as the place to play all these fantastic new games, citing only "modern browsers." But the improvements to Firefox 4 suggest that's what it's thinking. It's possible that Mozilla expects developers who are inspired by this announcement simply list their games in the Chrome Web Store, which lists apps that can work in browsers other than Chrome.
We're guessing that driving developers to the Chrome Web Store is not what Mozilla is thinking. But it sounds like games are really a means to an end here. Magazines are writing stories about how the Web is dead and consumers and developers are flocking to native mobile apps. Mozilla wants to spread the word about what's possible in the Web browser.
We'll be paying close attention to see what details Mozilla reveals about the competition and its vision for the future of the browser-centric Web.
Are native apps really where it's at? What do you see in the browser's future, and do you think Web games are a good way to get there?
DiscussAP - With clean-energy legislation trapped in a political deadlock, renewable-energy advocates called big business the new leader in the nation's green revolution during a national summit meeting Tuesday.
The dramatic battle between Mark Hurd, HP, and Oracle continues. Yesterday Oracle announced that it was hiring recently-ousted HP CEO Mark Hurd as Co-President and a member of its Board. HP responded this morning by suing Hurd, alleging that he would potentially leak trade secrets to Oracle. Oracle has just responded to the suit, and it isn’t pulling any punches:
“Oracle has long viewed HP as an important partner,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “By filing this vindictive lawsuit against Oracle and Mark Hurd, the HP board is acting with utter disregard for that partnership, our joint customers, and their own shareholders and employees. The HP Board is making it virtually impossible for Oracle and HP to continue to cooperate and work together in the IT marketplace.”
Above: Boutique book publisher and geek James Bridle has printed the 12,000 edits made to the controversial Wikipedia entry for Iraq War between December 2004 to November 2009 as a 7,000 page, 12 volume set of books.
"This is historiography. This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification."And for the first time in history, we're building a system that, perhaps only for a brief time but certainly for the moment, is capable of recording every single one of those infinitely valuable pieces of information. Everything should have a history button. We need to talk about historiography, to surface this process, to challenge absolutist narratives of the past, and thus, those of the present and our future." -James Bridle
Sponsor
Bridle spoke about the project in his talk "The Value of Ruins" at the dConstruct conference last week in Brighton, England. Audio of his talk is posted below.
Of the printed collection, Bridle says: "It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes 'Saddam Hussein was a dickhead'."
Of Wikipedia, Bridle says: "It's not only a resource for collating all human knowledge, but a framework for understanding how that knowledge came to be and to be understood; what was allowed to stand and what was not; what we agree on, and what we cannot."
I think that's pretty awesome.
Below: Bridle's talk at dConstruct, The Value of Ruins. Audio thanks to the wonderful podcast curation tool HuffDuffer. (Which, incidentally, was built by James Keith, author of HTML5 for Web Designers, who recently shook hands with James Bridle himself.)
