1 of 2 posts filed under web
“It’s a live-streaming 3D point-cloud, carried over a binary WebSocket. It responds to movement in the scene by panning the (virtual) camera, and you can also pan and zoom around with the mouse.”
A depthcam? A webkinect? Introducing a new kind of webcam
(Source: berglondon.com)
1 of 2 posts filed under web
Choose one of the love songs (or compose your own) in Tellart’s Love Song Machine and press “Play Song Live” to play it on the bell ensemble in their office.
1 of 2 posts filed under web
When Should I Visit? by Dan Williams is antisocial software. It finds the least busy time to visit the museums, galleries and theatres of London. It states the quietest day and provides a glanceable graph to judge the relative popularity of different days.
It was built in 24 hours as part of Culture Hack Day using data gathered from Foursquare.
1 of 2 posts filed under web
Students at the MIT Media lab have linked Kinect to Google’s Chrome browser to create near Minority Report style gestural browsing.
Get the code and do it yourself: DepthJS
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Ride Society by Anders Højmose is a mobile-based toolset designed for freeskiers – people skiing in snowparks and the backcountry. Besides being a mobile application, Ride Society consists of a series of outerwear to support the mobile experience and an online community. Together these parts create a small ecosystem. Freeskiing is all about having fun and enjoying the mountains – one of the main goals in this project was to build on that.
1 of 2 posts filed under web
The birthplace of the web
“The reason I’m interested in this is that recognizing the exact places involved in the birth of the web is a celebration of knowledge itself rather than belief, opinion or allegiance, both politically and spiritually neutral and something that everyone can potentially enjoy and feel a part of.
Secondly, many places of lesser importance are very carefully preserved. The place where the web was invented is arguably the most important place in 2 millennia of Swiss history and of global historical importance.
Lastly, this kind of information is perhaps overlooked as being so obvious as to be common knowledge - exactly the sort of thing that sometimes gets forgotten. I’m not suggesting that the locations have indeed been overlooked, but they are not preserved or all indicated and the people I spoke to didn’t know the full details.”
David Galbraith in Confirming The Exact Location Where the Web Was Invented.
1 of 2 posts filed under web
Luke Wroblewski (LukeW Ideation + Design, stealth startup co-founder), makes the case for “designing Web applications for mobile platforms before the desktop in order to take advantage of explosive growth, useful constraints, and innovative capabilities”
LinkedIn Tech Talks series, May 2010.
(Via JohnnyHolland)
1 of 2 posts filed under web
“Want to know if your ‘HTML application’ is part of the web? Link me into it. Not just link me to it; link me into it. Not just to the black-box frontpage. Link me to a piece of content. Show me that it can be crawled, show me that we can draw strands of silk between the resources presented in your app. That is the web: The beautiful interconnection of navigable content. If your website locks content away in a container, outside the reach of hyperlinks, you’re not building any kind of ‘web’ app. You’re doing something else.”
1 of 2 posts filed under web
They’ve been around for a while so I thought I’d try the huge QR code on the side of a bottle of Diet Pepsi. Clearly they really want people to use it.
I scanned the code with the camera using Neo Reader on my iPhone and found it contained the URL below.
WAP? Am I being transported back to the year 1999? Surely the fact I have a phone with the ability to scan QR codes means I’m highly unlikely to be interested in a WAP experience on my mobile.
Anyway, mustn’t grumble. I pressed continue and got this page.
Oh come on. What’s the point? Why are Pepsi putting such a large QR code on the side of their bottles if it’s delivering people to something like this?
That’s not all. Ignoring the content on offer, if you scroll down to the last option it’s a page about QR codes and what they are.
Why would I need to find out about what a QR code is if I’ve already successfully used one to get me here? Surely the fact I’m looking at this page must mean I know what a QR code is and how to use one.
QR codes could be really useful if they’re used properly but this isn’t useful at all. It’s not even a good marketing campaign.
I know QR codes have a lot of shortcomings. They’re ugly, they need to be quite big, and they’re quite a lot more fiddly than RFID would be to use. The benefit to them is that all they need is a cameraphone capable of decoding them whereas RFID needs specialised hardware to do its thing. The biggest issue with QR codes is really that the software to read them is a bit crap. That said, I’m not convinced that QR codes should be a consumer facing technology at all but I definitely think that if you’re going to do something interesting with them you should probably at least try to make it half decent.
1 of 2 posts filed under web
Instapaper is a simple web service that allows you to save web pages to read later. You view your saved pages by visiting the Instapaper site.
Let’s say I wanted to read this page later.
My Safari has Instapaper’s “read later” bookmarklet as the first bookmark in my bookmarks bar so I hit Apple+1 and I get a small “saving… done” message to tell me Instapaper has done its thing for me.
I can then go to my Instapaper account where I’ll find my list of items to read later.
If i click the title of the article (there it is at the top) I’ll be taken to the web page but the thing Instapaper is good at becomes clear when you click the “Text” button.
You get this.
Instapaper has removed all the ads, all the layout, lots of the formatting and is presenting me with the content I’m interested in and little else. Look at the first screenshot. Which would you rather read? This is where it differs from bookmarking services like Delicious.
That’s not all. There’s an Instapaper iPhone app too. Here’s my Instapaper account as viewed on my phone.
All this is available offline so I can read it anywhere regardless of network connection. It means I can read all the stuff I’ve saved for later while I’m out and about or on the way to and from work.
I tap on the article title and I’m presented with a version of it formatted for reading on the iPhone. There’s a tilt-to-scroll option which i quite like even though I don’t use it much.
There’s a number of sharing options within the Instapaper app so I could now post the article to Twitter via Tweetie, post it to this blog via the Tumblr app or email it to a friend. If I click on a link in the article I get the option to save that for later too, which means I can carry on reading the article I was reading without losing my place. Really nice touch.
Instapaper integrates nicely with some of the other apps I use. NetNewsWire is an RSS reader for Macs that syncs with my Google Reader account. If i right click an article in a feed I get the following options.
RSS to Instapaper. Nice.
Tweetie on the iPhone allows me to save links in tweets to read later too.
Tweet to Instapaper. Pretty damn useful.
All this adds up to mean that Instapaper is one of the few web services that I can safely say I couldn’t do without. In just a few months It’s become such an integral part of my daily browsing that I don’t think I could go back. I’ve even found myself Instapapering articles to read immediately because it makes them easier to read.
There’s a few more useful features (some people are doing interesting things with its print feature) but I won’t spoil it for you. You should find out for yourself.
I really can’t recommend it enough.
