This is some really excellent work. Kudos to these dudes.
I wasn’t even born when it happened, but I find the video game crash of 1983, and the subsequent years, to be one of the most fascinating stories in the history of American business. Here’s a great piece on the subject.
Cliff notes version: publishers cranked out tons and tons of horrible-quality atari games, leaving video games as a whole to be regarded as a cheap gimmick. The issue was that respect for the industry was destroyed.
Tomorrow morning, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata will deliver the keynote address at Moscone Center. At the same time, Apple will unveil their next iPad across the street. The two companies represent two gaming philosophies, and also a very real friction in gaming today. Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime described his concerns: ”I actually think one of the biggest risks today in our gaming industry are these inexpensive games that are, candidly, disposable from a consumer standpoint.” Disposable. Like E.T. cartridges, which famously filled a landfill in 1982. Which caused the video game crash of 1983.
Are we headed for the second crash? Perhaps not, as long as we have Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony creating multimillion-dollar blockbusters. Also, the value of video games has already been proven in our culture– even our moms play games now. Still, though the App Store is a great showcase for independent developers who would otherwise not have a voice, I’m worried that copycats, ripoffs, and trash could unravel three decades of goodwill that we owe to Nintendo.
The idea of autonomous robots that communicate with each other brings to mind the horrors prognosticated in The Terminator and The Matrix. But are cooperative robots really so foreign? They also present themselves in much more likable and human ways. Here’s some robots working together to play soccer.
Cooperation of semi-sentient beings has achieved incredible feats, such as utter dominance of planet Earth. The reasons humans are so evolutionarily successful is likely tied to our capabilities to intelligently interact with each other to achieve incredible tasks. Robots have already been put to work in a variety of fields, ranging from the janitorial to the professional. But imagine teams of robots working together. Read More
My friend, Lisa, has started a new tumblr. I know what you’re thinking– “WHAT! Nobody ever starts tumblrs!” Hear me out.
Hello, Jell-o is the funniest tumblr I’ve ever read, and it only has two posts. I can’t wait to see what startling discoveries and Eat-Pray-Loveish revelations visit her as she embarks on this journey.
I love Kirby. I grew up with the character, and have played each of his games that have been released in the West (and a couple that haven’t). I feel like someone at Nintendo loves him, too, but isn’t in a position to secure adequate funding or marketing for a PR event to celebrate the release of a new Kirby game.
As ElectricPig.uk relates, Nintendo summoned Kirby’s London fans to one of the city’s most dismal areas, Elephant and Castle, with promises that “For one day only Elephant and Castle will be decked out in a colourful array of knitting to bring the feel-good vibe of Kirby’s Epic Yarn and replace grey with colour.” Fans arrived to find quite the depressing scene:
THIS is a LAUNCH EVENT? Nintendo has done weird PR stuff before (like celebrate the launch of Wario: Shake It at a gas station. Get it? Gas????). For some reason, though, Kirby launch events seem to be spectacularly mishandled. Exhibit number two:
What. Some weird, middle-aged dude in Norwood Park next to Kirby Middle School in Birmingham, Alabama blowing Kirby-shaped foam bubbles? Here’s what Nintendo had to say about the matter. For a character who is so absolutely charming, iconic and likeable, I’m troubled that the most attention that Nintendo puts into the character is a grubby stuffed figure in the middle of a depressing, inner-city garden. GET IT TOGETHER, LADIES.
Note: I rarely editorialize here, but I feel especially passionate about this, due to my extensive history as a warranty voider. 
Apps. All anyone talks about today are apps. But do we remember a time before apps existed? For the first year of the iPhone’s life, the only people using “apps” were garage enthusiasts, who were branded as criminals. These individuals produced a lot of software that you might recognize. Ever heard of “Tap Tap Revenge”? It began it’s life as a homebrew jailbreak game called Tap Tap Revolution. Before Apple deigned to allow users to copy and paste text, there was Clippy. The tech press seemed to buy Steve Jobs’s statement that “webapps would be enough” for the iPhone OS platform. But hackers and enthusiasts clamored for access to a native SDK (software development kit), and some even reverse-engineered the operating system itself to deliver native applications for the device, but El Jobso standed firm.
How did that turn out? In March of 2008, Apple announced a native SDK and the App Store. In January of 2011, Apple announced that 10 billion apps had been downloaded. The company shifted from outright rejection of the idea to control of the most lucrative software distribution platform in history. Developers are raking in millions of dollars, and Apple takes a 30% cut off the top. The company is now dipping it’s hand into subscription revenues, too, but that’s another can of worms.
Are we seeing this same story play out today with Microsoft’s Kinect device? Upon its release, hackers and DIYers recognized that the product had potential far beyond having an avatar on screen dance like the player. LadyAda declared a $1000 bounty (later increased to $3000) for the first individual to submit open source drivers for the dual camera device. Microsoft was not amused, threatening legal action against anyone posting such drivers. The drivers eventually were developed and released, the Kinect far exceeded analysts’ expectations of sales, Microsoft backed down, and this morning announced that they were releasing a native SDK for the device.
So, the pattern appears to be:
Step 6 is where things diverge. Does the company lock down the work that the hackers have done, and fight tooth and nail to maintain control of the newly-invigorated platform? Or do they simply release drivers and let enthusiasts continue to unlock a device’s potential? I guess we’ll see what the community does with the Kinect. So far, the future looks pretty bright.
And now, my favorite Kinect homebrew hack: creating structures in Minecraft.
Nothing more to see here, besides this cat .gif.
Google, in collaboration with Larva Labs, has released Androidify, an avatar-creation application for Android. It’s incredibly easy to use, and the results are just adorable. There’s me to the left.
Google is smart to try to cultivate the Android brand, and has done a great job with some of its partners. At the forefront of this effort is the iconic little green robot. He’s shown up many places, at gay pride parades, toy shops, and even pushing his wares on the side of the street.
To my knowledge, the first time he was “brought to life” was in Sprint’s commercial for the HTC Evo (now being rerun with information on the Evo Shift 4G). I really liked Sprint’s contributions: he’s very shy, modest, he floats around like WALL-E’s girlfriend. The commercial fleshes him (her?) out a bit.
Android users have developed an affection for the little bot, who is very approachable and likable. Much more cuddly than a severe Steve Jobs sending out curt, one-word responses to user attempts to to reach him. I hope to see the little champ pop up more in 2011.
Just over a week ago, I tweeted that I was ready for life in the cloud. I use web-based IM, Twitter, music, as well as Google-powered e-mail, calendaring, docs, and RSS reading. That sums up my list of needs, basically, and 99% of my computing is in Chrome. I could handle eschewing the other 1%.
Google asked me to step up and put my money where my mouth is, when I received a cr-48 laptop on my doorstep approximately one week later. Since yesterday morning, I’ve been living with my head in the clouds.
The device can handle almost all of my tasks, due to the excellent webapps I listed above. I like the hardware a great deal. The rubberized case feels excellent. The keyboard is spacious, and the replacement function keys are infinitely more useful than naked F keys. The caps lock key is gone! The battery lasts a solid seven hours. I love it. Unfortunately, the trackpad is a bit cheap and jittery. The chipset is very low power, struggling with even YouTube videos. Wireless networking options are sorely lacking– no enterprise WPA2 support as of today.
The device’s settings are minimal. They barely go beyond what you see in Chrome’s options panel. Syncing of options and settings with your Google account means that the device was ready to go with my bookmarks and extensions within minutes of booting. One big missing feature is syncing of search engines, which is a big deal for me, since I use upwards of 100 customized search keywords.
All in all, a pleasure to use. It’s supplanted my use of my Macbook at home.
The tablets are coming! Over 100 of them, in fact. Over 101 if we include the inevitable iPad 2. I wrote an article early last year comparing iOS 3.1.2 to Android 2.1, but I’d like to take the fight to slates, the most exciting battleground of innovation in 2011. Google gave the world a preview of Honeycomb (Android 3.0, their tablet OS) this morning, so it seems like a perfect time to line up the competition. I think that Google’s got it right. Here’s some reasons why.
In this corner: iOS 4.2.1Perfectly Apple. It’s the same interface as the iPhone, with minor tweaks. You can assemble 4×5 icons per homescreen, the dock holds 6 icons instead of 4, and folders can hold up to 20 icons. Otherwise, it’s the iPhone’s homescreen. This seems, to me, like a huge waste of real estate and computing power. The homescreen doesn’t do anything. It’s just an “activity picker.” This bothers me somewhat. It apparently works for most of the world, though, as the iPhone is now the world’s best selling handset or whatever.
iOS seems to me to be a hit parade of missed tablet opportunities. To be fair, though, it’s only been on tablets a year, and Apple is probably going to call a press conference at any minute to introduce iOS 4.3 or 5 or whatever. But in the meantime, we’re stuck with what I feel is the worst flaw in iOS. THE NOTIFICATIONS.
LOLWUT.
You are stopped in your tracks and are greeted with a tiny blue rectangle with some information in it. You must act on it now or never. If an applications needs to give you two notifications, tough shit. You only see one. This system is so flawed and weird, it shocks me that Apple has never revisited it since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. I might take this all back when apple rectifies it with the iPhone 4G or whatever they introduce this year, but for now, I’m sticking to my guns. An iPad has SO MUCH screen real estate, and it’s ludicrous to waste all of it with such a terrible notification system.
My last big gripe is iPhone app scaling. They’re simply blown up to twice their size, and they look terrible. Even Retina display supporting apps look absolutely disgusting. Something that ugly should never have made it out of One Infinite Loop.
Honeycomb! Google debuted it at CES, but it got a proper coming out this morning. There’s some great, incisive coverage from CrunchGear (a blog I generally do not read). I’m very excited for the Honeycomb experience, and I will probably be trading in my iPad this year in exchange for an Android-powered model. I’ll have to wait for the dust to settle to pick one out, though. Let’s look at the homescreen.
Wow! There’s stuff on it. The Android homescreen has always differed in that there’s widgets and live folders. If you don’t like the perfectly adequate homescreen (“Launcher”), you’re free to replace it. I’m very happy with the improvements to the homescreen (left), which is rich with content, widgets, and information. Android leverages the power and space of a larger device to great effect, and I can’t wait for it. One thing to note is that Android hardware buttons (home, back, menu, search) have been relocated to the software, which is great. No more confusing, nonstandard button layouts!
Android continues to be top-of-the-class when it comes to notifications, which are rich and can be acted upon independently. You can “snooze” the rest while you carry on with whatever you were doing. Don’t fix what isn’t broke.
Google has also moved the “Menu” options into an application-specific Actionbar (see the top of the image to the left), so they are always available. This will give me a better sense of what an app can and can’t do, and how I may act on the information in front of me at a quick glance. I love this. All-in-all, Honeycomb really appears to be a thoughtful, rich, beautiful operating system, and I can’t wait to get my hands on it.
Finally, Honeycomb scales phone-sized apps beautifully. Android’s detractors have posited that the great variety of screen shapes and sizes would be the operating system’s Achilles heel, and would make development for the platform a nightmare. Google responded by building application scaling into Android, and the ultimate result is this. Phone-sized applications look native on a Honeycomb tablet, 7″ or 10″, no terrible pixel scaling required.
Update: Immediately after posting this, Giz posted their hands-on with the Xoom. Sounds like a dream.
Android Community has a great video.
Update 2: Lifehacker writes this post, but better.
Excellent blog that asks artists to write in with cases of corporate misappropriation of their art. Most examples are blatant copyright infringement, but it seems that few of the submitters have taken legal action against the purloining parties. This artist explicitly disavows any legal remedy, simply wishing that their art was not further used to sell Toyotas. This is in sharp counterpoint to the music, film, and adult entertainment industries, who have contributed to the 100,000 John Doe plaintiffs that were been sued for infringement in 2010. Here’s some examples from the site.
There are some examples of “flattery” by some big names, and the site’s definitely worth a browse. I find myself siding against some of the alleged victims, however– the United States as a whole needs a comprehensive lesson on fair use.
The work of industrial designers is unique in that it lies at the intersection of copyright law and patent law. They create objects, and marry form (an expressive, artistic choice) and function (the useful purpose that the object is supposed to serve). What part of their work is protected under copyright? Surely we wouldn’t want to confer a 100 year monopoly on a useful object—this would fly in the face of the carefully-conferred and much shorter monopolies that are issued under the patent regime. What sort of protection can a creator hope to secure for his expressive works that also serve a utilitarian purpose?
The protection in a sculptural work is limited by §101 of the Copyright Act to solely those aspects of a work that can be identified separately from and are able to exist independently of their useful aspects. For instance, the ornamental details on the handle of a fork are protected as expressions, while the tines are solely a utilitarian feature, and are not protected.
There are 2 ways to frame “separability”: 1) physical separability, and 2) conceptual separability. 1) Creative aspects are protectable if they can be removed, physically, from the useful parts (if you can peel the decorative label off a bottle), or 2) they can be conceptualized and appreciated as a separate element of a work (the ornamental flourishes on the leg of a chair). Designers should test their creations against these standards before contemplating litigation.
Dollree Mapp was a central figure in the history of the 4th amendment (which controls what the cops can search, and what happens if they cross the line). And never has Constitutional law had such a sassy ambassador!
On a sunny afternoon in 1957, Miss Mapp answered the door to find police officers. They aggressively questioned her about a suspected bomb plot and a gambling ring, to which she pled ignorance. They demanded to come inside, and she denied them entrance until she could speak with her attorney. The attorney advised that she request that they produce a warrant, and when they were unable to, she locked the police out.
The police lieutenant called Dollree and demanded that she allow the officers to search her home. She refused, and called her lawyer for backup. The police denied the lawyer access to her home, and instead broke in themselves. She demanded a warrant, and one officer waved around a sheet of paper.
DOLLREE MAPP SNATCHED THAT BUSINESS AND SHOVED IT DOWN HER DRESS.
She was promptly placed into custody, and the fake warrant was recovered. The officers thoroughly searched the entire home, and found no evidence of crime. They went into the basement, and there they found
A HUGE TRUNK FULL OF OBSCENE SMUT.
She was arrested for keeping all that filth around. She was convicted, and appealed her case all the way to the SCOTUS. Mapp was victorious, and as a result, any evidence that is collected in violation of the 4th amendment must be precluded in all criminal trials.
Justice Brandeis, dissenting in Olmstead v. United States (1928), in which the Supreme Court deemed a wiretap not to constitute a “search” or “seizure” under the Fourth Amendment:
The protection guaranteed by the Amendments is much broader in scope. The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man’s spiritual nature, of his feelings, and of his intellect. They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone — the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized men. To protect that right, every unjustifiable intrusion by the Government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment. And the use, as evidence in a criminal proceeding, of facts ascertained by such intrusion must be deemed a violation of the Fifth.
How beautifully said. Brandeis also wrote the seminal law article on Privacy Law’s roots in the common law. I’ll be blogging about that article fully in the next couple of days.
I’ve reskinned my blog, and decided to give it a hearty dose of Century Schoolbook, my favorite font. Also Richard Posner’s. The Seventh Circuit highly recommends it. The Supreme Court demands it. What’s the deal?
Surely you recognize the font. It was in most, if not all, of your schoolbooks in elementary school. The font is thought to be easy to comprehend, and to foster information retention. It was designed in 1919 by the extremely talented Morris Fuller Benton (it’s one among very many of his creations). From Wikipedia:
Morris Fuller Benton utilized research done by Clark University that showed young readers more quickly identified letterforms with contrasting weight, but with the lighter strokes maintaining presence. Tests also showed the importance of maintaining counter-form (the white space around the black letterform) in recognizing the face at smaller sizes.
I use it because it’s nostalgic, stately, charming, and playful. Hopefully you agree.
Unless you’re using a Windows machine, which doesn’t come with the font installed. Suckers!
Ten years on, this is what Wikipedia looks like.
I’ve always been fascinated with prosthetics. I know it’s sort of grim, but the technology that has been developed to replace the functionality lost to an amputation always has seemed ahead of science. Gizmodo had an excellent feature, This Cyborg Life, documenting some fascinating fusions of biology and hardware. This feature was guest-edited by Aimee Mullins, world sprinting champion and double amputee. I recommend that you read all of her articles for Giz.
Aimee Mullins by flickr user Rubenstein
While Aimee’s prosthetic legs are fascinating, they aren’t nearly as magical as bionic arms and hands. There are hands capable of grasping an egg without crushing it, and inventors have even demonstrated prosthetics that transmit a sense of touch to the nervous system via a prosthetic. The science behind this is electromyography- the detection of electrical impulses exuded by muscles. Electromyography is the basis for a lot of prosthetic technology, and is the mechanism for activating prosthetic limbs by performing the same muscle movements that you would use before your limb was removed.
One company– I-LIMB– is at the forefront of this technology. Check out the hand.
Magical, right? And this is only the beginning. Prosthetic limbs are already starting to overtake the real things.
EDIT: The day after I posted this, I-Limb announced the I-Limb Pulse, a prosthetic hand that is programmable over bluetooth, for added customization. This is just the beginning! Gizmodo has the scoop.
I’ve been accused of being a philistine and bibliophobe because I prefer digital volumes to paper ones. Let me make my case for ebooks.by flickr user hiperactivoWhen people explain why they like paper books, they invariably bring up a few things. The way a well-bound book feels in your hands. The texture of the paper between your fingers. The aroma of pulp-and-glue. People feel a sensual affection toward books, and I’m not above these seductive qualities. There are just too many offsets to them for me to prefer IRL books to URL ones.
I’ve been through a lot with my modest library. It’s enough to fill about two medium-sized bookcases, but I’ve never catalogued or counted my books. I’ve moved them across Florida and then across the United States. I’ve packed and unpacked my library five times in the last seven years. I’ve anguished over selling and throwing out books when I moved because some wouldn’t fit in the moving van. I’ve had to ice my back and pop ibuprofen for a week because of the sheer heft of those hardcovers. Lending books almost always leads to loss, which is sad. The result of these experiences are that I wish I never had these books to begin with, because they’ve just become a kind of emotional obligation. I now resent these objects that, for a month or two each, brought me a lot of joy.
Really, though, if you shop at any e-retailer, they’re watching what you read.
When people discuss digital books, they speak of them in much less sentimental terms. You can’t resell them, they’re device locked, they’re a privacy risk, you can’t connect with a stranger when you see their ebook’s jacket. There are appeals to the senses, too: people claim to hate reading from a screen (joke’s on you if I got you to read this!), you can’t curl up with a computer, silicone doesn’t have a smell. Though there are some valid points, I’ve grown quite fond of my ebook library, and moving it takes nothing– Dropbox makes it available anywhere, at any time. No more back strain! No more “Sophie’s Choice” when the moving van is full! No more heartache when a lent book vanishes along with an ex! Easy backup, searching, and cataloging!
I’ve owned three devices that I’ve used largely to read ebooks: an OLPC XO-1, a Kindle 2 (US Edition), and now, an iPad (16 GB wifi). The XO-1 was just a mess (though I’ve never used a better display than the transflective one designed by Mary Lou Jepsen), and the Kindle was nice, but e-ink has well-documented shortcomings (refresh rates kill it for me). I am very satisfied with the iPad, and prefer reading books on it to the Kindle, but that’s for another post. All three of these devices did things beside read books, and that’s why they became superior books. They would perform services for me: they’d search a book. They’d upload clippings to the cloud. They had built-in dictionaries. I could copy-and-paste selections for friends. They became more like companions than did my revolving cast of books, each making a brief starring role in my messenger bag.
So, it still comes down to sentimentality, really. I feel a kind of attachment to my ebook library and to the device I enjoy it on. They’ve improved how I consume and share information with people, while still giving me the opportunity to isolate myself with a good read, if that’s what I’d like to do (toggle the wifi!). The next time I finish moving, the only thing I’ll be icing is my celebratory margarita.
Keep an eye out on the next two posts in my e-book series: iPad vs. Kindle, and The sticky sitch of DRM and lock-in.
I wrote this 6 months ago, but I spent like 20 bucks on it, and there’s still nothing better on the market. So, I’ll repost it.
One of the coolest possibilities of the iPad is that it can become a backpack replacement. It can hold your textbook, it can record lectures, you can type on it at a pretty good rate (this whole post was created and edited on mine, at the airport). However, these capabilities don’t exist out of the box. We have to wait for app developers to provide the tools to do these things. I have decided to evaluate their efforts so far in the note taking arena. Spoiler alert: every note taking app in the app store sucks. While you’re waiting for omnioutliner, though, consider the alternatives.
There you have it, folks. Nine apps, and not a killer app in site. I can’t wait to give OmniOutliner a whirl. It’s slated for release at some point in summer 2010.
