Technology
Random news about technology!
Bryansays Podcast Ep7 (Guest spot)
Jul 30th
Got in on another episode of the Bryansays Podcast and had a great time talking alot about the location aware social networks that are similar to the popular Foursquare. I learned alot and even ended up signing up for an account on Whrrl, a new one I have never heard much of. There are really just too many of them out there and need to step up with more amazing features before it gains a huge mass like twitter or facebook but listen in on the episode because we might have a few big name players to talk about that are possibly getting in on the location game and changing it. Enjoy listening to this episode just as much as I enjoyed being in on it!
Links:
BryanSays Site
Subscribe to Podcast
Our Episode (Ep 7)
Download Podcast
Popularity: unranked [?]
My iPhone 4 FaceTime Commercial
Jul 27th
Been having a really good time getting a better grasp at 3d modeling, rendering and animating. There is a lot that goes into all of it but once you start to see final products coming out, it really feels good. I can say that it has taken me longer to get good pieces out of 3d work than anything else I tried to create. Thankfully, I have been making post worthy stuff lately so thats pretty much the reason for this post. Please feel free to leave some comments in the post to let me know what you think. Rate the posts on my site as well, dont be too shy to join the blog community by giving feedback!
Here is something uploaded just to facebook:
Popularity: unranked [?]
First iPhone 4 Wedding Video
Jul 19th
Ever since I got my iPhone 4 I have been itching to try it out in some of my real world freelance projects. I have been doing a lot of editing with any kind of camera you can think of to put together great product for a client of mine named David Axe that takes from iPod’s with video cameras to HD Sony cameras all over Afghanistan and other places. We put that stuff together to make great pieces, so why cant I take this new iPhone 4 with an amazing high definition camera that takes great? shots under the right circumstances? Well I could, I already lined up and talked a client into letting me shot part of his upcoming music video with it, another one wants me to do every part of the project using it and now I already got a wedding video done!
The wedding video was not planned at all but came out decent enough for them to at least have their greatest moments captured in high quality for them. I was at a friends wedding when I realized I didn’t see anyone with a professional camera capturing this great day so I dug into my pocket and said I got this!
It wasn’t the most pleasant thing in the world trying to keep my phone straight the whole time for a Catholic wedding but I did fairly well for an impromptu videography session. The best part about the whole thing was the quick turnaround. I shot it at around 2pm, edited a good bit on the way back home and put the final touches a few hours later after hanging around the house. Now its a DVD for them, the day after! I will work on my equipment to get more smooth shots and be more steady with the camera and turn this into one of my production tools. Here is a quick clip of the highlights, Watch it in HD!!!
Popularity: unranked [?]
Adobe Photoshop CS5 Tips
Apr 12th
Superior HDR Imaging
Although HDR images always received a mixed response from photographers, there’s no denying that they provide a unique and interesting take. CS5 will – for better or worse – make creating HDR images easier, with greater control and accuracy.
Automatic ghost removal compensates for any camera movement, and the HDR tool gains tone mapping and better adjustments. The tool also allows for the creation of a HDR using only one image.

Content-Aware Fill
Another feature that has “wowed” users in the run-up to the launch is Content-Aware Fill. This is one of the app’s flagship pieces of functionality. The idea is to let you remove any part of an image, with content-aware fill automatically filling in the space left by that particular object. It aims to accurately match lighting, tone, and noise so it looks as if the removed content never existed.
Abobe’s demonstrations of this look impressive to date, and I’m looking forward to giving it a try with a few of my own images.
Easier Complex Selections
Accurately selecting delicate areas of an image – such as a person’s hair – can be a very difficult task. We actually posted a tutorial on this very subject a few months ago.
CS5 brings new functionality to let you easily select these intricate image elements. You can eliminate background color around your selection edges, and use a set of refinement tools to ensure an accurate selection.

State of the Art RAW Processing
To co-incide with the launch of CS5, we’ll be seeing a new version (v6) of Camera Raw. This new version of the plugin gives far greater control over your RAW conversions. A few notable features let you nondestructively remove image noise while preserving color and detail, add grain to make digital photos look more realistic, and give you greater flexibility for post-crop vignetting.
Better Performance
Finally, a few changes in CS5 promise to bring much improved performance. The main addition in this area is the introduction of 64 bit support. Providing you have a 64 bit computer, this could mean that processing very large images is “up to 10 times faster”. Whether you’ll experience that type of speed boost remains to be seen, but it’s a welcome addition for those of us with newer hardware.
Watch the Launch Event
If you’d like to see all these new features and functionality demonstrated, it’s worth signing up for the launch event later today. Julieanne Kost will be demonstrating several new features for photographers.
I’d love to know what you thoughts are at this stage – will you be rushing to upgrade, or are you happy to wait and see how the upgrade is received by everyone else first?
Announcing Adobe CS5! Join us for the exclusive Global Online Launch Event, Monday, April 12, 2010.
-source: tuts network
Popularity: unranked [?]
The First iPad Review
Mar 31st

It strikes you when you first touch an iPad. The form just feels good, not too lightweight or heavy, nor too thin or thick. It’s sensual. It’s tactile. And it’s a good way to spot a first-timer, too, as I observed with a few test subjects. The dead giveaway for an iPad n00b is pausing a few breaths before hitting the “on” switch, and just let the thing rest there against skin. Flick the switch and the novelty hits. Just as the iPhone, Palm Pré and Android phones scratched an itch we didn’t know we had, somewhere between cellphone and notebook, the iPad hits a completely new pleasure spot. The display is large enough to make the experience of apps and games on smaller screens stale. Typography is crisp, images gem-like, and the speed brisk thanks to Apple’s A4 chip and solid state storage. As I browse early release iPad apps, web pages, and flip through the iBook store and books, the thought hits that this is a greater leap into a new user experience than the sum of its parts suggests.
Remember The Periodic Table of Elements series of books we featured here at Boing Boing? There’s an iPad version ($13.99 in the app store, screenshots here), and it’s dazzling — it makes science feel like magic in your hands. I called the guy behind The Elements, Theo Gray, and asked him to put into words the UI magic that iPad makes possible for creators of books, games, news, and productivity tools.
“The Elements on iPad is not a game, not an app, not a TV show. It’s a book. But it’s Harry Potter’s book. This is the version you check out from the Hogwarts library. Everything in it is alive in some way.”
Indeed, the elements in this periodic table seem very much alive. The obvious way to examine static objects — say, a lump of gold (number 79) or an ingot of cast antimony (number 51) is to rotate them, to spin the specimen with your fingertips. And that’s exactly what you do here. You can view them in 3D if you wish, with 3D glasses you buy separately online. Tap here, and live data from Wolfram Alpha pops up (the thermodynamic properties of molybednum, perhaps, or the current price of platinum). Some elements are presented with little video clips you can play, too.
When you get a chance, compare it to the tiny screen of an iPhone or Droid, or the less responsive touchscreens of an all-in-one desktop PC such as HP’s TouchSmart: it’s a completely different experience.
“A stereo 3D video of a static object that you can rotate in real time,” Theo says over the phone. “Honestly, I’m not sure where you go from there. Smellovision? Not a whole lot more you can do.”
The Elements presentation for iPad (those spinning samples of elements you twirl with your fingertip) makes use of openGL textures, compressing visual data in a way that can be compressed in the graphics chip, so the data can be read without hogging CPU resources. By making use of hardware native to iPad, you can can “play” a spin forwards and backwards with no hiccups or performance lags — even spin 3, 4, 5, 10 views of an element at a time. This ain’t Flash video over WiFi, folks. You’ll feel sad going back to chokey http embeds.

Each app for iPad can’t be more than 2 gigs in compressed archive form (a limitation imposed by the zip compression standard at work here, not something of Apple’s own design). Data-dense applications like The Elements buck right up against that limit, but future iterations (this and others that go live Saturday were developed with great haste) will likely take advantage of the ability to do background downloading to supplement data.
Popularity: unranked [?]













