- Privacy Commission Uses CC License For Content — The office of the New Zealand Privacy Commissioner is releasing its content under the CC-BY license, including fact sheets, newsletters, guidance, case studies, howtos, and more.
- Magic iPad Light Painting (BERG London) — continuing their stunning work, this concept video uses a form of long-exposure stop-motion to turn the iPad into visual magic.
- Implementing TLS and Raw Sockets Using Only Flash and Javascript — interesting first steps to implementing non-trivial security in Javascript (“The Language Of The Future ™”). (via ivanristic on Twitter)
- How to Read a Patent in 60 Seconds (Dan Shapiro) — quick guide to the important parts of a patent. For more detail, check out the more detailed docs from the PatentLens.
"iPad" entries
Four short links: 15 September 2010
CC Privacy Info, Magic with iPads, SSL in Javascript, and Reading Patents
Device update: Tablet edition
A look at the Neofonie WeTab, Samsung Galaxy Tab, and Telefunken T9HD
The IFA 2010 may become known as the moment when electronics manufacturers announced their responses to Apple's iPad. Here's a look at notable tablet announcements from the event and other recent news from the world of ereaders and related devices.
TOC's Wednesday devices, gadgets and ereaders update
With IFA Consumer Electronics Unlimited just days away, this week brings plenty of buzz about new ereaders, tablets and more.
The IFA traditionally offers an early indication of what gadgets will sell well through Christmas. It's no wonder so much attention is focused on the show with order volume stemming from last year's show reaching nearly $3.8 billion.
What publishers can and should learn from "The Elements"
Theodore Gray on true interactivity and apps vs. ebooks.
Theodore Gray, author/creator of "The Elements," shares his thoughts on interactivity in ebooks, why programmers should be treated like authors, and why he believes the print form will continue to exist for quite some time.
Four short links: 11 August 2010
iPad Designers, Scientific Cooking, Twitter Psych, Courseware Reach
- 10 Essential iPad Apps for Publication Designers — a couple of interesting new suggestions here, including the New Zealand Herald (hated at home for including a bloated intro movie, but with interesting article presentation), and Paris Match (adding interactive features to almost every story). (via Simon St Laurent)
- Cooking in Silico: Heat Transfer in the Modern Kitchen (YouTube) — In this talk at the University of Washington, Nathan Myhrvold and Chris Young of Intellectual Ventures show how computationally intense heat-transfer calculations can reveal the subtle factors that influence the success or failure of a cook’s efforts in the kitchen. Explore the virtues of computational cooking, and watch novel techniques and creations made possible when science informs the culinary arts. Mhyrvold has a new cookbook (six volumes!) coming out. (via TechFlash)
- Ten Psychological Insights re: Twitter — summary of ten psychological studies about Twitter users. Many but not all of the most-followed Twitter users are, unsurprisingly, celebrities. This top-heavy usage reflects the fact that being interesting is a talent that not everyone can acquire (without relying on the halo effect of being famous that is). Occasionally, though, some manage the trick of being famous and quite interesting, e.g. Stephen Fry. (via vaughanbell on Twitter)
- MIT OpenCourseWare: Unlocking Knowledge, Empowering Minds — Ten years later, MIT Open-CourseWare (OCW) […] contains the core academic content used in 2000 classes, presenting substantially all the undergraduate and graduate curriculum from MIT’s 33 academic departments. A selection of courses, including introductory physics, math, and engineering, contain full video lectures. Partner organizations have created more than 800 translations of OCW courses in five languages. The OCW team has distributed over 200 copies of the entire Web site on hard drives primarily to sub-Saharan Africa, where Internet access is limited. OCW has grown into a global educational resource. (via Sara Winge)
App Inventor and the culture wars
Creativity is what makes life worthwhile, and enabling it is a heroic act. Google has built a culture around enabling others' creativity, and that's worth celebrating. Google's new App Inventor gets to the heart of the cultural difference between Apple and Google. If you haven't seen it yet, App Inventor is an experimental new SDK for the Android platform. What's different about App Inventor is that there's practically no coding per se; it's an entirely visual language.
Ruminations on iPhone 4, iOS and mobile video
We're on the cusp of the post-PC era, and Apple is pushing us there.
Follow the path that Apple has forged in creating a 100-million-device-strong iOS platform and ecosystem (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad). Next, watch the seamless flow of tens of billions of consumer downloads from an iTunes and App Store marketplace that is backed by 150 million active credit cards. Whether you consider the emerging "it" a phone, a computer, a media player, a netbook or a gaming device, is it even a stretch to argue that Apple is on the cusp of completing the last mile to the Post-PC era?
iPhone economics and lower barriers to entry
The power of the App Store is defined by more than direct revenue.
The App Store has exposed incumbents in the mobile industry to the same sort of asymmetric competition that has reshaped the media industry over the past decade. Developers are responding in droves to the economic incentives that lower barriers to entry create, as well as the fact that the App Store has generated $1 billion in royalty payments in just a few years.
Four short links: 11 June 2010
Delicious Absolution, Open Data Incentives, Curious iPad, and Desktop Web Apps Again
- Joshua at Seven on Seven — Delicious creator Joshua Schachter participated in a Rhizome “Seven on Seven” recently. He was paired with artist Monica Narula and together they explored guilt and absolution with the help of the Mechanical Turk. Check out the presentation PDF for the quick summary.
- How to Align Researcher Incentives with Outcomes (Cameron Neylon) — the open science data movement battles entrenched forces for closedness. We need more sophisticated motivators than blunt policy instruments, so we arrive at metrics. […] What might the metrics we would like to see look like? I would suggest that they should focus on what we want to see happen. We want return on the public investment, we want value for money, but above all we want to maximise the opportunity for research outputs to be used and to be useful. We want to optimise the usability and re-usability of research outputs and we want to encourage researchers to do that optimisation. Thus if our metrics are metrics of use we can drive behaviour in the right direction. It sounds good, but I have one question: I remember The Rise of Crowd Science. Alex Szalay didn’t have to change researcher incentives to promote shared astronomical data. I’d ask: what can the other sciences learn from astronomy?
- Making an iPad HTML5 App and Making it Really Fast (Thomas Fuchs) — some curious hard-won facts about iPad web development, like that touch events are delivered faster than click events. (via Webstock newsletter)
- Appcelerator — open source platform for building native mobile and desktop apps with web technologies. Local filesystem access and native controls, but built with HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, Python, and Ruby. OS X, Linux, Blackberry, iPad, …. I’ve not tried it, but it may be the variation on desktop web apps whose time has come. (via ptorrsmith on Twitter)
The iPad in Europe (real live units)
UK, German and French book publishers have all provided content for the ipad and while there remain some grumbles about legality, the agency model for bookselling now seems to have passed it's first challenge, actually existing.