I like these e-mail-yourself-from-the-future things, and Photojojo’s Time Capsule is a brilliant one that takes a selection of your Flickr photos from the past and “makes them wonderful again”.
It was just the right amount of delay, because I’d forgotten I’d done it so it was a little bit of delight in my inbox to take a look at my time capsule.
[tags]photojojo, time capsule, flickr, future[/tags]
After the disaster I had with MacHeist I decided to go for the new MacUpdate Promo Bundle, mainly because of Sound Studio and Parallels. The last MacUpdate Promo worked well for me - none of the billing hassles of MacHeist, nor the arrogance of John Casasanta.
There are a couple of lame apps in there like Art Text and BannerZest, but also a bunch of useful utilities like Typinator, Hazel and Leap. I’ve also heard some writers rave about Story Mill. An added bonus is WhatSize, a little app that clearly shows up what’s guzzling your disk space (more useful than I had imagined).
I’m guessing that Sound Studio, at least, will get unlocked, which will save me much paid with my podcasts even if Parallels fails to make it, and the other are useful (I used to use Textpander and now Typinator all the time).
Anyway, stop reading this and go buy a bundle so that Parallels gets unlocked!
[tags]macupdate, macheist, bundle, parallels, sound studio, apps[/tags]
Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, who created one of my all time favourite interactive pieces, We Feel Fine, have a new piece called I Want You To Want Me commissioned for MoMA’s Design and The Elastic Mind show.
I Want You To Want Me explores the world of online dating, scraping data from thousands of online profiles all in search of love. As with We Feel Fine the interaction is simple, but allows you to view the data in lots of beautiful, emotional and meaningful ways. The interface is made up of balloons representing each person and each one has one of over 500 specially shot video silhouettes inside it.
The ways of looking at the data are described as movements and include things like “Who I Am” and “What I Want” along with “Openers”, “Closers” and “Taglines”, which are used in the profile descriptions. There’s also a matchmaker section:
Matchmaker algorithmically pairs people based on their descriptions of who they are and what they’re looking for. Balloon couples emerge on the horizon and drift to the foreground, before pausing side by side for a few seconds and then floating off together.
The project’s website explains it all in detail with some great images from it. A real treat is that they also documented their process with sketches, photos, etc.
[tags]Jonathan Harris, Sep Kamvar, MoMA, installation, dating[/tags]
My latest Core77 Broadcast interview with Jason Bruges from Jason Bruges Studio is now online.
In a slightly echoing room in Jason’s studio, accompanied by the usual sirens and car alarms of London’s Shoreditch, he talks about his roots in architecture, the journey to interactive surfaces, sustainability and his thoughts about giving this emerging area a proper name.
Hope you enjoy it.
The next one, coming soon, is with Troika.
[tags]Core77, Jason Bruges[/tags]
Apparently Playpen has been broken since yesterday and I didn’t notice (I was on a train from Hamburg most of yesterday). The robot running it got all lonely in his little grey cell.
Something went screwy with the WP-Cache plug-in and it was spewing error pages. If you’re reading this, it’s fixed now.
At some point I’ll be upgrading Playpen too, so get ready for it to break all over again.
Thanks to Joel for pointing it out.
Photo: DonSolo on Flickr.
Following on from my post and Nigel’s comments about Clicktoy, I just found Scratch, which is a simple multimedia authoring environment for children. It looks like it outputs to java applets as a playback format.
The team is led by Mitch Resnick at MIT’s Lifelong Kindergarten, which would frankly be my dream academic post.
Scratch is free to download and is for Windows and OS X.
[tags]games, programming, multimedia, children, MIT, Scratch[/tags]
From the old, beloved Atari 2600 joystick to the Wiimote, how did we get from there to here?
The “Sock Master’s” family tree of controllers has the goods. There are some classics and some real stinkers like the The Nintendo Virtual Boy Controller. What were they thinking?
[tags]controllers, games, videogames, hardware[/tags]
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