Forget Gaming, This is Why I Want Gesture Recognition in iOS

I've written before about Leap Motion, and how it's still not entirely clear whether gesture recognition is ready for mainstream computing, but this is a neat idea:

As any chef can attest, swiping, scrolling, or clicking through a recipe with fingers covered in dough can be a messy, insurmountable feat – not to mention potentially damaging to your devices. Reaching into Allthecooks Recipes with Leap Motion, however, keeps your device batter-free.

Fancy Minority Report style cookery aside, I'm not sure I want my MacBook in the kitchen, and I've have thought the iPad would be a much better fit for this kind of thing. Who's thinking that this might well be how Apple is planning to utilise its recent purchase of PrimeSense?

Coming Next from Studio Ghibli's Arrietty Director

I adored Arrietty, so I can't wait for this.

Studio Ghibli スタジオジブリ's next film will be an adaptation of children's novel When Marnie was There 思い出のマーニー.

Written by Joan G. ROBINSON in 1981, Marnie tells the story of an adopted child who meets a mysterious girl who lives by the sea. The story has been transported from England to Japan for the Studio Ghibli adaptation.

How to Get a Mac Plus Working Online

Such a labour of love here, and probably beyond my own levels of patience and skill. In the early days of our Internet experiments I used to be the guy who knew how to get most LC-era Macs online, and my own Colour Classic was hooked up to the network, but I never got my Mac Plus surfing. This makes me want to try.

Sure, it was slow as hell, but it worked! Data loaded, pages rendered, and links were clickable. Even forms sort of worked.

Did I mention it was slow? It was slow. Soooo sloooow. Slow slow slow. Like, minutes to read and render a page slow.

Vertu: Selling Ugly To Rich Suckers Since 1998

Vertu started life in the late 1990s as an indulgence for Nokia's designers. Led by Frank Nuovo, the group set out to explore what a phone could look and feel like if its design was unconstrained by budgetary concerns. What if you could use all the best materials and most expensive manufacturing processes, what sort of phone would you end up with? Given free reign to experiment within the then-resplendent Nokia, Vertu gradually evolved into its own division, with a name, logo, and brand identity that grew to be synonymous with overt demonstrations of wealth.

As I scrolled through the manufacturing images on The Verge's profile of once-Nokia-owned luxury handset manufacturer Vertu, I was amazed by just how many of the awestruck captions could apply to Apple's current products. High-end materials, engineered to micro-scale precision, hand assembling of the smallest parts, rejection of imperfectly fitting elements? Have these people seen how the Mac Pro is being made? Or the iPhone 5/5s? Seems to me that Vertu has just not bothered working out how to scale anything, instead relying on fetishising the inefficiencies in their processes through ultra-premium pricing.

“The Hunger Games” is already here

Harsh words on US Immigration policy from Miles Kimball over on Quartz:

In the real world, exclusion is a form of cruelty that we take for granted. Keeping people out of a material paradise for no good reason turns utopia into dystopia. By keeping immigrants out, the United States—like the other rich nations of the world—plays the role of the Capitol in my twist on The Hunger Games. But all we need to do to change that is to honor once again the words on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free …”

Important stuff, and a lesson of which we in the UK could do well to take note.

The Home Replicator isn't Coming Anytime Soon

From back in October, but nice to read a less breathless take on 3D printing in the MIT Technology Review:

As for everyone getting their own household replicator, Basiliere, Lipson, and other experts are skeptical. Even if printer prices fall drastically, making any finished product is going to require serious industrial machinery, with high-temperature lasers and powdered metals. Lipson envisions a 3-D printing ecosystem: some people might have printers at work—a car mechanic might have one for making certain parts, for instance, or a hospital for making implants—while other people might send designs to companies like Shapeways to be printed offsite. Some hobbyists might have small machines at home to tinker with, making bespoke Legos or other objects.

I've argued this for some time, somewhat unfashionably. Nevertheless, Josh Dzieza's closing paragraph is worth bearing in mind:

But Lipson also admits there could be surprises ahead. “It’s like having this conversation in the ’70s, trying to figure out how people are going to use computers,” he says. “It’s hard to imagine what business models will emerge.”

The Wii U Gamepad is an Anchor

In a balanced and largely optimistic (long term) Wired piece on Nintendo's fortunes, Chris Kohler raises the question of a Wii U without the second-screen-cum-gamepad: 

Purely based on where Nintendo is going with its software lineup, GamePad is becoming an optional accessory. All that’s left is to make it an optional purchase. If selling GamePad separately might allow Nintendo to reduce the price of Wii U to just under $200 (with a game pre-installed on the console for extra value, of course) it would look much more appealing next to the $400 PS4 and $500 Xbox One.

If it seems unlikely that a game console would climb down so dramatically and remove the one thing that it pitched as its defining feature, think again. It’s already happened twice this year: Microsoft’s preemptive reversal of all of its Xbox One DRM policies (and making Kinect optional) and Nintendo’s release of the 2DS, which removes the 3-D screen that gave 3DS its name in an effort to knock the price down even further.

Totally with this. As a casual-gamer that doesn't own any consoles I was looking at the cheaper Wii mini with interest until I saw just how much they'd crippled the display output quality. I've looked at the Wii U but was completely turned off by the complexity of the two-screen set up and the huge controller. If you'd offered me the option of having the Wii U with the Classic Wii controller I'd have gone for it.

Missing the Fax Machine

Richard Baguley over at Medium is has a fondness for the pre-email document transmission technology that many of us came to despise. 

Every technology has a dark side, and the dark side of the fax was junk faxes. In the 1980s and early 1990s, it wasn’t uncommon to come into the office on monday morning to find your fax machine had received piles of junk faxes advertising dodgy goods, from cheap t-shirts to medical insurance. Companies were set up that would scan every possible phone number, calling and looking for the bippy noise of a fax machine at the other end. For a fee, they would then send your advert to thousands of these devices, whoever they were used by.

On one occasion my office needed a dedicated fax line for a new Mac we'd bought with a built-in Fax/Modem. The phone company still had an adjacent number that we'd used for the fax machine at a company a year or two earlier, so we grabbed that. No sooner had we plugged it in than we started getting junk faxes. They'd been sending them for the whole time that the number had been inactive. Nightmare.

Saidoka iPhone Dock

I've been looking for something like this for ages, but from reading the actual user reviews it seems like a case of "almost there". The Saidoka puts the iPhone at the perfect angle—lying almost flat but sloping slightly upwards for ease of use—and doesn't partially obscure the Home button in the way that Apple's own dock does (which makes unlocking with Touch ID difficult). It lacks an audio through port (Apple's own carries audio-out but doesn't support the headset mic, which pretty much makes it useless in these days of Airplay for speakers), and reviewers seem to have taken issue with the "loose-fitting" micro-USB port for charging. Personally, I'd be happy to never see another micro-USB port ever again. I'd take a bigger dock with a full-size USB—or ideally a Lightning port—over this any day. 

Gender, Marketing & The Video Games Industry

This is a fantastic article, which I urge you to read in its entirety. I could pull any number of quotes from it, but this one stands out for me: 

But Romero points out that if we go back to fall 1993, two significant things happened in gaming. One is the release of Doom, which heralded the start of the male-dominated first-person shooter genre. The other, in the same year, is the launch of Myst, which had an overwhelmingly female player base. "Myst dominated the charts, and we don't say games are dominated by women," Romero says. "So I've never felt that way. The Sims has more female players than it has male players, but I don't use those statistics to paint all of games."

A complex and fascinating area. We can all agree that we need more young women in the industry, but it's not as clearly male-dominated as it might first appear.

This, Bogost says, is one of the fundamental problems with the way people view video games today. The most popular titles — stuff like Candy Crush, Draw Something, Bejeweled — are excluded from being 'real games,' both by those within and outside of video game culture. What that leaves is what he describes as infantile adolescent power fantasy games, which are possibly a minority game experience, but they're the "loudest." So even if video games as a whole aren't a gendered medium, even if there's diversity in content and players, the stereotype persists outside of video game culture.

Nailed it.

Finding the Next Billion Smartphone Users

To say the Moto G has been highly anticipated is probably an understatement. The Verge does a pretty good job here of deconstructing what Motorola has had to let go of to meet its low-to-mid price point. This is a shot against the bows of Samsung's older offerings for sure, but I'm still not sure it's enough on its own to move data-light phone users over to expensive data plans.

The Moto G doesn’t have to contend with the type of premium devices that meet my standards, though, and compared to the (admittedly fun) clear plastic shelled Asha phones like the 503, uninspiring Firefox OS phones like the ZTE Open, and Nokia’s low-end Windows Phones, the Moto G looks truly premium, even if it doesn’t quite live up to expectations.

Motorola has taken a leap in the right direction here, bringing aspirational qualities to a new price range, but it hasn't performed a miracle. Instead, it’s boiled down the elements of great design to sell it to the masses. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Within the growing tablet format, Apple’s iPad gaining share.

What are all these other tablets being used for? Not for viewing ads, that's for sure.

Tablets grow, while the iPad grows even more. Tablets accounted for 28% of all mobile ad impressions over Q3 2013, which was double their share in Q4 2012. Within the growing tablet format, Apple’s iPad, already the dominant device, further established its position by gaining share.

Apple pulls away from the pack. Apple remained the strongest manufacturer by volume, with 63% of all global ad impressions. Furthermore, Apple also increased its share of global impressions against the ‘long tail’ of manufacturers
- that is, all mobile device manufacturers other than Apple and Samsung. 

From the Q3 2013 Adfonic Global AdMetrics Report. Full PDF report linked here:

Life Size Artificial Gaga

If anyone was going to do this, Gaga was. 

Gaga teamed up with manufacturers in Japan to create GAGADOLL, a humanoid silicon doll that looks just like the singer. In a video showing the making of the doll, a user places his head on the doll's chest while it plays "Applause."

Fabian Oefner's Exploding Cars

You have to see these images. 

The Disintegrating series – representing a staggering amount of work- has been created from hundreds not to say thousands of shots. Each car has been dismantled completely, from the body shell to the smallest screws, then photographed piece by piece in a specific position to obtain the illusion of an exploding car.

I remember piecing together composite digital images from separate shots of models in the early 90's, when digital cameras were low-resolution, and our Macs were incredibly slow compared to today, but we never attempted anything as intricate or as beautiful as this.

Walking New York

To write The New York Nobody Knows, Helmreich walked 6,048 miles, covering almost every block in the city's five boroughs: Queens, Manhattan, Staten Island, Brooklyn and the Bronx. It took him four years, walking an average of 1,512 miles a year. He wore out nine pairs of shoes.

 As a passionate pedestrian, I can attest to the virtues of walking cities. Heck, I've nearly killed myself doing it in the heat of Bangkok, and I've worn out good boots on trips to Paris and Hong Kong.

(Thanks to  MyAppleMenu for the link)

UPDATE: The book is here on Amazon, and looks well worth a read. The cover alone is gorgeous.

Cédric Delsaux's amazing Star Wars photographs

Delsaux's Dark Lens collection has been around since last year, but they're still worthy of your attention. 

“Depuis longtemps de nombreux artistes ont interprété l’univers de Star Wars bien au-delà de tout ce qui fut représenté dans les films. Une des interprétations les plus unique et intriguante que j’ai pu voir est celle du photographe Cedric Delsaux qui a brillamment integré des personnages de Star Wars dans des paysages urbains et industriels indiscutablement terrestres. Aussi novateur et dérangeant que puisse être son travail, il n’en est pas moins plausible."

George Lucas

If you like the work, you can still buy the book on Amazon.

iPads generate "vast majority" of US holiday mobile sales

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(EON: Enhanced Online News)--Adobe (Nasdaq:ADBE) today released its Adobe® Digital Index 2013 online shopping data. Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday saw record online sales with 1.062 billion and 1.93 billion, respectively. For the first time more than 24 percent of online sales occurred on smartphones and tablets, a record increase of 118 percent year-over-year (YoY). iOS-based devices drove more than $543 million dollars in online sales, with iPad taking a 77 percent share. Android-based devices were responsible for $148 million in online sales, a 4.9 percent share of mobile driven online sales.

 $417 Million sales through iPad-transaction alone. Android phones still doing more business than Android tablets. I wonder how that'll change going forward? It's easy to see why the massive numbers of Android-based phones aren't reflected in transactions, since so many of those handsets are generic smartphones-sold-as-feature phones, probably sold with zero-to-low data plans and sold to people who primarily use them for calls and texting. Can that pattern hold for Android tablets? I imagine Amazon expects online sales generated by Kindles to overwhelmingly go to its own stores, and they're probably right.

When Did Microsoft's Marketing Get So Clueless?

Matt Lees of popular UK game site, Videogamer is. He produced a video criticising KSI's inclusion in the event. An influential games critic, his scathing attack has been viewed almost 100,000 times on YouTube, and caused a spike of controversy within the games industry.

He told the Guardian: "Microsoft's marketing angle this year more than ever has been all about the all-in-one 'entertainment hub'. It's a very family-oriented angle, and KSI's unresolved history of making light of sexual objectification and rape didn't feel like a good fit for a family brand."

What with this and all the Chromebook 'Scroogled' stuff, I'd say Microsoft needs a new marketing team.

Shenzhen's Amazing Terminal 3 Building

Designed by the Italian Studio Fuksas, Terminal 3 has been shaped to look like a manta ray, "a fish that breathes and changes its own shape, undergoes variations, [and] turns into a bird to celebrate the emotion and fantasy of a flight." That theme of breathing and openness is carried on by a honeycomb of skylights perforating the new terminal's steel skin and a set of stylized "trees" that disguise the air conditioning apparatus. The hexagonal shapes and honeycomb theme are then subtly reiterated throughout the three-floor, 500,000-square-meter facility.

Incredible. I want to fly to there the next time I visit China or Hong Kong.

How the iPad Changes Writing in Education

In the progression from Writing 1.0 to 2.0, we digitally enhanced an existing process. If we examined it through the lens of Dr. Ruben Puentedura's SAMR model, we might have stepped from "substitution" to "augmentation," allowing the technology to provide "functional improvement." With iPads, the goal should not be to apply the paper or digital processes in the same way, but to consider how we can leverage the capabilities of the device in order to "modify" and "redefine" what's possible.

Great article with a lot of practical ideas for how iPad can change how writing happens for students and teachers.