das is a telee vision

Who says that spontaneous purchases are a waste of money? Well I usually do. I'd like to think of a product, look around, research the web for reviews, get a bunch of prices. This time however, it was different. Going to the local 'Retravision' store on the weekend to lurk around was an accidental event. "Let's just have a quick look", were the famous last words. Well the look was quick indeed. A new model 'W' series of Sony's Bravia TVs has hit the store. "how much is it?", "boy, it looks nice", "what are the specs?" were the in-store comments at the time. Oh yea, whatever, thanks buddy, yep TV is nice but so are the other 20 on the shelves. But this TV in particular stirred something up. It was simple, feature packed and a new model. The price wasn't too bad either.
But what of it, it's just a TV that I've been dreaming of having for a long time, but the tech has never been up to scratch or the looks were way off. I didn't want some 1366x768 "HD ready" or compatible LCD that pretended to be. But this was the real deal. Full 1080x1024, digital receiver, 3 HDMI ins, VGA in, and the design was clean and simple. After inquiring about the 'best price', we went looking around. No other store had these in stock yet as it was so new and the other prices were about $500 more than the one on offer.
So We thought 'stuff it' let's get spontaneous on this baby. Bought it, it fit in the car.. just. Got it home, turned it on. Dream-like. Everything was perfect. Nice bright, sharp image, and the HD programs looked awesome. After doing some research on the web about this model, I found that the reviews were very favorable, so that made me happy.
Long live the new telly!

Touchscreen navigation: touch or scratch?

With the encroachment of the self glorifying iPhone, it shows that touchscreens are starting to break trough the mainstream barrier. What is really interesting here though is the innovation of navigation methods using a touchscreen on a small device. Apple seem to be pushing the fact that we already have hand fulls of stylus', namely our fingers. So we should use those, and throw out the old stylus.

The idea of using a finger on a small device touchscreen is not new. My old iPaq would accept finger touches, albeit very difficult to register a press and inaccurate, but it did work for things like the media player. However this raises two main points that pop up when the stylus is thrown all together in favour of the finger.
Accuracy and Visibility - when you're touching a button, you obscure it. This may reduce the accuracy of the button and it definitely removes its visibility. Issues that can be huge on a small-screen device. Apple, being the kooky bunch that they are came up with a reverse-touch approach. I think this one fails too because when you're going to touch a button, you want to go and touch it directly, not have to wind your hand around the back of the device. The awkward feeling of this would actually shift my preference towards obscuring the button on order to press it.
A simple stylus would solve both of these issues. It is both accurate and does not obscure what it's pressing, making for a usefull little stick. C'mon Apple, dropping this? Really?
This should not, however, detract from the viability of using fingers as a navigation device on small device touchscreens. Indeed it doesn't look that bad on the iPhone. But what also impressed me is that in parallel, a Taiwanese company HTC have released their version of how some of this navigation can work. Also I'm glad that they stole some of iPhone's thunder by releasing this device before the iPhone.

My work is getting blogged with positive feedback

Doing a quick search on "iDirectory westfield" in Google, brings up a few blogs that people actually went to trouble to to write about my software. This is the wayfinding kiosk in the San Franciso Westfield shopping center. This one seems to be positive on the software interface part, which makes me happy. The couple of points that were pointed out were about putting more of these kiosks around the place so that people didn't have to wait to use them. There is a good discussion going on here about the viability of this type of interface in shopping centers. Always good to discuss these things. This one went to the trouble of putting the interface usage on digg and youtube.
Great feeling.

Sony's stepping up in the display race

With it's bendable thin screen. This screen is paper thin piece of plastic (well plastic thin then), so it won't break if dropped. And it is reminiscent of sci-fi movies such as minority report where the screens are transparent. This one however has the added bonus of being bendable. This means that all sorts of shapes can now be surrounded by pixelated real estate. Going beyond the clothing applications of such technology, with the introduction of a touchscreen panel this could go very far. Any surface becomes a tactile, interactive interface that can fulfil a purpose.
The technology involved in making these screens has been around for a while. I've heard of it about 5 years back when the Kodak labs were researching the capacity to emit luminescent colour from a chemical reaction generated by insects such as the firefly. It's only now that we are seeing some actual results. In fact it looks like these screens are brighter and more detailed then the conventional LCD. Because the technology here is chemical and organic in nature, researches have been having trouble increasing the size if these screens for a while, but it seems to be finally happening. The OLED screens that are emerging now should see that all our screens in the future are just a piece of plastic. Awesome.
Devices could range from patient health monitors to gaming industry's newest controller revolution: the hand. If there was a console (let's bank for PlayStation 5) that comes with 2 pieces of transparent plastic. This moulds to any surface, your forearm, leg, the couch, and it displays touchable controls that conform to a standard of course, but may be altered by the software to have additional buttons, sliders and controllers. This does take away from the whole 'button' experience, but I think it is adaptable. Hope it's better for the gaming RSI too.

new picture taking thingo

I have not owned a digital camera singe my monstrous Sony Mavica that took floppy discs and took 640x480 images. It was an awesome toy and the floppy disc integration was pure genius. Well OK that was at least 10 years ago now. Since then the only way I could take pictures was with my phone camera. Wheee! blurryness!
So before embarking on my trip to Bali, I thought the opportunity presented itself to buy a camera for myself. The potential of the pictures that I could take in Bali was awesome from what I could see in brochures and ads. Lush forests, carved statues, temples, rural people, chaotic traffic. It was all too much of a temptation. A camera has to be had.
So, choices choices choices. The digital camera market has been saturated with digital cameras of all sorts for years now, so which camera to choose could be a bit overwhelming to say the least. Thank the interweb gods for review sites. Hitting all sorts of review sites and reading furiously as led me to less decisions. I could choose a compact camera. Something small, handy that I could hold in one hand, point-and-shoot and put back in my pocket or hang off my keyring. All good and well, technology is getting smaller so might as well run with it. The things that put me off getting one of these nano gadgets were based on the size of the lens. I know, it's not the size but how you use it, but to this day the size matters. So the general rule of thumb in photography is that the bigger the lens, the better quality the images. So generally compact sized cameras have small lenses, this can end up with inferior quality images in certain occasions. For most cases they are fine, but it's the marginal cases such as fast moving images, close images and nighttime images that may end up frustratingly blurred. Steering away from this I moved onto the other camera extreme: SLR.
SLR cameras have been around for a long time now. They are those massive cameras that professionals use to take pictures in studios, on sportsfileds and in other professional settings. Great! now I can take awesome quality images! just what I wanted. Get me one of those! So wow! Canon, Nikkon, Olympus, Sony... All have great professional cameras that take awesome images and accept all sorts of fancy-ass lenses. Now the cons. Expensive! oh gawd! a good camera would set me back about AUD$3000, then the lenses. these can cost anything up to $50k! great images and all, but I'm not a professional photographer nor do I intend to be one. I don't want to spend thousands just to take photos! even the $3k for the camera is a bit much. What does it take to take some happy snaps?
OK, clam down. Back to the review websites. What do they think? read read read. aha! Most of these recommend one camera as the one that they love and admire. This is the Canon PowerShot S3 IS. This baby is a mid-range camera. What that means is that it's a camera that is feature packed, has a good lens and is small enough not to warrant a special backpack. So now I made the choice! awesome! Now where to buy. Scouring eBay yielded some results, but nothing concrete. Local stores are selling it for around AUD$600. Then I got a hot tip. One of Taryn's friend's husband, Ben, happen to be selling cheap Canon cameras because of a loop hole in his budget allocations! Sweet! So after a quick email I was able to get this baby off him for AUD$466. Brilliant! Also a 1GB SanDiskII SD card cost me AUD$30 from a duty free shop. Perfect!
Bali Bali Bali! snap snap snap!