Everyone on this planet, especially those who frequent our sister blog Webdesigner Depot, could appreciate the awesomeness and creativity that Photoshop empowers people with on the Web. However, some people have an obsession with Photoshop — the Hyperakt group, which came up with the idea for the “I Have PSD” video short, is a perfect example….
Is it a bird? A plane? Big Foot? It’s none of those. However, it might just be the first photo of humans in existence. It all started after photos of Cincinnati along the Ohio River were discovered and analyzed. The photos themselves were intriguing, but now question has arisen over whether or not this one photo is a first of its kind: the first photo of humans in existence. Is it? Robert Krulwich, an NPR correspondant, was on to something: This is Cincinnati on Sunday, September 24th, 1848—162 years ago. The picture, a daguerreotype taken by Charles Fontayne and William Porter (who were standing…
I don’t know whether this is awkward, crazy, or both, but someone has started the incredible rumor that Apple might very well be interested in purchasing Sony — yes, the company that makes TVs and PS3s. The funny thing is that Apple could afford it. The interesting thing, however, is that Apple doesn’t need them. It all started on Saturday, when an article from Barron’s noted that Apple could be eyeing Sony, Adobe, or Disney as a potential purchase. It is very likely, especially when considering that Apple has money to blow. But speculation has continued to grow as trading of Sony’s stock has increased…
Not only does Apple get to celebrate its future release of OS X Lion and the hype surrounding the new Macbook Air, they get to laugh in the face of Research In Motion (RIM), too. Apple has now overtaken RIM for second place in worldwide smart phone share. Apple only trails one company when it comes to smart phone market share, and that company is Nokia. The third-quarter global smart phone share report from Strategy Analytics states that Apple has ousted RIM by 3.1 percentage points. It’s such an impressive undertaking by Apple, given that only three years ago there was no such thing as an iPhone. However,…
If you’ve taken a stroll through Nanjing, China lately, you might notice something peculiarly odd: vending machines. These things, on their own, are not usually odd, but sometimes the things inside of them are. This is one of those situations. This time, the Chinese are stuffing live crab inside of vending machines, giving “fresh” and “fast food” new meaning. The grab are placed inside individual plastic containers, and they are around 30 cents cheaper than crab sold in markets. What happens happens if you receive a dead crab? Consider yourself lucky: you’ll receive three live crabs for free….
As much as I love Twitter, these issues over stability and scaling are really starting to get to me. For the past several days, the message “Loading Tweets seems to be taking awhile” has bombarded my screen. It’s not clear what the issue is, but Twitter obviously hasn’t yet fixed the leaky pipes. The worst thing of all is that I no longer get to see the Fail Whale, I merely see a pointless useless message telling me that the website is broken. No fun at all….
Remember seeing those futuristic looking heads-up displays that soldiers and, well, Iron Man gets to have fun with? Well, Olympus and NTT Docomo are planning to bring something like that to consumers who have lost their way with AR Walker. It’s a pair of glasses, a smart phone, and a retina display all combined in one package to enable the user to acquire information in their peripheral vision. In other words, it blasts images and text to one of the user’s eyes without having the user become distracted and run head-first into a wall (as always, safety first). AR Walker has an acceleration sensor and…
Games go social, computers go mobile, and communication goes online, but many newspapers and magazines still haven’t made the connection; Or as the old saying goes: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” It hasn’t ever been more relevant than today when New Corp failed to convince many of its publishers that an online subscription-based newsstand was worth their while. Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corp, is always on the hunt to find new ways to make people pay, even if that means pissing people off. The concept of an online subscription newsstand sounds like a fair middle ground;…
As much of an advocate I am for competition, I can’t help but laugh on the inside when I see yet another favorable impression of Windows Phone 7. I want to say great things about it. No, I really do! But I can’t! It’s because I know that this is a failure from the start. So before we get into detail about the competition and the hoopla surrounding Windows Phone 7, let’s start with the company that is behind all of the commotion: Microsoft. Microsoft’s Problems Microsoft has an identity problem. If you ask a teenager to explain what Microsoft does, you will, without question, hear them mention Windows….
Facebook. It’s in our cell phones, it’s mentioned in our television shows, it’s featured in our Hollywood movies, and it’s all over the Web. It’s everywhere! In fact, Facebook could be considered one of the great, if not greatest, social innovations since the creation of the Internet. However, would you believe it if I said that this was Mark Zuckerberg’s plan all along? “We’re going to change the world,” said Mark Zuckerberg in the early days of Thefacebook. He had just begun to believe that Thefacebook could be more than just another side project. But this is not where the story began. It began…
Cloudy days have befallen the PC as a gaming platform. Yet it wasn’t so long ago when things were different; A-list games were released for the PC on what seemed to be a monthly basis — consoles were second class. But now the world has their Xbox 360s, PS3s, PSPs, Wiis, and DSs. Subsequently, the PC had lost its touch with the gaming community and was in dire need of help. Could it be saved? Bland, mediocre, unimaginative, stagnant — these are all words that could have been used to describe the PC gaming industry as it stood in the past few years. Ironically, the same technology that helped create…
The blog — once full of affinity, originality, and creativity — is now filled to the brim with animosity, mediocrity, and futility. So what happened? What has become of the blogosphere that I once knew and thoroughly enjoyed? Going back a few years ago, it was not uncommon for yours truly to read hundreds of different blogs in a single day. It was amazing to have the opportunity to read a myriad of unique perspectives that I never had been exposed to before. Everyone had something to say, and everything they said was interesting. As such, clicking that “subscribe” button was incredibly addictive…
