Things I like best in Snow Leopard

There are a heap of things I’m really liking about Snow Leopard so far… even though it turns out that my early 2007 MacBook Pro can’t take advantage of a lot of the under-the-covers enhancements

1. The new (configurable) Dock behaviour to have application windows minimise into their app icons – combined with the click-hold-Expose feature, this has made the Dock useful for me again. I’ve moved it from autohiding at the side of the screen, to permanent (but 2D) at the bottom.
2. Safari running Flash as a separate process. Far fewer browser crashes.
3. Nearly 15Gb of reclaimed disk space. Seriously! Could be the fact that I opted for a custom install and removed most of the language support I didn’t need, too, and also influenced by the fact that Snow Leopard reports disk space differently.
4. Scrollable, more intelligent grid views in Stacks. The Dock is even more useful.
5. Seeing the date in the menubar. Bye bye, MagiCal.
6. Setting Spotlight search to find in the current folder by default (in Finder preferences).
7. The default screen gamma setting is now 2.2 – at last.

If you want to dig a bit deeper to find some of these things, check out a couple of Macworld articles – I wouldn’t have known about them otherwise! All-in-all then, a minor upgrade with a bunch of welcome changes.

The Matrix – ten years old?!

In the past couple of months, I’ve nearly abandoned my feedreader in favour of what I consider to be the “smart crowdsourced filtering” I’ve gained from the people I’m following on Twitter – I rarely miss a news item and often still see the most insightful posts through tweeted links. However, I have been missing what my friend have been writing about, and a bunch of other stories or items that just haven’t floated across my Twitter feed.

(bear with the preamble…)

So, in the last week, I went back to my feedreader, which is currently Google Reader with the web client on the Mac, FeedDemon 3 beta sync on Windows, and Byline on the iPhone.

In doing so I came across an xkcd comic that I’d missed, and the news that The Matrix is now ten years old. Click through for a full-size cartoon on the original site.

It’s hard to believe that ten years have passed. The Matrix was a totally revolutionary film and it blew me away. The influence of the movie on the current industry is clear – just as an example, the visual style (including “bullet time”) has been much copied across all kinds of formats in the past decade. The cross-media reach of the storyline, whereby you “had” to have played the video game Enter the Matrix and watched the animated Animatrix shorts to get a “full” picture of the narrative, has inspired other filmmakers looking to invent franchises. If you’re looking for a better understanding of how this all worked, I recommend the book Convergence Culture which uses The Matrix as one of its case studies – when I read it last month it explained several parts of the story I’d never understood, reawakened my interest in the Matrix universe and inspired me to pick up the trilogy on Bluray.

I have to say I agree with the xkcd cartoon – the first was, for me, the best of the trilogy, perhaps because of the freshness and mystery, perhaps because of the lack of overcomplicated backstory and exposition that the second and third attempted to insert.

Is Amazon neglecting the UK and Europe?

Just an idle thought. Consider:

• the delayed MP3 store launch in the UK
• the continued lack of an iPhone app for the Amazon store
• no Kindle launch outside of the US, and they’re on the second version already.

I’m probably just impatient…

Haptic fantastic

Yesterday I got the opportunity to play around with a haptic device, which basically provides a force feedback / touch user interface to various 3D technologies. These included navigating a virtual world, and building 3D objects. I’ve written about it more over on eightbar, but it was so cool that I wanted to include the video over here as well.

Just to explain what is going on in the video, as it may not be entirely clear! The demos use a Novint Falcon gaming controller. To quote Anarkik, it is “like a small grounded ‘robot’ and provides the ‘force feedback’ that gives the uncanny sense of touching a virtual object. This device replaces the mouse and also provides more natural and coherent movement in 3 dimensions.” At the start, several of us have a go with the controller to drive an avatar around an OpenSim island running on the local machine, using Anarkik’s software. Around the middle of the video, we switch to using the Cre8 tool to do some simple modelling. In particular, we change the surface hardness of a sphere (where it becomes more or less soft to the touch); and then go inside the sphere and extrude the shape by pulling the controller around. Finally, there’s a brief look at some fabricated items modelled using the same software.

By the way, this was another clip edited with iMovie 09, which I’m increasingly impressed with – I need to do a screencast to show some of the nicer more advanced features that I’ve discovered!

Clarifi case for iPhone 3G

Quick review of the Clarifi case… with a couple of photos on Flickr… you can get it on Amazon

Smart Planet

IBM’s Chairman and CEO, Sam Palmisano, has been speaking to the Council of Foreign Relations in New York today. He’s been discussing how the planet is getting smarter:

These collective realizations have reminded us that we are all now connected – economically, technically and socially.  But we’re also learning that being connected is not sufficient.  Yes, the world continues to get “flatter.”  And yes, it continues to get smaller and more interconnected.  But something is happening that holds even greater potential.  In a word, our planet is becoming smarter.

In the speech, Sam talks about how the world has become instrumented, more interconnected, and devices more intelligent. And he talks about how the current world crises – ecological, financial, and others – represent an opportunity for change. The next step for the globally integrated economy is a globally integrated and intelligent economy and society.

Some of the problems and solutions that are being mentioned are interesting.

67 per cent of all electrical energy is lost due to inefficient power generation and grid management… utilities in the U.S., Denmark, Australia and Italy are now building digital grids to monitor the energy system in real time.

Congested roadways in the U.S. cost $78 billion annually in wasted hours and gas… Stockholm’s new smart toll system has resulted in 22 percent less traffic, a 12 to 40 percent drop in emissions and 40,000 additional daily users of the public transport system

This is exciting for me on many levels. Let me step up through them.

As regular readers will know, I’ve become increasingly interested in pervasive computing and home automation. The little “Current Cost craze” that has swept through my group of friends at work could be seen as a mark of the individual interest in applying technology in a smarter way. I’m excited that this has widened out to a group of folks who are supporting Chris Dalby’s Home Camp idea in London later this month.

Secondly, beyond this individual approach, it ties in to some of what I heard at the recent Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin… people talking about the opportunity for technology to change the way things work, from Tim O’Reilly’s keynote on the way forward for Internet technology and innovative thinking, to Tom Raftery’s brilliant GreenMonk pitch on Electricity 2.0.

 

Finally, and most broadly, it’s a hopeful vision which resonates when lately, things do sometimes appear bleak.

 

Technology can help society. Let’s go and make it happen.

New York Times article on Sam Palmisano’s speech

YouTube Smarter Planet videos

Update: a couple more links, if you want to get involved…

Smarter Planet on FriendFeed

Smarter Planet on Tumblr

Badged

Picked this pin badge up from the folks at Zemanta at a recent MOO drinks event in London.

Photographed with my iPhone and edited with Photogene and Brushes

Dogear Nation #71 – partially Pipr…

By the time you read this you should be able to get hold of Dogear Nation episode 71 (in theory… I won’t be online to check when this post appears on the blog).

In case you are wondering what Dogear Nation is… it’s a podcast, run by my good friends Michael Martine and Michael Rowe. Listeners mark their latest discoveries and news stories on the web with the tag “dogear-nation” on social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us. At the end of the week, the Michaels take a run through the interesting news from around the web. The show is fairly varied – we have a “technology and innovation” slant, but cover all kinds of topics: the 3D Internet and virtual worlds, coffee, gaming, social software, books, libraries and Kindle e-readers, Macs and PCs, iPhones and mobile devices, hardware hacking, and just whatever is hot in the week the show is recorded. Ultimately though, it’s about what the listeners tag for us to talk about, so the content changes dynamically from week to week. If you haven’t tried it before, take a listen – the show is usually about 30-45 minutes and we have a lot of run recording it. Hopefully you’ll enjoy listening!

If you’re wondering about the name of the show – inside IBM we have a social bookmarking service called Dogear, and the guys started out running the show inside the firewall. They’ve migrated to the outside, but the name has stuck

I’ve been an occasional guest so far, and I’ve also been getting increasingly involved in the running of the website recently, rediscovering forgotten web management skills and learning a whole set of new ones around the wonderful world of podcasting!

On Friday night I joined the Michaels about halfway through the recording, and we had a little audio issue where I couldn’t hear everything so in a couple of places I lost track of the conversation… but it was awesome to be able to call in and chat about the latest tags. I always have a blast when I get to join in.

I’m looking forward to being back on the show in a week or so to talk about the news from next week’s Web 2.0 Expo.

By the way, you can also follow the team on Twitter, if you’re so inclined.

On the Chrome bandwagon

Well Twitter and the interwebs sparked up with discussion of Google’s new browser, Chrome, late last night (UK time) and I thought I’d add some ill-formed thoughts of my own. Don’t expect reasoned, complete analysis at this point: the morning coffee is sitting beside me unsipped…

First thing to say is that I enjoyed the web comic that leaked out a day before the formal announcement, although I did wonder at some of the logic at the time.

• Chrome installed very smoothly on Vista. For a beta, it’s remarkably stable and well-featured. It has been no real secret that Google have been at least tinkering with browser technology for a while, but they’ve made a very credible entry to the space by coming along with something so (relatively) complete and solid as a first release.
• I didn’t quite get the reasoning behind the inversion of current UI paradigms with the tabs along the top of the window. I’ll be interested to see how this looks across the major OS platforms. Phil mentions that it’s probably easier when each tab represents a separate process, and Phani points out that it lets them associate the address bar and tools with a tab rather than the window. I guess I’m more used to a platform-native look-and-feel now.
• Some of the touches in the UI are quite nice – sites with insecure SSL certificates appear with a crossed-out line through the https, and in common with Firefox 3 it initially warns with a big red page when the site is not trusted.
• It seems fast, but I typically browse with a lot of tabs open in Firefox so I could just be “used” to a slower browsing experience brought on by bad habits.
• On that note, the concept that a “bad tab” won’t kill my browser really, really appeals to me. The design of this feature leaves me wondering whether we are going in another technology loop (processes good, threads bad) but I’m willing to be convinced.
• I like the idea of the start page with thumbnails of favourite pages. I’ll be the other browsers adopt that soon.
• I like the idea of “application shortcuts” which can go straight onto the desktop. It makes sense. Lots of applications are webapps now.
• Flash “just works”. Java does not.
• On the subject of plugins… I’ve come to depend on a lot of the plugins that I can get for Firefox. Given the heritage of the Chrome development team, and the model that the comic describes for isolating plugins / scoping them to a tab, I assume that it will be possible to extend Chrome… but the user-visible extension points are currently limited (no menu bar, no status bar) so it will be interesting to see how they approach this and what the take-up is likely to be.
• The developer tools that are built-in are very impressive… nice source viewer, element inspector, and the “task manager” with “stats for nerds” gives an interesting glimpse into the way the browser and task isolation is working.
• RSS feeds don’t appear to display. I half-expected an RSS link to whisk me off to Google Reader – I have no doubt that all my base WILL belong to Google here. Maybe that’s a “todo” feature.
• Another technical thought – are images in Chrome rendered with colour profiles? I assume so since it uses WebKit, but I’m not sure.

I’ve been saying to people for a while now that Apple has been worth watching… using WebKit as the basis of Safari, Dashboard widgets for OS X, and the iPhone. With this (re)use of the same techology by Google, I’m intrigued to see where all of this will take the browser. With Google’s brand recognition and reach, this has the potential to be a very disruptive move.

Update: WOAH, major licensing issues. And Mark Cathcart brings some interesting perspectives, too. For now, I’m removing Chrome.

Update: as Mark and Justin note below, the EULA has been fixed. Chrome gets a reprieve and can come back to my system, for experimentation purposes at least.

Another Dogear Dance

It was my pleasure to join the two Michaels on Dogear Nation on Friday. If you listen to the episode you’ll pick up on a bunch of the things I’ve been doing lately that I’ve not gotten around to blogging about… such as our recent acquisition of a Wii + Wii Fit + Mario Kart, and my iPhone 3G. Oh, and there’s some mention of that Roo Reynolds guy, too…

Robots video

I previously blogged about our visit to a primary school in Maidenhead last week. The local paper took a video which can now be viewed online.

Mindstorms

A break from the norm today – a small group of IBMers went to an infant school in Berkshire to play around with robots!

I’ve written before about my enjoyment of working with schools and helping children to learn about technology. I do make an effort to get involved in these kind of opportunities when possible. I’m a regular helper at IBM’s annual Blue Fusion event in the Hursley lab, but this one was a little different. For one thing it was much smaller… just four of us. We were out on the school site, rather than having the children come to us. Finally, it was a significantly different age group to the ones I’m more used to dealing with – these youngsters were only 6 years old, and I’ve only ever worked with teenagers in the past.

The day was really successful. We were armed with several boxes of LEGO Mindstorms robot kits. We kicked off by talking about ASIMO and how robots work, the fact that they need bodies and brains and so on. After that the children worked in groups of 3 or 4 to build a basic wheeled robot base, making it as funky as possible with tubes and anything else they wanted to add, and then we did some simple programming. It was the first time I’d used the Mindstorms system and I have to say it’s absolutely superb – easy to use and with a lot of potential to do far more advanced stuff too.

A hectic day and challenging to keep children of this age group on track, but I was very excited to see the range of their imaginations and how they were able to work together. I hope they enjoyed it as much as we did – one child asked me “do you like working with computers?” and it made me realise that one of the things I do love about my job is the human side of it, as well as having the occasional opportunity to get out there and introduce technology to youngsters.