sneakyBlog

A picture can say more than a thousand words, once again…

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Today I stumbled upon this very interesting article at bit-tech.net. You might not expect this kind of article on a website that labels itself as a casemodding/overclocking/hardware reviews/gaming site, but it’s really interesting. No complete book of course, but a very interesting evolution analysis of the HCI during the past decades.

Multi-touch is anything but a gimmick, but to manipulate 3D space with the mouse we need to add extra inputs. If using a normal touchscreen is like using a single mouse then multi-touch is like using ten - or more! In fact, you’ve probably seen a multi-touch in action – or a representation of one. If you’ve seen Minority Report then you have, the diminutive Mr Cruise and his cronies use one to edit video.

All the scenes where he’s flapping his arm around aren’t actually as far from reality as you might think, because those are the kind of intuitive gestures and feedback that you can expect to use and receive from a multi-touch device when it’s used with an appropriate user interface.

Appropriate interfaces are needed, and fortunately they’re almost ready to hit the streets. Jeff Hann’s work on multi touch interfaces uses simple gestures to manipulate objects on the screen. When you watch him use the interface, all the motions he makes to control the world seem intuitive and easy to learn and experiment with.

While Jeff’s work may be confined to the world of research, both Microsoft and Apple are working on their own versions behind the scenes. Microsoft’s PhotoSynth uses an interface that seems designed to be used with a multitouch display. While the application itself is incredibly cool, it’s interesting to see how the interface works, seeming very similar to the photo browser Jeff uses in his multi-touch demonstration. You can hear the operator’s mouse wheel whizzing away as he jerkily zooms into the images; in Jeff’s demonstration the same actions are performed effortlessly by placing two fingertips on the screen and moving them away from one another.

The complete article.

Technorati Tags: HCI, interfaces, GUI, multi-touch

Probably you’ve already heard of Apple’s Sudden Motion Sensor (if the description “I keep track of everything with ‘Apple’ on it” fits you), a very useful feature built into Apple’s notebooks (both the MacBook Pro’s and the MacBooks, and the last generation of the PowerBooks). It allows your notebook to shut down your HDD whenever it detects a sudden motion, hence its name. It prevents major damage to your HDD. But Apple has provided an API that allows 3rd party developers to use it as well.

After iAlertU and MacSaber, I present to you: the SmackBook. I know I’m a bit late with this post, but I’ve been very busy with my DriverPacks project, which has since 2 days its own forum, with already 50 members and about 150 posts at the time of writing.

No more dawdling, here’s the superb trailer!

Two days until the moment where this blog wouldn’t have gotten a new post in a month… Shame on me! But, I do have some sham: I’ve been sick for a week and before that I had one week (of well filled up) vacation. But that still leaves two weeks to post something, of course. Well… I still have sort of an excuse for that: there simply hasn’t been much interesting or remarkable news on the internet.
Except for maybe the fact that Windows XP finally boots on a MacBook Pro. The happy hacker, narf2006, is now about USD 14.000 richer thanks to the contest. But what else has happened? The Xbox 360 DVD firmware has been hacked, flash memory will get alot cheaper in the next few months, in France p2p downloading might become legal, a MacBook Pro’s MagSafe connector has melted down and a 1 TB RAM drive was built by Texas Memory Systems.
That’s all fairly interesting, but either too expensive, too difficult or too useless.

That title is NOT a lie, it will become reality in the second quarter of this year, thanks to the Matrox Extio F1400. How it works: plug the PCI(-e) card in your pc that gives you a fiber connection, connect it with the Extio F1400 through a fiber-optic cable, connect your monitor(s) (maximum 4 and no higher resolution than 1600*1200) to the fancy device - that obviously also spots a GPU - and you’re done! (Also possible: up to 6 USB 2 devices and an audio connection.)

Fiber & fanless are the 2 keywords: no lag & no noise are the results! The only thing that could devaluate this promising product is its price - but more about that later.

Technorati Tags: matrox, extio f1400

The first Apple MacBook Pro in the wild has been spotted (or at least someone who was smart enough to put some pictures online…)!

Technorati Tags: Apple, MacBook Pro

Specifications:

• Color Depth: Monochrome Green at 532nm (full color available late 2006)
• Depth of Focus: Infinite (image remains in focus at any distance from the projector)
• Resolutions Supported: QCIF, CIF, VGA, NTSC, 1024×512 (resolutions up to 2048×1280 including SXGA and S-HDTV available upon request)
• Typical Diagonal Image & Brightness: 15″ @ 50cd/m^2 (all pixels full brightness); 15″ @ 200cd/m^2 (50% max average pixel amplitude)
• Aspect Ratio Image: 7″ @ 220cd/m^2 (all pixels full brightness); 7″ @ 880cd/m^2 (50% max average pixel amplitude)
• Electrical Power Consumption: 1.4W (max pixel power, all pixels); <350mW (50% max average pixel amplitude)

Nope, I’m not lying!

This wonderful device was designed to be used in cellphones: they should make it possible to show more information at once. With a monstrous resolution like 2048*1280, you should be able to display ALOT! Except for… well… photos taken with your gsm camera, or a nicely coloured UI. Lucky us that ‘full color’ will be available later this year! But ehm, monochrome green > full color, in less than a year, isn’t that a bit optimistic? I guess they mean by ‘full color’ RGB: Red, Green and Blue. Of course, ‘full color‘
Technorati Tags: laser projector

The World of Smartboards, Sympodiums is about to change

The technology is multi-touch screens, developed at NYU (as per post on the Cult of Mac blog). And the interesting part is that Apple has patented these interactions, which means… a TabletMac?

This is one of the most amazing technologies I’ve seen in the past 5 years or so! Watch it and be amazed!

Technorati Tags: future technology, multi-touch screen, smartboard

This time the devil is EFI, while the angel is Core Duo. Funny, if you know both technologies come from the same multi-billion dollar company: Intel. EFI, short for extensible firmware interface, is the same what the well-known BIOS does for almost every pc. Previously, Apple used Open Firmware, but now it moved to Intel for supplying its processors (and chipsets and…), it also moved to that company’s technology that’s built to succeed the ordinary, inflexible BIOS system. The largest difference for the end-user is a faster boot time.

Now what’s the problem? Well, Windows XP does not support this… Only 64-bit Windows XP does! Okay, no problem. But currently the Core Duo (Yonah, Intel’s latest CPU for use in laptops) is only 32-bit! Damn damn damn! Byebye Mac OS X + Windows XP dualboot (just to make a smooth Switch possible) on that blazingly fast, breath-taking - simply astonishing - MacBook Pro…

I keep telling myself it’s just not meant to be… :’(

Technorati Tags: efi, bios, macbook pro, windows xp

What’s an Intel chip doing in a Mac? A whole lot more than it’s ever done in a PC.

Apple’s tagline for the newly (yesterday) released MacBook Pro and updated iMac. I hope to buy the 15.4″ model with the most powerful CPU (currently the 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo) before starting my studies at the university. (Yes I know, I’m not yet graduated… ). Why Apple? Several reasons: stability (which is in general alot better than ‘generic’ laptops), Mac OS X (which just WORKS when you need it, and it’s more fun to use for everyday use), durability (they last for long) and of course design. I don’t think I have to explain that one! At the university, I’d need a laptop anyway. And though I’m not yet annoyed by my current system’s speed - thanks to NOT installing anti-spyware, anti-virus, firewall and anti-whatever - I DO notice that my system is taking just too long sometimes. So if I’d get myself such a laptop, I’d have ONE platform to work one, both at school and at home, which is always more favorable - at least that’s what I think.

But before I will really try to figure out how to collect the nice sum of 2500€ to buy it, I’d first like to see an extensive review of the MacBook Pro and more specificly about its performance in comparison with the previous generation: the PowerBook G4. And of course head-to-head comparisons with ‘generic’ laptops that use the same hardware platform. When I come accross them, I will certainly let you know more about it here at my blog.

Already published MacBook Pro-related (p)reviews say that the performance is very to extremely good but it seems that the battery time is actually alot lower than it was with the G4…

AnandTech - Intel Core Duo (Yonah) Performance Preview - Part II
ArsTechnica - Jade at Macworld: MacBook Pro battery life meh

Technorati Tags: apple, macbook pro, core duo, intel