Everything and the Mobile Software Universe…

Well, I’ve blogged about twitter and micro blogging a while ago (see the article here).

Since then I’ve used twitter … when I say used twitter I’m wrong I hardly NEVER write a single tweet, I comment what blog posts I read in Google Reader and those comments are autmatically gathered in a feed by Yahoo Pipes automagically redirected into my Twitter account (see my article to know how to do that).

I aslo post a weekly twitter update on this blog, to have a list of my comments about the industry in a weekly form (Ok, perhaps I shouldn’t do that since I’m not writing that much …the blog feels empty with those automatic posts, I disgress).

So really I’m an old school twitterer : I tweet as if I were posting on this blog, in a less formal way, but the spirit is the same. I don’t use it as a personal/emotional way of sharing my thoughts, I try to keep it professional.

But many people don’t, and twitter is now a phenomenal data gold mine to have impression/feeling/thought about a subject, in minutes.

And here comes the Twitter search:

Twitter’s real-time search is probably one of Twitter’s most valuable features, as it allows you to keep track of an event as it unfolds in real-time

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_finally_integrates_search.php

I use it all the time to get point of views, ratings, instead of raw news or information, I use it to get subjective information …

The 1000€ question: Since when is it a value to get a highly not formatted, unverified, noisy and above all completely irrational piece of information ?

Well newspaper/school/etc told us that objective and verified data was key, Google is trying to have this stamp on its serach results with complex ranking algorithm (based on popularity in fact…) … but if I want to have the latest point of view about Iran troubles? An ongoing TV show, or a californian keynote? A feeling of a hard drive noise I want to buy? … I go to twitter, and it is a large amount of my search, I don’t want to wait for someone to cleanly format, verify and formalize the info I miss.

Why Real-Time Is Google’s Achilles Heel

Google cannot be real-time. It indexes the historical web, and it does it better and faster than anyone else. It finds me after-the-fact reporting on major stories from major media companies. But it misses the real-time story. And that matters today.

Sure, Google can play in the real-time web. It can buy Twitter and anything else it fancies. It will always be a big and powerful company and will make money from search just as IBM made money from PCs and Microsoft makes money online. But IBM did not dominate the PC business, and Microsoft does not dominate the online business. Likewise, Google will not dominate the real-time web.

Sorry Google, You Missed the Real-Time Web

Another very good read about this twitter real time search meaning: Twitter destined to replace Google Search

Of course we have to learn how to filter this flow….but this flow is from human beings, not machines, and well, for most of us we are human, it is why it feels so natural.

As for Google vs Twitter thing … I really think the forthcoming Google Waves paradigm shift will be the way to gather a high volume of private and public conversation, rants, etc….and if done right, google may have, again, a winner , time will tell.

Thomas

A good UI  is nothing without talented graphical designers and interaction designers: How  the plethora of new UI technologies are helping unleashing their creativity? What are the main concepts behind those technologies?  Let’s try to find out!

UI is trendy… thank you MacOS X, Vista and iPhone!

Put the designers in the application development driver seat!

Here is a little slide about the actors involved in UI design

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Simply brilliant! ….especially the hardware part

DIY Multipoint touchscreen

TAT » The Astonishing UI-blog

Then do yourself a favor and look at this page for a nice listing of multi-touch experiments and devices: http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html

Flash 10: Hydra and AIF (Adobe Image Foundation) and Hardware Rendering [ draw.logic ]

Very interesting stuffs those days around UI. Adobe is PUSHING (is it big enough?) , and really trys to begin a direct MS WPF/SilverLight/.NET direct competitor… they even have a server part (for Flex).In this annoucement what I find particularly interesting is the following: From Adobe here is what AIF is:

The Adobe Image Foundation (AIF) Toolkit (…) includes a high-performance graphics programming language (…), codenamed Hydra, and an application to create, compile and preview Hydra filters and effects. (…). It currently ships in After Effects CS3 and will be used in other Adobe products in the future. The next release of Flash Player, codenamed Astro, will leverage Hydra to enable developers to create custom filters, effects and blend modes.

Hydra is a programming language used to implement image processing algorithms in a hardware-independent manner. Some benefits of Hydra include:

• Familiar syntax that is based on GLSL, which is C-based
• Allows the same filter to run efficiently on different GPU and CPU architectures, including multi-core and multiprocessor systems in a future update
• Abstracts out the complexity of executing on heterogeneous hardware
• Supports 3rd party creation and sharing of filters and effects
• Delivers excellent image processing performance in Adobe products

At last usage of hardware! and with the recent annoucement of AMD licensing some ATI hardware IP to Freescale and Qualcomm…. this is coming to mobile phone and perhaps faster than we think.

The only issue for me is … that I don’t see a real use beside video encoding/decoding for now , but it will come.

Thomas

Hello all…

Last week I attended the Open Source in Mobile conference in Madrid, at which I could get a demo of the “One-Laptop Per Child” (OLPC) XO device from Jeff Waugh, a prominent figure of the GNOME project.

For those of you not familiar with this project, the “One-Laptop Per Child” foundation wants to bring laptop computers to schoolchildren in developing countries. I will not here dwell on the price or success of the device, but rather focus on its software and really innovative user interface.

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I’m back ….before some more complete article : here is a great one about Data Visualization:

Data Visualization: Modern Approaches | Graphics

example:

Shape Of Song: What does music look like? The Shape of Song is an attempt to answer this seemingly paradoxical question. The custom software in this work draws musical patterns in the form of translucent arches, allowing viewers to see – literally – the shape of any composition available on the Web.

Hi all

For my first post here, I have decided to just be an aggregator, i.e. spare you the hassle of browsing through all these blogposts about the most-hyped CE product ever: the iPhone… now you have it all here summarised in neat bullet points.

Kudos to Engadget Mobile for their extensive review, The Register for their numerous and humorous articles, as well as iFixit for their step-by-step reverse engineering.

Also worth noting that there is now a very extensive entry for the iPhone on Wikipedia.

In short: it’s a great device in terms of usability and design (so long as you share Apple’s tastes), but suffers quite significant shortcomings when it comes to business productivity (notably due to its poor email application) and lack of capability to have 3rd-party applications installed.

/Guilhem

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Checkout this amazing Video from : Microsoft Surface Video – Touchscreen, Multi Touch Coffee Table – Behind the Scenes – Popular Mechanics

Official Microsoft web site

Ok, it not new, but really not so far from production

Diagram by Intoaroute

Something that really buzz me about those new kind of interfaces is obviously the “home” and “personal” application and services, but I see also some possible tremendous change for the software development : with the raise of multi-core, parallel programming will be mandatory, and to leverage this horsepower, a paradigm shift is needed, to break the C/C++/C#/php/ruby, etc sequential view. And this new paradigm may be graphical programming. See this LabView/QNX article or this one at DevX:

The U.S. government, through DARPA, had previously awarded contracts to proposals for High-Productivity Computing Systems. A major premise of this thrust is that the performance of computers is outstripping our ability to harness the power through programming. It is logical to conclude that we need better methods to program them, and DARPA had funded three research languages. All three programming languages are textual X10, Chapel, and Fortress. It seems that the research has run its course, and the answer is that the breakthrough opportunities fall short of the grand hope of catching up with computers. This just makes me wonder all the more if a graphical approach will ultimately be an avenue for a programming breakthrough.

Technologies like those multi-touch screen may bring a lot to the developer ability to dig and build his system….and it is needed: look how poor are the current graphical languages in the “graphical” and above all the user interaction aspect: (below a LabView screenshot)

First a A4 Electronic Sheet of paper by Philips/LG Technology, found via Clubic:

This sheet of electronic paper is based on the E-Ink technology, and is able to display 4096 colors, for a 180 line of sight… with a thickness of only 300 micrometers. Battery friendly the E-Ink technology is only consuming juice when display is changing.

Then this one from Sony (thanks I4U):

A completely different technology: OLED/organic TFT on a flexible substrate, size of 2.5 inch and a resolution of 120*160 pixel …and 16,7 millions colors.
100 cd/m2 brightness, 1,000:1 contrast ratio and 300 micrometers thickness.

Great , the E-Ink technology is hanging around for years now, but really it is, for me, the most credible replacement to paper … if it needs to be replaced after all: I don’t know for you but the majority of what I read is on screen (computer, smartphone, nokia tablet), and what is not … it is BDs , books where the reading experience of paper is hard to challenge.

The OLED one is really interesting : imagine a device where a big screen is rolled inside, and you only deeply it when needed (either a smartphone or a laptop…).

Some great things are coming….and just for fun: the Teleglass T3-F to watch TV when commuting

MSX is releasing gaxoo : it seems to be an embedded graphical framework plus a server side part to manage subscribers: very interesting, I really would want to know what kind of technologies they are using.

From their press release:

The MSX Platform extends this ODP functionality to include complete
control of phone functionality as well as the ability to download
new phone applications (also known as widgets). These can vary
from RSS/Blog widgets through to photo sync, branded media
players, storefront and customized promotions.

The xPhone UI works on a variety of high-volume consumer phones
and employs advanced visual effects including alpha transparency,
gradients, anti-aliased vector graphics, fast dynamic scaling and
rotation, as well as 3D transitions.