Toyota Window to the world - multimedia system

This is a pretty neat concept

Muppet Bar in SF

A Muppet Themed Bar recently opened on Mission St in San Francisco.

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: the Ars Technica review

Via ArsTechnica

"The user-visible changes in Lion are legion. You'll be hard-pressed to find any part of the user interface that remains completely unchanged from Snow Leopard, from the look and feel all the way down to basic behaviors like application and document management. In Lion, Apple has taken a hard look at the assumptions underlying the last ten years of Mac OS X's development—and has decided that a lot of them need to change. "

Read Article>>

Study finds toddlers learn more from Elmo

Via KidScreen

"There’s something about Sesame Street‘s Elmo.

Researchers from the Children’s Digital Media Center at Georgetown University have found that toddlers performed a sequencing task better when an Elmo toy puppet demonstrated it than when an unfamiliar puppet performed the same exact task."

Budget Hero

Check out an interesting ed game made by a friend of mine at APM about balancing the Federal Budget:

BUDGET HERO

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/features/budget_hero/

"Think you might do better than President Barack Obama and congressional leaders in picking and choosing what government spending to cut -- or taxes to raise -- to stave off a debt showdown that could wreck the economy? A new game gives you, too, the chance to play "Budget Hero."

"Budget Hero 2.0" is an update of an original version that came out in 2008. It shows players just how difficult it might be to carry out their grand policy objectives -- universal health care, extending the Bush tax cuts or ending foreign aid -- and still keep the government from either becoming irrelevant, or going broke."

BTS - MHP Shoot - Super Grover 2.0 on 7/12/11

"Minority kids spend most of their waking hours plugged in"

Minority kids spend most of their waking hours plugged in

Minority children spend an average of 13 hours a day using mobile devices, computers, TVs and other media — about 4½ hours more than white kids, says a report out today.

The findings, from Northwestern University, are being presented to childhood and telecommunications experts in Washington, D.C.

The results are from an analysis of two Kaiser Family Foundation surveys that tracked media use by kids 6 to 18. Researchers analyzed that data to find out how black, Hispanic, Asian American and white youth use media for homework and for fun, and how long they're plugged in on any given day.

Among 8- to 18-year-olds, Asian Americans logged the most media use (13 hours, 13 minutes a day), followed by Hispanics (13 hours), blacks (12 hours, 59 minutes), and whites (8 hours, 36 minutes.)

Researchers didn't say why, but some experts have theories.

"Children may turn to media if they feel their neighborhoods lack safe places to play or if their parents have especially demanding jobs that prevent engagement," says Frederick Zimmerman, chair of the department of Health Services at UCLA School of Public Health.

"It's clear that, overall, American youth spend an enormous amount of time with media, but minorities spend most of their waking hours with media," says study director Ellen Wartella, head of the Center on Media and Human Development in the School of Communication at Northwestern.

Read the rest of the article

Kinect Hackers Are Changing the Future of Robotics

For 25 years, the field of robotics has been bedeviled by a fundamental problem: If a robot is to move through the world, it needs to be able to create a map of its environment and understand its place within it. Roboticists have developed tools to accomplish this task, known as simultaneous localization and mapping, or SLAM. But the sensors required to build that map have traditionally been either expensive and bulky or cheap and inaccurate. Laser arrays cost a few thousand dollars and weigh several pounds, and the images they capture are only two-dimensional. Stereo cameras are less expensive, lighter, and can construct 3-D maps, but they require a massive amount of computing power. Until a reasonably priced, easier method could be designed, autonomous robots were trapped in the lab.

On November 4, a solution was discovered—in a videogame. That’s the day Microsoft released the Kinect for Xbox 360, a $150 add-on that allows players to direct the action in a game simply by moving their bodies. Most of the world focused on the controller-free interface, but roboticists saw something else entirely: an affordable, lightweight camera that could capture 3-D images in real time.

cont: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/06/mf_kinect/all/1

Apple’s iPhone 4 lifts off with Atlantis Space shuttle

Yes, that's right: They took 2 iPhones into space.

http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/177338/20110710/nasa-atlantis-space-shuttle-apple-iphone-iphone-4-app-apps-application-applications-iss.htm

Aren't you curious to see their hypstamatic photos from space?

Android design highlights

Smashing Magazine just posted a great article on the basics of designing for Android. See the full article here.

Some highlights:

"For designers, Android is the elephant in the room when it comes to app design. As much as designers would like to think it’s an iOS world in which all anyone cares about are iPhones, iPads and the App Store, nobody can ignore that Android currently has the majority of smartphone market share and that it is being used on everything from tablets to e-readers. In short, the Google Android platform is quickly becoming ubiquitous, and brands are starting to notice.

Android’s UI conventions are different from iPhone’s. The big difference is the “Back” key, for navigating to previous pages. The Back key on Android devices is fixed and always available to the user, regardless of the app. It’s either a physical part of the device or digitally fixed to the bottom of the screen, independent of any app, as in the recently released Android 3.0 for tablets (more on this later).

The hard “Back” key on a smartphone running Android 2.0.

The presence of a Back key outside of the app itself leaves space for other elements at the top of the screen, such as a logo, title or menu. While this navigational convention differs greatly from that of iOS, there are still other differentiators that Android calls “design patterns.” According to Android, a design pattern is a “general solution to a recurring problem.” Below are the main Android design patterns that were introduced with version 2.0.

Action Bar

The action bar is one of Android’s most important design patterns and differentiators. It works very similar to a conventional website’s banner, with the logo or title typically on the left and the navigation items on the right. The action bar’s design is flexible and allows for hovering menus and expanding search boxes. It’s generally used as a global feature rather than a contextual one.

The action bar design pattern as used by Twitter.

Companion Widget

Widgets allow an app to display notifications on the user’s launch screen. Unlike push notifications in iOS, which behave as temporary modal dialogs, companion widgets remain on the launch screen.

The companion widget by Engadget, New York Times and Pandora.

Using established design patterns is important for keeping the experience intuitive and familiar for your users. Users don’t want an iPhone experience on their Android device any more than a Mac user wants a Microsoft experience in their Mac OS environment. Understanding design patterns is the first step to learning to speak Android and designing an optimal experience for its users. Your developers will also thank you!

Android Design Deliverables

OK, so you’ve designed your Android app and are ready to make it a reality. What do you need to hand off to the developer? Here’s a quick list of deliverables:

1. Annotated wireframes of the user experience based on the baseline “medium” size of 320 × 480 DPI. Include additional screens for instances when a “large” screen size requires a modified layout or when a landscape version is required.
2. Two sets of visual design mock-ups of key screens for both medium-sized HVGA 320 × 480 screens and large-sized 320 × 533 screens (based on a WVGA 800 × 480 hDPI physical pixel screen size).
3. Specifications for spacing, font sizes and colors, and an indication of any bitmaps.
4. A graphics library with lDPI, mDPI and hDPI versions of all bitmaps saved as transparent PNG files. If you’re planning on developing one version of your app for smaller devices and another version for larger devices, then you’ll need lDPI and mDPI sets for your “medium” baseline design and one hDPI set for your “large” version.
5. Density-specific app icons, including the app’s launch icon, as transparent PNG files. Android already provides excellent tips for designers on this topic, along with some downloads, including graphic PSD templates.

A Word of Advice

Do get your hands on an Android phone and tablet, and spend some time downloading apps and exploring their interfaces. In order to design for Android, you have to immerse yourself in the environment and know it intimately. This might sound obvious, but it’s always surprising to hear when even the product manager doesn’t have an Android device."