Weblog

Posted at 5:17pm on 20 Jun 2008

E.T.A.

Brilliant animated spoof of the Alien(s) films: E.T.A.

Warning: The film is short, but the filesize is huge.

Posted at 4:36pm on 17 Jun 2008

Spore Creature Creator

In advance of the hotly anticipated release of Spore - the follow up game to The Sims, which will allow players to create a whole species and lead them through their entire evolution from the primordial soup into space - Maxis have released a standalone creature editor, designed to give users a taste of what Spore will be like.

Requires Windows XP or an Intel Mac.

Posted at 3:29pm on 17 Jun 2008

Bug Fuel

it sound almost too good to be true, but according to The Times, scientists have genetically engineered bacteria that eat waste and excrete crude oil.

Of course one might argue that the last thing we need right now is a way to extend the usage of fossil fuels. But running cars off bugshit has got to be better than buying it from the middle east (and directly funding terrorism in the process).

Posted at 3:16pm on 17 Jun 2008

Sproutcore

After we reported a few days ago that 280 North were using a Cocoa-inspired framework for their Keynote-like webapp 280 Slides, Appleinsider revealed that Apple has adopted a similar system called Sproutcore for their Mobile Me system (the replacement for .mac).

Sproutcore started life as an independent open source project, but like much of their technological foray into the Web (including WebKit itself), Apple has adopted it, hiring the lead programmer and taking development in-house.

Posted at 8:12pm on 16 Jun 2008

RBGL v1.1 Released

We've just released version 1.1 of RBGL, our open source graphics library for REALbasic that leverages the OpenGL library on Mac OS and Windows for hardware accelerated graphics.

Posted at 10:47am on 11 Jun 2008

Fabrication

This is really cool – BMW have produced a concept car using flexible fabric instead of metal for the bodywork.

The car is called GINA, which presumably stands for something. I love her "eyelids".

Posted at 4:22pm on 10 Jun 2008

Snow Leopard

Few people were surprised by the new 3G iPhone announcements at the WWDC conference yesterday. With many news outlets talking about the new iPhone as if it were an actual product (as opposed to just a rumour) for weeks beforehand, some people were more probably surprised to hear that it had not actually been officially announced until then.

More surprising and in some ways more interesting was the low-key announcement of Snow Leopard, Apple's next major operating system release.

Billed as a kind of maintenance release, Snow Leopard is going to focus on predominantly under-the-hood improvements to the OS, boosting performance and hardware utilisation by increasing the use of preemptive threading and GPU processing throughout the OS.

The Grand Central and OpenCS concepts in particular are intriguing. It seems that Apple has grown tired of waiting for developers to figure out how to utilise the multiple processors available in modern machines, and so has decided to do most of the work for us. Consequently Mac OS may become the first platform to truly utilise the power of modern computer hardware effectively.

Posted at 10:35am on 09 Jun 2008

Objective-J

Interesting new JavaScript-based technology from an outfit calling themselves 280 North:

Objective-J is basically an implementation of Objective-C language constructs on top of the JavaScript language (Objective-C is the native language used by the Mac OS X application runtime – kind of like .NET for Mac OS).

On top of this language they have basically re-implemented the Cocoa GUI framework as a web-based technology (they call it Cappuccino – they're evidently not tea drinkers). Their flagship application using this system is a web-based slideshow authoring program called 280 slides, which has already been compared favourably to the Macintosh Keynote program (Apple's competitor to Powerpoint).

There's an interview with 280 North here

You can play with 280 Slides here

Posted at 8:01am on 06 Jun 2008

A child is born

A few weeks ago we told you about the RepRap rapid prototyping machine.

Well, on 29 May 2008 the machine managed to print a replica of itself. One would assume that this just means it printed the parts which had to be assembled, but still, it's a significant step towards a general purpose, automated 3D replicator.

Posted at 2:20pm on 05 Jun 2008

Eco Zoo

A cute little 3D Flash website. If you ignore the ecotard message, the popup book idea is very cool, although it's a pity the popups haven't been done in a way that could actually be made with real paper.

The site is significant because Flash still can't actually do native 3D graphics. Unlike web plugins such as unity, Flash provides no 3D drawing commands, nor any way to leverage the built-in 3D graphics hardware in modern computers. The site was made possible by the Papervision3D, an Open Source 3D engine for Flash that implements 3D rendering and texture mapping from first principles.

Posted at 3:46pm on 04 Jun 2008

Widgets 2.0

Has anyone noticed now that the term "widget" has become a catch-all phrase for describing more or less any software component? I now hear the term used to describe any of

• A user interface component or control
• An application built using some nonstandard technology, e.g. JavaScript
• A plugin for a web site
• A panel or sidebar on another window
• A web service for providing any or all of the above

As far as I can tell, "widget" basically means "something I haven't got a name for", like doohickey, or thingamajig, or whatchamacallit. So why is it that Yahoo can announce a "widgets API" and we are supposed to know what that means?

Coming soon: Google doohickeys and Microsoft thingamajigs, for all your unspecified software needs.

Posted at 10:50am on 04 Jun 2008

OpenLayers

Interesting new Open source JavaScript mapping API aims to break the coupling between the implementation and the data provider.

As a framework, OpenLayers is intended to separate map tools from map data so that all the tools can operate on all the data sources. This separation breaks the proprietary silos that earlier GIS revolutions have taught civilization to avoid. The mapping revolution on the public Web should benefit from the experience of history.

Posted at 10:49am on 03 Jun 2008

SquirrelFish

Apparently not content with having the fastest JavaScript engine on the market, the Safari/Webkit developers have just announced Squirrelfish, the improbably-named new JS engine for Webkit that is more than half-again as fast as the version included in Safari 3.1.

This speed bump is signficant not just for Mac users and the ~3 users of Safari on Windows, but for mobile Internet users, where Webkit is rapidly becoming the dominant browser platform. On mobile devices, where processors are slow (Safari on the iPhone, one of the most powerful handheld Web-capable devices, was benchmarked as being 100x slower than its desktop cousin) this speed boost could mean that a whole generation of "Web 2.0" sites now become usable on today's hardware.

Apart from being great news for web developers and users, the article includes a facinating discussion of the engineering process for virtual machines and bytecode interpreters.

Posted at 10:43am on 03 Jun 2008

iPlayer Downloader

Handy open source program for downloading DRM-free content from the BBC's iPlayer service (Mac OS X only):

iPlayer Downloader