10 Hours in L.A.
How is it possible that I saw the crazy spaceship-shaped building thing outside of LAX today? Business trip number one for me.
Puma and the Future of eCatalogs
This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in Flash: The Puma Summer eCatalog. If you’ve ever had to sift through the online IKEA catalog, you know that Flash brochures, even when they get you all the information you need, are very clumsy and take a long time to navigate through. In the Puma eCatalog, you are looking through the eyes of someone holding a Puma catalog. You move your mouse, he moves his hand. You grab a corner and drag it left, he grabs a corner and turns the page. And some of the items in the catalog are interactive.
You’ll even find yourself moving your hand to the corner and holding down the mouse button, exactly the same way you hold the corner of a magazine page waiting for your eyes to finish reading so your arm can turn the page again. Ad-dict-ing.
It’s based off of an open-source page-flipping engine called PageFlip. Check out the demo to see the full capabilities, including transparent pages!
This would be great for an online portfolio, or an alternative web page for an eZine, or even an added benefit that you could provide to paid subscribers of a magazine.
Xbox 360 and the Ring of Light
The XBox 360 was revealed last night, and it’s pretty exciting. It’s powerful, it’s cool, it’s better than any PC I’ve ever had. But here’s what I thought was really interesting: the “Ring of Light.”
From Tom’s Hardware:
The power button itself is unremarkable, but the LED lights that surround it, dramatically named the “Ring of Light,” are quite novel. The ring actually consists of four LED lights, each corresponding to one of the four possible controllers connected to the console, and also related to the Xbox Guide buttons on the controllers.
Here’s how it works (as far as I can tell): The Ring of Light lights up in each quadrant that is associated with a connected controller. On your controller, a light in only one of 4 quadrants of the similar “ring of light” tells you which of the 4 controllers you are.
Why is that important? Because the controllers are all wireless. You can’t trace the cord back to which slot you’re plugged in to. How many times have you had to to untangle the cords just to figure out who’s who?
A few more notes:
The Xbox 360 has a 3-core processor at 3.2 GHz each. That’s theoretically 9 times more powerful than my Powerbook.
The bus speed from the processor to the RAM is 700MHz. That’s the same speed as the processor on the Xbox sitting under my TV right now.
What’s on Your Tiger Dashboard?
So after about a day of using Tiger, I’m underwhelmed. Hopefully as I use it more, I’ll find more little things that make it worthwhile.
Here’s what’s on my Dashboard at the moment: Weather, Hula Homer, Stocks, Calendar, Gmail (but it doesn’t seem to refresh ever), iTunes controller, and a webcam view from the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas pointed at random parts of the Bellagio. I also downloaded “Dasher,” which opens the Dashboard after I’ve been idle instead of starting a screensaver, which I think is pretty cool (and would be better if the Gmail widget worked). But besides that, when the novelty wears off, I know I’m not going to open it very often. There’s not that much to do from the Dashboard.
More bad news: On my 1GHz 12″ Powerbook, Spotlight is much slower than advertised, definitely never updating as I type. I type my full search and wait another 1 or 2 seconds before anything shows up, and then the results fill in over the next 3 or 4 seconds. It took 4 hours to index my hard drive, but maybe it couldn’t enable everything because it was an upgrade from Panther? I tried playing a few HD trailers in Quicktime 7, but they were choppy. Automator is really slow when you try to drag an action into a flow. Safari does seem faster, but the RSS stuff pales in comparison to what I have now using Bloglines.
The best part of Tiger so far? A new “Add Image to iPhoto Library” action when you right-click on a photo in Safari. Great for adding photos I get as Gmail attachments.
