Sep 072010
HTML5Rocks? Yes it does

The HTML5Rocks site may be slanted toward Google’s implementation of HTML5 (and works best in Google’s Chrome browser). But it’s an impressive compendium of demos and how-to’s for everything HTML5, from 2- and 3d animations, to instant text columns, to building databases in the browser (“Web Storage”), to drag-and-drop with a single line of code. Web designers, prepare for HTML5 to rock your world.

Sep 072010
Neal Stephenson's new novel is part wiki, part CD-ROM

Famed science fiction author Neal Stephenson has unveiled a digital novel platform created with a cabal of interactive fiction / martial arts enthusiasts. To judge from initial glimpses of their first interactive novel, The Mongoliad, this “new” platform is more of a combination of older ideas: part interactive CD-ROM (Voyager in the 1980s), part paid subscription (the New York Times in the 1990s), and part user-generated content (Wikipedia in the 2000s). At least the authors have given up on DRM from the get-go.

Sep 032010
Captchas courageous

Are you getting subliminal messages from your spam-blocker? Check out these examples of captchas gone crazy. (And no, I don’t want to enable images, thank you very much!)

Aug 302010
Can't afford Adobe? Just fire up your browser

Get ready for a whole new wave of goth tattoo graffiti art, thanks to DeviantArt and HTML 5.

Aug 282010

Blogs, wikis, videoconferencing? “No thanks,” say most professors; “PeopleSoft and PowerPoint will do.”

Aug 282010

Starting your own online business? It sounds like this open source software makes it easy.

Aug 262010

Two bits of good news for anyone who wants to start a simple location-based game: 1) SCVNGR offers a readymade tool for creating one; and 2) you’ll have little competition, as all the games made so far sound moronic.

Aug 252010

Alberti would have had an aneurysm if he had seen this Augmented Perspective.

Aug 242010

Just look at that slimy software. It’s as though this Softimage researcher, Eric Mootz, is reverse-engineering the work of biologists who are looking at how slime molds resemble computer networks.

Aug 222010

Fred Brooks: design starts with scarcity.

Aug 222010
How to hack your swimming pool

Looking to reduce your water and grocery bills simultaneously? Follow these three steps to thinking outside the box–er, pool. Via Bruce Sterling and William Emory.

Aug 212010

Is David Pogue setting the bar too high for easy-to-use programming tools, or too low for nonprogrammers?

Aug 172010

The controversial practice of “reconciliation ecology” tries not to restore old habitats, but to create new ones–by bringing nature back into human spaces. Its proponents think innovative software may help people get along with their new neighbors. Capstone, anyone?

Aug 052010

Flash and 3d vector overlays would seem to be a no brainer for the AR market. If Adobe had pushed this out the door sooner it might have contributed pressure on Apple to enable Flash on its handhelds.

Aug 012010

Have you ever wished you could use Jedi mind powers to speed up your boring professor’s PowerPoint presentation? Or force the words “Happy Birthday Jennifer!” suddenly to appear on his screen? Now you can, thanks to Dutch researcher Niels Teusink, who combined an Arduino board and Metasploit software to demonstrate how to hack a presenter’s computer by hijacking his remote.

Aug 012010

Looking for ideas to inspire a new media capstone? How about turning a problem into a solution? The software keyboard has been one of the biggest stumbling blocks to using mobile devices such as the iPad for real work rather than just media consumption. But that may soon change. Thanks to soft keyboards like BlindType, the words smart and keyboard may start to be used in the same sentence.

Jul 212010

Might be helpful advice for anyone looking to beef up a resume or portfolio.

Jul 212010

Might be helpful advice for anyone looking to beef up a resume or portfolio.

Jul 202010

Why you still should master Photoshop even if you’re planning a life of crime.

Jul 202010

Why you still should master Photoshop even if you’re planning a life of crime.