Archive for the ‘Software’ Category
Thursday, November 9th, 2006
Some months ago, Microsoft’s Live Labs showed off a rather cool application they’re working on, called Photosynth.
Photosynth is basically a new way to view your photos – you give it lots of photos you’ve taken of a given area, it creates a 3D area within which you can then view your photos (after much processing, trying to find landmarks), and then you’re able to kind of look around and see the photos you took in a given direction. It’s difficult to describe (so take a look at the videos on the Photosynth site), but if they pull it off – it will be truly fantastic.
The reason I’m posting about it now though (other than I didn’t have a blog back then), is that Microsoft just released a Technical Preview of Photosynth, which if you have Internet Explorer 6 or 7 handy you can give a try. The team introduce it on their blog.
The Technical Preview doesn’t let you add your own photos, but instead lets you navigate through some of their’s to see what it’s like – they’ve provided four different collections of photos in different places, to play with. I have to say, it’s really quite a nifty system, takes a bit to get your barings with regards to looking around, but as soon as you do – it’s quite an intuitive way to look at photos. For an early preview, and for something that’s currently browser-based, it’s all very smooth to move around and view these photos. You can also jump between a 3D view, and what’s called the ‘Similarity View’, the later of which is worth playing with if only to see the way all the photos jump up in the air when you click on them, hours of fun!
The possibilities into the future to look at other people’s photos too in the same place you’ve taken some, particularly if you’re trying to work out where a photo you’ve taken was, and even to eventually have a world of photos knitted together, is I have to say, quite exciting. If Microsoft continue to fund this project, the end result could well be worth all the effort.
Posted in Photography, Software | 1 Comment »
Monday, October 2nd, 2006
For quite some time now, I’ve been keeping track of the many websites I visit via Mozilla Firefox‘s ‘Live Bookmarks’ feature. This was fine for awhile, but as I’ve added more and more sites, and as I had no way to know what I’d read already other than relying on my memory, I’ve been considering trying out some of the seperate RSS reader applications.
The final straw was returning from London to find that in three days, just about everywhere I visit had gone ‘post crazy’ – it took far too long to catch up.
As luck would have it though, Google went and launched a new version of their Google Reader site, which on closer look seemed as though it would suit me just fine – if I give it all my sites it will list off any updates for me to look at and keep track of what I’ve read.
Moving all my live bookmarks was relatively easy once I’d worked out there’s an extension for Firefox to allow you to export them in OPML format, ready for importing into Google Reader. After some initial mopping up, rearranging some of them into different folders, and marking recent posts at each site as already read, I was good to go…
Sort of. While Google Reader has certainly sped up my internet browsing, and I do quite like it – it’s still a little buggy (remember it’s still a Google Labs product) as the above screen shows. I’ve added 115 subscriptions, and it can be a little slow at times. There are also sometimes phantom entries telling me a feed has a new post when there aren’t any, but it’s simple and useful enough that I’ll stick with it for now.
Posted in Google, Ramblings | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, September 12th, 2006
Steve Jobs at
Apple does like is little press gathering shindigs where he can make announcements from time to time. This evening (or this morning in his case) was one of those times, and unlike the last few occasions he’s stepped on stage there was something of interest to me. Something better than all the rumours that always precede these press gatherings (anything that’s announced is almost always not as cool as what people predict will be released).
You see, the biggest shocker about this ‘Showtime’ Apple gathering was not that Steve wore something slightly different (unbutton that top button Steve!), not the different coloured Nanos (come on in girls, there’s a Pink Nano!), not the even more stupidly small shuffle, nor the games-friendly iPods, or even the Movie announcements that are US-only. No, I’m talking about the new version of iTunes – version 7.0 and get this, it’s actually quite good.
Show someone iTunes 4, iTunes 5 (if you blinked during its release, you probably missed it), or iTunes 6 and they would have struggled to see the difference, or even feel the difference when using it. Show them iTunes 7 though, and not only does it look a bit more polished and modern, but it has the one feature I’ve been wanting ever since I got my first iPod (I have two, a 4G white 40Gb iPod that I never use, and a 4Gb Black Nano) – the ability to browse by album cover art!
Finally I can find music the way I used to when going to grab a CD off the rack – by the cover of the album. I forget all about albums I own, or particularly good songs – but when I see the cover, it all comes flooding back.
I guess I should point out that in actual fact, this new spinny CD artwork thingy has been around for a little while for Mac users who downloaded the seperate free application CoverFlow, and my first thought was – damn they must be annoyed that Apple ripped off all their work. Luckily for them, Apple paid for the privilege though, and now Windows users get to use it too.
Okay, so YOU might not be that bothered about iTunes 7, but I use iTunes every day, and this new release actually runs very smoothly and quickly on my PC. The best improvement in this area is that I can now download all my many subscribed podcasts without iTunes dragging my PC down for a minute or two whilst it checks each feed (don’t know who originally wrote that feature, but they clearly knew how to NOT write code on quite a spectacular level).
So there you go, iTunes 7 – never mind that shiny box that’s ‘coming soon’ for your TV, I’m just fine.
Posted in Apple, Music, Software | No Comments »
Thursday, August 31st, 2006
No, not a typo – it’s not even a particularly funny joke. No, I’m talking about Microsoft’s new games development effort, XNA. In particular, the beta of XNA Express Edition which came out late yesterday afternoon (BST).
If you haven’t heard about XNA, then you should probably mozee on down to the XNA Developer Centre and the XNA Team Blog and read up on it. Basically, it’s what Managed DirectX evolved into, and the XNA Framework allows you to develop games for both Windows and XBOX 360 in one full swoop. With XNA, Microsoft’s actually made DirectX development a lot simpler but still as powerful, and this first beta of the Express Edition (which will allow anybody to try out games they’ve written with it on their own XBOX 360 for about $99 a year, or just on Windows for free – a better explanation can be found here) is actually looking very impressive.
The full release of Express Edition isn’t due until later this year, and this beta is for now missing the Content Pipeline which when it appears, should make it very easy to bring in various graphic assets (of particular interest to me is the use of the FBX format), but the beta is still well worth a play. All the coding for now is done with a little help of C#, a language Microsoft sees as being the one many will migrate to from C++ in the coming years, but I can live with that - there are plans to extend support in the future to other languages 
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Microsoft appears to be taking games development very seriously (in a fun sort of way obviously), being able to develop for a console in this way is something that’s bound to be now worrying Sony and Nintendo. In fact, all this talk of XNA is almost enough to make me want to buy an XBOX 360. Oh no wait, crap – it IS enough 
.
Posted in DirectX, Programming, Software, XBOX 360, XNA | 1 Comment »
