überthings, inc. » Supercool

Octocat revelation at Pictoplasma.

michael — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 01:27:05 +0000

I’ve just had a fantastic day at the Pictoplasma conference in NYC watching hours of character art and design, from the rampantly hallucinogenic visions of David Oreilly and Friends With You to the simplified forms of Akinori Oishi and the prodigious output of Studio AKA.

One of the more interesting talks was David Oreilly’s, where he showed a number of unseen animations and outed himself as the creator of the Octocat meme, before showing us the final episode. I won’t give anything away, but try see it if you can.

And I thought he was just the guy that created the fake iPhone hologram video:

iHologram – iPhone application from David OReilly on Vimeo.

BONUS: Alba and I scored a box made by Motomichi for the apartment – sweet!

iPhone 2.0 Firmware’s Built-in Screen Capture Utility

michael — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 20:00:00 +0000

It’s the little things that count: one the best things about the new iPhone 2.0 software is the built-in Screen Capture utility. Smart move, Apple – now all the kids will be flickr’in up their screenshots all day long and documenting iPhone App BSODs – sweet!

Built-in Screen Capture Utility: With the iPhone 2.0 software installed, hold down the Home button and press the Lock button and your screen will flash—and an image of your phone’s screen gets saved to your Camera Roll’s images.

- via Lifehacker

Here’s my latest screen:

Technorati Tags: apple, iphone

Shifd launches!

michael — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 05:25:47 +0000

I knew that Shifd – Nick Bilton and Michael Young’s Yahoo Hack Day-winning project was something special, so I’m stoked that they got a chance to take another crack at it and build it bigger, albeit with slightly less RFID. Fittingly, I read about their launch in the Times piece on Adobe AIR – which they used to create the desktop interface for Shifd.

I was using Instapaper to capture all my private links, but I’ve since switched to Shifd. Why? One reason – the bookmarklet is much faster. The Instapaper bookmarklet hangs around on screen for a good second or two after posting the link to offer some form of confirmation, but I really don’t miss it with Shifd’s lightning fast posting. More on this later.

Falling in love with Ingo Maurer

michael — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 23:54:25 +0000

After Nora dragged me off to the last day of his show at the Cooper-Hewitt, I have a serious crush on Ingo and his endlessly inventive stream of playful, witty lighting installations.

iPhone Porn and the “google” neologism juggernaut

michael — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 13:39:15 +0000

As is my habit, I woke up this morning and reached for whatever new iPhone pr0n was available. Luckily for me, Apple had just thrown up a lengthy (20 mins) new “documentary”/feature propaganda (20 mins) featuring a friendly Apple designer/model/actor.

One thing that stood out for me, in between high contrast video of the phone merrily multi-tasking it’s way on to being the ultimate device ever, was the Google search demo. The guy, let’s call him Bob, opens up the iPhone and initiates a search by typing a few phrases into Safari’s search field, then hitting the “google” button. Very interesting.

Subversion, reappropriation and modification of key terms and phrases are some of the hallmarks of the current US administration’s communications and the previous two Republican campaigns and as they’ve proved, he who controls the language, controls the universe [sorry Frank Herbert!].

It seems awkward to talk about yahooing for something, but googling has become synonymous with searching for – and finding – information and that may be the subtle difference that means everything, especially as searching and finding heads mobile. This is all pure speculation, but I wonder if the iPhone will change the action button to “yahoo” if you switch to using their search? Time will tell. I’ll let you know on Friday.

StarCraft II announced by Blizzard

michael — Mon, 21 May 2007 03:59:30 +0000

OMG! Yesterday, at the Blizzard Invitational in Seoul, South Korea, Blizzard announced that they’re working on StarCraft II. If that doesn’t send shivers of unearthly delight through your spine, then you really need to go and read a bit more about the original Starcraft. In fact, why don’t you go out and buy it and spend the next few weeks losing yourself in the tightly balanced gameplay, the superb characters and one of the best control interfaces for real time strategy games ever (hint, use the keyboard shortcuts – they help). I can almost guarantee that the type of excitement the original generated in Korea will sweep the rest of the world with this next iteration. It’s definitely swept my apartment already!

gotAPI.com adds J2ME, mobile world rejoices.

michael — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 22:04:13 +0000

Q: Can the awesome API reference site gotAPI.com get any awesomer?

A: Yes, since it’s just added J2ME at the request of yours truly.

I love the (Lazy) Interweb.

“I Love Me, Vol. I.”

michael — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 05:55:46 +0000

OMG. I love palindromes. Say it backwards, say it forwards. It’s the same! Get all your literary goodness every day from Jim Kalb’s Palindrome Connection.

I’m, alas, a salami!

UPDATE: I love them so much I made a cute little palindrome generator. Go to http://uberthings.com/palindromic for your word of the day.
UPDATE2: I am such a dork. I made a mobile palindrome generator with Textmarks. Text “pali” to 41411. Enjoy.

Chumby Devices Handed Out at Foo

michael — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 05:17:09 +0000

Michael Arrington from Techcrunch writes about an interesting new hackfriendly mobile device called the Chumby.
Chumby Devices were handed out at Foo Camp to about 100 lucky Foos (I’m looking at you, Raffel) to prod, poke, develop world changing applications and generally hack to pieces. I’m not going reprint the technical specs verbatim, but the most interesting thing for me is the input methods – touchscreen or squeeze sensors on the casing let you interact directly with this guy, no buttons, keys or mice to get in the way.

Practically nipping at the heels of Synaptics touch screen cell phone prototype announcement, it definitely feels like there will be a fair amount of mobile/portable devices with gestural control interfaces in the near future. Now if only Synaptics would hand out some of those cell phones for student projects…

Starcraft Origami

michael — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 04:49:39 +0000

OMG. If you’ve ever spent hours building up your puny Terrans and mighty Protoss forces to withstand a Zerg rush – you know what I’m talking about. Here are those same terrifying pixels, gently shaped and folded to look something like this – 야후! 이미지박스. I should have guessed that it was a Korean who did it, it seems like everybody mainlines the stuff over there. If you ever get the chance, try to watch Starcraft TV. Who says video game spectating is boring? It goes a little something like this.