Duck Goes Moo!

http://reviews.cnet.com/4531-10921_7-6464030.html

My Mac using friends have often ooh-ed and ahh-ed over a small bit of OS X functionality: the Widget.

A Widget is a small little graphical application that appears in your Mac OS Dashboard, which is essentially a shadowy desktop hidden beneath your normal desktop. With a quick click the user is presented with a wide assortment of small little interactive programs that can report weather, give sports scores, tell fortunes, provide quick amusement, and any other smallish program that doesn’t take up too much desktop real-estate.

Well, the up and coming Windows Vista is now going to have its own little source of digital bemusement; introducing Microsoft Gadgets. They work much the same as the Mac Widgets, and is kind of a nice touch, albeit a stolen one. Still, it seems as though there are quite a few aspects of OS X that are being brought into the new Windows, like the cool scrolling program selection bar that beats the pants off the Windows “Start” menu any day.

Not a bad idea really, since the OS X does indeed provide a great user experience despite the great disadvantage that Mac mice only have one button and no scroll wheel .

Charles Babbage came up with an idea of how to quickly derive trigonomic and logorythmic tables back in 1822: the Difference Engine!

A real Difference Engine was never built until near the end of the last century, but some intellegent soul with a lot of spare time actually built one out of legos.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a method by which a web site is tweaked and altered to get higher placement in search engines like Google and Yahoo! Search. It’s a business in which there lies much voodoo and superstition; rumor has it that if you sacrifice a chicken under a fullmoon you’ll get more hits to your site, or at least violate a health code or two.

There are many types of SEOs, but one of the main deliniations is between “black hat” SEOs, making bogus pages, bogus links, hidden pages and other nasty tricks to try to fool search engines, and “white hats”, which try making a site with good structure, good relative content, and legally acquiring links from sites in order to get as much a boost in their SEO ranking than they can by less savory means.

Sound confusing? The process, much like a Rubik’s Cube, is suprizingly simple but difficult to master. There are many sources online that provide enough information for a beginner, like this one, but the true insider info and how to get your site to the top of the searches does not come cheap.

In case you haven’t seen this latest new invention from the big G, check out Google Video. Here you can find video clips from websites from all over the world, including some full length broadcasts and TV shows for free… or at least you used to be able to when it first came out. I was able to watch the entire first episode of “Everybody Hates Chris”, which was actually a pretty good show.

The search feature could use a little work though. Often I get results back that have absolutely nothing to do with what I’m looking for, often getting clips from CNN and the Fox News Network. I have found a few interesting things though:

MORE COWBELL!!!

Clip from Carmen Electra’s “Strippercise” video

Product spot for the new Nintendo Revolution console

I’ve been a Macromedia Studio user for quite some time now, plus also a Microsoft Visual Studio user as well. With Macromedia studio I can design rich user experiences with flash and with Microsoft Visual Studio I can design powerful desktop and web-based applications. Now Microsoft has made a move to take all the nice properties of Macromedia’s products and make them their own (perhaps making their own version of flash MSN searchable).

Microsoft Expression is a suite of products designed to create a whole new realm of online and desktop experience… and also make a step into Macromedia’s customer base, in true Microsoft fashion, but there is more to this besides merely getting into a new market.

Microsoft Expression is meant to be part of the new Windows Vista operating system. One of the main advances I’ve been hearing people goof about the most is the new XAML file format which is a markup language that can express objects, text, behaviors and more in a common format. Bitmaps are going away in favor of vector graphics, even with icons and text on your desktop screen.

This could all be very cool, or it could end up being a confusing mess. Either way it looks like many experienced designers and developers may find themselves having to go back to school. Such is the life of the code warrior.

I have spent my entire life typing, having been born to a family of programmers, and it’s something that come almost second nature to me. I often have trouble speaking when I think too hard because generally when I am deep in thought I communicate with my fingers and not my mouth.

Still, It’s kind of an inefficient excerise, and I’ve thought quite a bit about more efficient ways of engaging in programming and online communication.

The Almaden Research Center, a research division of IBM’s based in the infamous Silicon Valley, has come up with a new method for inputing words and symbols into a computer.

It’s called Shape Writing and instead of typing individual letters you instead drag a stylus or finger accross the surface between the characters to form the words you want to use. The system remembers the paths you used to create the different words, instead of the individual keypresses, to determine what to input onto the screen.

How is this a better system? For one it is potentially quicker than lifting the fingers up and down repeatidly to form words. Also, it is much better for systems like cell phones or PDAs, where the keys can be kind of small.

In the end, a person remembers a word as a path instead of letters. An experienced user might not even have to see the letters to trace the words and would have the paths remembered, much like experienced typists do not have to look down to see the keyboard to type the correct letters.

Of course, the true “1337″ users do not need keys with the writing.

Further proof that the lines between reality and our computer created fantasies are bluring, a group called Interactive Telecommunications in New York has come up with a live-action Pac-Man game. The game consists of 10 players: 1 pacman, 4 ghosts, and five more people who control the previous five players via a control center… so I guess in reality there are only five players and five actors, but the street character and the control room player must work as a team to make sure each side wins.

How does this work? The “Pac-Man on the Street” cannot see any dots and most be told by his or her control room team member where to run to collect dots. GPS devices attached to the Pac-Man’s costume lets the control room know when dots have been collected, or that he has been gobbled up by one of the four ghosts, who as well have GPS devices and partners shouting directions into their ears on how to grab the yellow dot muncher.

Pretty neat stuff. I wonder if they could bring this show to St. Louis.

CORRECTION: They did not use GPS devices. That was an accidental assumption of the editor and many thanks to DKG for pointing out the error.

I’ve heard through the grapevine that Apple Computers is soon coming out with an announcement of their latest innovation: a Mac branded cellphone that can download and play iTunes. Ever since Steve Jobs returned back from his time of exile from Apple, there has been a long stream of new innovative products, including the ubiquitous iPod.

I myself do not own any apple products, but I have to admit the new iMacs and iBooks look really neat and user friendly, albeit a bit expensive when compared to their PC counterparts. I have been giving some thoughts about buying myself one of those iMac Minis so I can have a taste of how the other side lives.

A 27 year old man in South Korea recently died from playing computer games for 50 hours straight. There are times I came close to reached the two-days-straight mark but I never quite got that far. Here is the article.