Thursday, December 09, 2010

Kinect finally fulfills its Minority Report destiny (video)

Kinect finally fulfills its Minority Report destiny (video)

Not to denigrate the numerous fine hacks that Kinect's undergone since its launch, but it's always nice to see the professionals come in and shake things up a little. A crew from MIT's brain labs has put together a hand detection system on Microsoft's ultra-versatile cam, which is sophisticated enough to recognize the position of both your palms and fingers. Just as a demonstration, they've tied that good stuff up to a little picture-scrolling UI, and you won't be surprised to hear that it's the closest thing to Minority Report's interactive gesture-based interface that we've seen yet. And it's all achieved with a freaking console peripheral. Video after the break.
Continue reading Kinect finally fulfills its Minority Report destiny (video)
Kinect finally fulfills its Minority Report destiny (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Dec 2010 08:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read More...

Wednesday, December 08, 2010

TI's OMAP4440 processor brings two blazing Cortex-A9 cores to the table

TI's OMAP4440 processor brings two blazing Cortex-A9 cores to the table

Phones and tablets based on TI's first production OMAP4 processor -- the OMAP4430 -- won't even be on the market until early next year, but TI's already planning ahead with the announcement of an upgraded chip that promises a 50 percent boost in overall performance. The new OMAP4440 can send its two Cortex-A9-based cores as high as 1.5GHz, while the 4430 tops out at 1GHz; TI says that means we should expect a 1.25x improvement in graphics performance, a 30 percent decline in webpage load time, and 1080p playback performance that doubles the slowpoke (comparably speaking, anyway) 4430. The company expects to sample these little speed demons to manufacturers in the first quarter of next year with volume shipment coming in the second half, itching to do battle with Samsung's Orion; in the meantime, we suppose your 4430 will have to do. Follow the break for the press release.

Continue reading TI's OMAP4440 processor brings two blazing Cortex-A9 cores to the table

TI's OMAP4440 processor brings two blazing Cortex-A9 cores to the table originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Dec 2010 11:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  sourceTI  | Email this | Comments

Read More...

Twitter Gains Much-Needed Instagram Support And Full Songs From Rdio

Twitter Gains Much-Needed Instagram Support And Full Songs From Rdio

For the past few months, probably something close to half of my tweets have been links that take you off of the site. My bad. But tonight I have good news! If you too are addicted to Instagram — which it seems about a quarter of the people I follow on Twitter are — you’ll no longer have to leave twitter.com to view those pictures. Yes, New Twitter has expanded their right pane to include a number of new third party sites tonight, including the popular mobile photo sharing startup.

So who else is joining the pane? Blip.tv, Rdio, SlideShare, and Dipdive. These added to the ones that launched alongside New Twitter such as YouTube, Flickr, USTREAM, and more recently, iTunes, means that less and less, you’ll have to click away from twitter.com. With these additions, they now have over 20 content partners for the right-side pane. It’s becoming quite the platform itself.

And they’re not done yet. “In the next few months we'll integrate with more content partners,” the company writes tonight on the Twitter Blog.

While Instagram is a much welcomed addition, Rdio is also an awesome one because it means users can share full-length songs for the first time on Twitter. You’ll recall that iTunes sharing only including song previews.



Read More...

Why Tech Startup Flattr May Be The Key to WikiLeaksâ Future Funding

Why Tech Startup Flattr May Be The Key to WikiLeaks' Future Funding

WikiLeaks, which publishes anonymous leaks of secret material (most recently 250,000 previously secret US embassy cables) still has a trick up its sleeve. In the last few days its sources of funding have been gradually cut off. MasterCard, PayPal and now Visa have all suspended payments to the organsation and founder Julian Assange has been remanded in custody in London without bail (so far).

However there remains one source of funding so far untouched, and that is a small startup, Flattr, created by Peter Sunde, co-founder of torrent site Pirate Bay, who has been reminding Twitter users today via his personal Twitter account that it’s still possible to “help” Wikileaks.



Read More...

The Five Best Chrome Webapps That Aren't Just Bookmarks [Video]

The Five Best Chrome Webapps That Aren't Just Bookmarks [Video]

The Five Best Chrome Webapps That Aren't Just BookmarksWhen Chrome launched their web store earlier today, the main question on a lot of minds was: "How are these apps any different from bookmarks?" Here's a look at five of our favorite exclusive apps for Chrome that stand out.

To be honest, there's a lot in the Chrome web store that is underwhelming; many apps are essentially links to popular webapps. This isn't necessarily a bad thing—it does still provide a place for you to search out and find good webapps for what you need, and many of today's webapps are pretty fantastic thanks to new technologies like HTML5. Once you find them, however, you're left with something pretty similar to a custom start page from the likes of myfav.es—or just Chrome's new tab page, but more customized. If you're looking for the Chrome web store to provide something that isn't already in your bookmarks bar, these five apps are sure to impress.

Note that while these dedicated apps have the ability to do more than a standard HTML5 app, it's hard to tell when looking at these apps which features actually fall into that category. In theory, the developers of these apps could have just released them as a normal webapp, but they didn't. At any rate, the point is moot right now because these five apps are only available in the Chrome web store—and they're all definitely worth checking out.

TweetDeck


If you use Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, or Google Buzz, you probably use a native social networking client like the Lifehacker favorite TweetDeck. The TweetDeck team wrote the Chrome app entirely from scratch, bringing the awesome features you're used to from native clients to your Chrome window: Inline image previews, drag and drop organization, and a remarkably slick and smooth interface make it pretty neat. It isn't as fully-featured as the desktop client just yet, but the developers noted that they'll be implementing new features in "ChromeDeck" first, so it's going to be pretty cutting edge once it ramps up—and we're excited to see where it goes.

The Five Best Chrome Webapps That Aren't Just BookmarksTweetDeck | Chrome Web Store

Aviary


Aviary is like Photoshop in your web browser, and it's capabilities are almost mind-blowing. If you need any proof, just watch a cat get unzipped in the video above. While it's certainly not as feature-rich and seamless as a desktop option, the fact that it is usable and surprisingly responsive makes it an option for actually doing real graphic work, color correction for your photos, and other common jobs you'd handle in Photoshop—but directly from your web browser. Aviary supports layers, blending modes, a variety of fonts, and even popular filters like blur, sharpen, emboss, and more. The downside comes in the form of keyboard shortcuts, which are mostly absent. It's not a tool you'll be able to use as quickly as your favorite desktop imaging application, but you can use it to do most of your graphic work from just about anywhere.

For creating vector graphics, Aviary also offers a free vector editor. You can also get a dumbed-down HTML5 image editor and a variety of other imaging webapps. As an alternative, Picasa and Flickr users might appreciate Picnik as an alternative. While it's not as feature-rich as Aviary, it provides common photo editing functions and integrates nicely with photo sharing sites.

The Five Best Chrome Webapps That Aren't Just BookmarksAviary | Chrome Web Store

SlideRocket

The Five Best Chrome Webapps That Aren't Just Bookmarks
(Click to enlarge.)

SlideRocket is billed as your online replacement to PowerPoint, and although the interface, at times, has a few more clicks than it may need, it's pretty impressive overall. It's not just capable of making presentations, but adding rich media and functioning just as well as a desktop app. Anything you add to a slide can be quickly dragged around and adjusted. Common settings are easily accessed from an inspector panel right in the app. SlideRocket lets you start from a selection of a few basic templates or import a PowerPoint presentation you've already started. When you're all done, SlideRocket lets you share your presentations by playing them in the app, exporting a portable version for Windows or Mac, or exporting to either PowerPoint or PDF format. A 15MB account is free, but SlideRocket offers more space and functionality for paid users as well.

The Five Best Chrome Webapps That Aren't Just BookmarksSlideRocket | Chrome Web Store

Write Space

The Five Best Chrome Webapps That Aren't Just Bookmarks
(Click to enlarge.)

We love distraction-free writing tools here at Lifehacker, and while there are a lot of good apps (and hacks) out there for native distraction-free writing, Write Space does a pretty good job of bringing those features into the cloud with their Chrome app. It's completely self-contained, so it works offline, saves data locally, and constantly backs up your work. It's also pretty customizable, letting you change the font, background, and other window traits. And, of course, you can make Chrome go full-screen for a truly distraction-free experience. You can even set it to do so whenever you launch it, which is convenient. There are certainly a few things we'd like to see in it (like exporting), but it's a great example of an app-like experience within Chrome.

The Five Best Chrome Webapps That Aren't Just BookmarksWrite Space | Chrome Web Store

New York Times

The Five Best Chrome Webapps That Aren't Just Bookmarks
(Click to enlarge.)

While we'd prefer a multi-publication webapp (Flipreader for Chrome, anybody?) or at least an RSS reader, the New York Times put together a pretty fancy webapp for Chrome. If you're an avid fan of the Times, this is a really excellent way to get your news. The interface is both simple and attractive, making it really easy to navigate through the top stories in various sections of the New York Times. If you're not satisfied with the default look, the webapp includes a number of themes to choose from. Overall it's a good way to read the New York Times, but is better served as an example of what other news-centric apps should aspire to be when they make their debuts in the Chrome Web Store.

The Five Best Chrome Webapps That Aren't Just BookmarksNew York Times | Chrome Web Store

Read More...