The new concept Nokia 888 is design by Tamer Nakisci, the Nokia Design Award, winner. And I say the award is well earned as you as you can see in the movie below. The phone is fully flexible and can take any shape, it’s even designed to ‘remember’ certain shapes ( some sort of presets), for example you can send a message to your boyfriend/girlfriend and make his/her phone take the shape of a heart.
Besides you can use the phone as a bracelet, make it turn into a clip-shape to carry it easily or make it ‘wave’ when somebody calls you. To do all this the battery is liquid-based an the display is flexible and servers as a touchscreen. With these features the phone will serve as a GPS device, PDS, alarm clock, electronic wallet and many more.
It all looks nice and high-tech but this is just a short preview of what technology has in store for us, phones like this won’t be on the market for at least a couple of years if not more.
Starting with the “3d bumptop desktop prototype” the new hype was 3D desktops for linux. From the most popular I mention XGL, Looking Glass for Ubuntu and of course Beryl-Compiz (based on XGL).
But the main features are the same:
Scale effect – Using the scale effect you can see all your opened windows and switch between them. Not only that but this is live preview so the movies will keep rolling, sites updating, etc. This is really helpful for operations like drag&drop and others that require you working with multiple windows.
The switcher – New way to visualize the windows when you ALT-TAB. It uses live preview of course, and it can be set to dim other windows besides the one active, it rotates the cube when you select a window in another dektop, etc.
Desktop Cube – I think this was the biggest hit. That cool 3D Cube that uses live preview (also) and that lets you manipulate your default four desktops in any way you want. Add to this the window effects and you’ll get some pretty nice visual effects.
Window Effects – There are dozens animations and effects for your windows. You can set your windows to fade in and out, to destroy themselves when you close them, to ‘wave’ when you move it, etc. Besides there are many attributes you can alter for each window, such as: Transparency, Brightness, Saturation, etc.
And these are only basic features enhanced and modified by each desktop, case by case. As you have seen the novelty is mostly visual, and the way I see it there’s little or no addition to usability.
It might be true that the video is a little overreacted but it contains actual footage of Steve Ballmer, SEO at Microsoft. Although this video was added somewhere in 2005 it still represents the Redmond company, I mean Ballmer is SEO and Chairman, he is Microsoft. I don’t love Microsoft and I don’t hate Microsoft but watching this video makes me wonder at its policy.
Just compare: that guy being your boss at the office or working for Google that has it’s own spa, restaurant, gym, etc. for its employees.
You are going to see a video that appears to be very simple and easy to produce, but despite that, Apple paid not more, not less than $1,7 million for its making and distribution. It has gone live last night, during the Oscars and it contains snippets of Hollywood stars saying “Hello” on different types of phones, from the plain old rotary phone to the iPhone we’re all going to see.
A total of twenty-eight actors from all eras of cinematography and even a couple of animated characters go through saying “Hello”, except two that say “bonjour” and “yo! yo!” (now that’s a nice touch, eh?), until the very end when the iPhone appears on the screen, immediately followed by a big “Hello” message on a black screen and a “Coming in June” finale.
Seriously speaking now, people tend to dislike the new operating system from Microsoft. For many a reason that is, but in the top there seem to be the incompatibility with a great deal of hardware devices, driver problems, installation problems, high requirements, etc.
We’ve all seen the PC vs Mac ads by Apple, there are plenty of them. But now it’s time for the PC to counterattack, with the help of director Laurie McGuinness, who created four small hilarious clips, with the same character personalities (the PC being older, “boring”, and the Mac being younger and cooler), but this time the Mac doesn’t get the spotlight. What I liked about the clips is that they’re not made in order to harm the Mac, and they don’t deny the qualities portraied in the Mac ads, but they observe the PC’s own qualities, without denying the Mac’s. So, without more description, here are the clips:
Yesterday, this YouTube vid got dugg by over 5000 users, though there was nothing new about it. I have seen it for the first time a long time ago, and it is on YouTube for 7 months now. After seeing it for the first time, I started wondering how practical could such a desktop environment be. Except for the people that usualy have their desktop full of icons, there’s no practical need for it.
This video found on NetBoy’s page caught my attention: here’s something that’s not spreaded and popular as it should be – XGL. Now that’s something I can use and find is useful: dividing your applications on a number of desktops and sorting them by type or by usage or by anything you may want. The best thing about it is that it’s free.
For all I care, I would love the first 30 minutes of play; I wouldn’t use all the features or at least most of them on a day-to-day basis, but it would definitely ease my works more than BumpTop. Real life doesn’t always apply to desktops.
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