Another key note another Apple device! Today’s keynote featured the iPad, Jobs latest and greatest creation… well at least latest! Disappointingly the iPad will not run Flash Player all we can do is hope Adobe do some tweaking here and there to get Native apps running on this baby! But what have they done?
The Device
The device has an awesome 9.7 inch IPS screen at 1024×768. It comes in 16, 32 and 64 GB flavours and has the option of 3G. It sports an accelerometer, 1GHZ Apple A4 processor and 802.11n wi-fi allong with all the other stuff like compass and bluetooth. Ohh yeah and it has a 10 hour (real use) battery life.
The Software
As expected it runs a variation of iPhone OS. What this means is it supports all iPhone apps out the box. The SDK will allow people to develop for the iPad specifically so we can see some really awesome apps come onto the app store when this gets released. It also has iWork which takes the full iWork sweet and has re-interfaced it to the iPad and to be honest looks pretty sweet!
What else?
Something I was happy to see was the new dock keyboard which holds the iPad in place as well as charges it. It also has video out for presenting iWork on projectors and will come unlocked to any network anywhere.
When?
iPad ships with Wi-fi only in 60 days and with Wi-fi+3G in 90 days internationally. 3G plans will take longer to arrange outside of the US.
I guess I’ll get this… when it gets jailbroke!
[Hit The Gallery Here]
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Thanks to the wonderfull world of Twitter I have stumbled uppon a great tool called Project Sikuli. Sikuli allows you to automate greate GUI based scripts by applying Python combined with screen shots. I have found this to be an exceptional tool as your delays can be set to when a visual element occurs rather than a static number. I have used Sikuli to open my Chaos based generative art instalation and close it when the UI gets too complicated, this process is repeated making sure that the canvas is kept clean and at a high frame rate. The reason I could not do this via AppleScript was because I wanted the installation to run for as long as possible and due to the nature of Chaos this varied from run to run. All I can say is what a great tool with many uses and beta testing user interface.
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Multi-touch is great when you want to enable complex features on a fairly intuitive and easy to read interface. But when deployed in a Windows or OSX environment common traditional elements such as screen orientation and workspace compatibility get in the way of development and are often more hassle than they are worth. The greatest thing about Multi-touch is collaboration and Pictionaire, a project by Andy Wilson and Björn Hartmann, really takes advantage of this and is an awesome tool for designers.
Although impractical at the moment due to costs and maintenance and complexity of the system we could well see this make its way on to the consumer based market in the future. This technology will allow designers to work both digitally and physically at the same time bridging an important gap in the design process and in turn reducing developing time through increasing productivity and allowing better access to information and through the digital interface.
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The Apple Tablet, rumoured to be called the iSlate, is rumoured to be announced January 27th. Yes I know I said rumoured twice in that last sentence but let’s face it we all know its coming! But what we don’t know is whether it will run a variation of iPhone OS or full on OSX. Odds our in my opinion it will run iPhone OS as it’s the best money maker thanks to the app store and this device will not be designed as a replacement for your computer. Fortunately for us however, it doesn’t matter whether is iPhone OS or OSX.
Flash Cs5 will publish to the iPhone platform and with a few tweaks here and there I’m sure that adobe will fix it up to do the tablet. If they leave this until the release of CS6 I may just go on an adobe hunting killing spree! On the other hand though, if it’s running full on OSX then we have AIR 2.0 or Flash. Regardless of the OS it will undoubtedly feature multi-touch and accelerometer which we will be able to access through the new AS3 extensions that Flash CS5 will bring us.
How will this be different from both the iPhone and Mac’s then?
This will come from how the user adopts the system, with the intermittent release of Flash CS5 a range of developers and designers will surely be publishing for these platforms, and the great thing is you can publish to all of them at the same time by making your stage object positions and scale dynamic to the resolution of the screen and platform that you are using.
But what about Safari?
I think that Apple will be heavily scrutinised if they don’t feature Flash Player into Safari on the tablet as it will be a powerful device with a reasonably large screen and will no doubt be capable of it. Apple have kind of got away with it with the iPhone due to it being a phone, but with many phone OS’s featuring Flash Player in the browser they can’t hide for long. If apple to feature Flash Player into the tablet and it runs a variation of iPhone OS then I believe it will be inevitable that they will be forced to feature it in iPhone OS 4.0, which may have a announcement and release on the same day!
Also Flash CS5 developing will be great for iPhone developing, but for more complex designs you’re better off going with Objective-C, the reason for this is that although Native Flash Apps for the iPhone will be great, they will lack in performance as proved by the existing apps on the App Store. Undoubtedly the tablet will feature a much higher performance graphics chip and processer than the iPhone therefore quality Flash published games could be a possibility for the tablet.
Regardless of what happens next week it will be important to us all.
[Don't forget to follow Engadget and Gizmodo for the release on January 27th 10AM Pacific!]
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Ever wanted to see what you look like in 3D? Well look in a mirror, but if you want to create a 3D model of yourself it’s really quite simple and will only take an hour or so if you have the kit allready. It’s easy, stylish, geeky, fun and innovative.
[Instructions & Gallery After The Break]
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If you want to blog you’ve got an array of tools you can use including WordPress and Blogger. If you want a forum your best bet is PHPBB and if you want a Virtual Learning Environment you have a strong selection of powerful services including Moodle. But what if you need to create a website fast due to a budget or time limitations. I know you can create Pages in WordPress but you can’t create the site without a Blog.
Why are there no successful control panel based PHP Publishing Applications? Think about it… you could create your site fast with custom themes and plugins and your clients can just jump in and make changes as when and often they need them, now I know what you’re thinking it would kill the Web Design industry surely? I don’t think so, people will still need themes and plugins and anyone who wants a website with a little innovativity will have to pay up and have it built in the old fashioned way.
Let me know what you think or if I’ve overlooked a service in the comments!
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With the upcoming release of CS5 what can we expect to see in the following year? Here are some of my insights and predictions for the following year -
The Multi-Touch Era
I’ve featured Multi-Touch on a few occasions and I think that CS5’s jump to natively build Multi-Touch applications will help push the Multi-Touch community to create some awesome applications. Though on the desktop platform it’s a niece market it will hopefully Flash will be the tool everyone had waited for to really push technology to support it. Regardless of this transition I’m going to be using it for interactive installation projects and will be much more effective, accurate and easier to use. When you look at Multi-Touch from the mobile platform you can put your bottom dollar on its success. The mobile platform is so perfect for Multi-Touch development and with an array of powerful devices now sporting capacitive touch screens Flash will be the best platform to build native and Flash applications designed to work across an array of devices.
Mobile Development
Why is Flash going to be successful on the mobile platform? Well this is an easy one… Say I’m developing a game in which I have an accelerometer controlled ball, it’s a 2D platform game and uses nothing more than multi-touch and the accelerometer sound familiar? Well I don’t want to spend my time learning and building these games in several different languages and with several different tools. Instead I can jump into Flash CS5, create an application which determines the screen resolution and places movie clips on the stage via AS3. By doing this I am accommodating for multiple devices following these basic rules I can publish to all the smart phone platforms as a swf and publish to the iPhone as a native app. This way I’m saving time, money and making it easier to debug by having a single version across all platforms. It just gets better though, this allows me to develop for a larger audience and sell or distribute your application faster and more successfully.
Web Development
Flash websites are nothing new to my readers so how can Flash websites reinvent themselves in 2010. I’ll tell you how, through 3D and acceptance in the business industry. 3D is getting better within Flash constantly and with Flash Player 10.1 improved hardware acceleration we might just get some decent 3D content. But what good is this unless people are willing to pay us for our work. I’ve found more business are willing to take a leap of faith into Flash websites now that they are a little more search engine friendly and that they can get better noticed from having some innovative website.
HD
It’s time for the UK’s Internet Network to crumble, long overdue for an upgrade. HD is on it’s way and there is no stopping it with YouTube already sporting a collection of 1080p videos and they just about stream thanks to Google super servers that far surpass anybody’s expectations. Again this is courtesy of the new Flash Player 10.1 with its improved video handling and better hardware acceleration.
Flash+
Well it’s not Flash but here at Flash+ I’m going to be dedicating more time to the blog and hopefully find someone to co-auther with me on it, but expect not just more news but up to date, relevent, interesting and fast to press news from here on out! Remember Flash+ is an ad-free blog I do this because I love it! So if anyone can spare some hosting that would be great, I’m looking at you Media Temple!
Let me know what you guys think of these ideas and share your own in the comments!
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Adobes CS5 continues to impress me with a new feature called Smart Paste. Smart Paste effectively takes raw data that has yet to be encoded and puts it onto a HTML5 canvas. So what does this mean for us developers? Well it means if we create vector artwork we are going to be looking at smaller file sizes in which the images will be scalable and adaptive. But the best thing about the technology is it’s ability to adapt to live and static data such as SQL or XML. This means that Smart Paste is not just for developers but also designers allowing them to easily create dynamic graphical elements into web pages.
Now I didn’t just say that it’s vectors, Flash CS5 animations can be ported over to HTML5 Canvas’s as well allowing users without Flash Player to view animations this could be very impractical because more people have Flash Player than people who have HTML5 compatible browsers but with use of browser detection this could be awesome and could even bring Flash like animation to the iPhone. More of this technology soon.
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OnLive is a cloud gaming service that is currently in development, it aims to port games over to your TV, Mac, PC and iPhone. The way this will work is by the game rendering server-side, and any inputs being sent to the server. I first heard of this technology about a year ago and in terms of pure speed through optimization it has come a long way.
The best thing I’ve seen about the technology is how games can be played on multiple devices in real time. Although I don’t understand all the jargon about how they have optimized the network structure, I can’t help to be hugely impressed. The 48 minute video after the break is long, detailed but so worth it. All I can do now is hope the technology arrives here across the pond in the UK. However for you guys you can rock the beta here.
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