This is a clever idea. It is a miniatures combat game—think Games Workshop—with an accompanying iPhone/iPad app to handle the record keeping and math. Units can gain experience, which will carry over to the later battles.
This TED talk—from the architect of Bing Maps at Microsoft—shows some really cool augmented-reality stuff. Soon this kind of tech will be in mobile phones.
Madgets: Actuating Widgets on Interactive Tabletops
Imagine the board game possibilities.
Engadget:
We’re not going to beat around the bush — in our approximation, the iPhone 4 is the best smartphone on the market right now. The combination of gorgeous new hardware, that amazing display, upgraded cameras, and major improvements to the operating system make this an extremely formidable package. Yes, there are still pain points that we want to see Apple fix, and yes, there are some amazing alternatives to the iPhone 4 out there. But when it comes to the total package — fit and finish in both software and hardware, performance, app selection, and all of the little details that make a device like this what it is — we think it’s the cream of the current crop.
In case you missed the announcement amongst the iPhone 4 hoopla: Safari 5 came out today.
Tethering. Finally!
I somehow missed this news from Google I/O last week:
The Developer Sandbox also includes a station showing another Google technology which, experimentally for now, we’ve made Unity support. That technology is called Native Client and we think it’s a potential game changer for rich web applications and games in particular. In a nutshell, Native Client is a security sandbox currently in Chromium that allows the secure execution of native code. If you want to dig into the details (e.g. how can native code be guaranteed secure?!), I *highly* recommend you watch Henry Bridge’s explanation in this video.
If we really cut to the chase for why this matters for Unity, it’s because what we’re showing is Unity running in Chrome with no plugin at all. That’s right, there’s no Unity Web Player installed on the machines running Unity content in Chrome. Rather, with Google’s clever technology, we’re running Unity content in Chrome using just default access and no additional installation or user interaction. It’s kind of wild!
Kind of wild indeed. I really hope this takes off.
Cory Doctorow:
Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear and several very talented friends (including one of the neatest hackers I know and somene whom I’m reliably assured could lay claim to the title of “World’s Greatest Swordsman”) have announced their new project: an online interactive fiction thinggum called The Mongoliad.
The Mongoliad will consist of a series of linked stories written by different writers, a Wikipedia-style concordance, and “an ongoing stream of nontextual, para-narrative, and extra-narrative stuff which we think brings the story to life in ways that are pleasingly unique, and which can’t be done in any single medium.”
What’s more, you, the reader, will be explicitly encouraged to improve and extend the Mongoliad canon with your own fiction and supplementary fan media.
Here’s an intriguing idea: author Neal Stephenson and a few friends (including Greg Bear and Nicole Galland) are going to be releasing a set of serialized stories as apps for the iPad and the iPhone. The project is called “The Mongoliad,” and is based on a world designed by Stephenson (author of the great novels Snow Crash and The Diamond Age).
I love Neal Stephenson. He is, without question, my favorite author. But this concept just does not pique my interest. I hope I am wrong—that this expriment turns out to be awesome—but for now you can mark me down as nervous.
I find myself starting sentences with ‘so’ fairly often, even in writing. This article is about rising use of the word ‘so’ to begin sentences. The reporter argues that this may have begun in the tech industry. Click through for some speculation about why the tech industry would favor ‘so’ over ‘well’ or ‘oh’ or ‘um’.
