king talk

The guys from imaGynize created an Augmented Driving App for your iPhone. The idea is not actually new, but it‘s interesting, that it´s working quite good. If you are often driving on highways or country roads, then you have to check this app (price: $ 2,99) with real-time object detection with up to 10 fps including the following features: Dynamic augmented reality overlays for lanes and vehicles, lane detection, lane change warning, vehicle detection and low distance information.

The system is designed to work in good lighting conditions during daytime for visible lane markings on highways and country roads and for detection of regular cars. For operation, a fix mount is required. You have to follow the safety notes and consider the setup instructions for optimum performance.

Bonnier globals R&D released a nice video about Mag+ some weeks ago. Due to the recent launch of the iPad in the states, they updated their concept for Popular Science+ and matched it to the iPad. In my opinion it’s a good concept which was well implemented. It’s a pity, that the overview mode can´t be displayed on the iPad. It looked really nice and the user could see what he has seen and what will be next.

The idea of the big background image and the horicontal text seems to work pretty well.  In times of blogging we learned to scroll down for reading. The user can swipe through the pages, which is a common iPhone gesture and should be established. On the other hand they have that concept called »heat up mode«. Rubbing a specific text area allows you to mark text and write additional notes to that »hot information«.

Mag+, is Bonnier’s digital magazine platform, is a project that began months ago in a collaboration between Bonnier’s global R&D task force and BERG, a London-based design studio. Their goal has been to preserve all the qualities that make magazines such a powerful, popular medium—inspired packaging of carefully curated content by a team of expert editors, delivered in a visually dazzling issue with a beginning, middle and end—and at the same time to reinvent it in a way that makes it come to life on the iPad’s screen.

I think I am not exaggerating when I say that I am quite immersed in digital lifestyle. I send and receive tons of email, I use Twitter and Facebook a lot and almost all the news I get are somehow channeled through an RSS reader, Digg or some other kind of syndication. I’m being told all the time that in todays networld, you have to be everywhere at the same time, everything has to be instant and everyone needs to maintain a variety of communication channels at any given time.

Well, I did all that for quite some time and to be completely frank: it sucks. The biggest problem for me seams to be, that I am surrounded by applications that all somehow want something from me. The RSS reader tells me how many really interesting articles I am still supposed to read, Growl and Skype are doing a terrific job at reminding me about who went on- or offline just a second ago and thanks to push email I get notified about new messages in real time because every email could be really important, right!?

I found my enemy. His face: a red badge with a number on my application’s icons. His name: notifications. Over time I started feeling so overwhelmed by them that I couldn’t bear it anymore. So over the past month, I gradually started to take out those little bastards one by one.

Here’s a little list of the naggers I got rid of and why. This might not work for everyone, but it doesn’t hurt to give it a try, right?

Good advice right after the break.

continue reading …

Tired of shooting at virtual people? Come on kids. Daddy got a new toy for your iPhone. Finally you can blast your friends… This game is based on the color tracking method like we used it for Augmented Pong. After you defined the opponents shirt color you can go on playing. I like the idea of using the iPhone as tool which engages you to run through your city instead of sitting at home and playing the Sudoku App…

via engadget mobile

Apples self proclaimed »magical« device has been announced yesterday and I am already certain that it is the most misunderstood product they announced in years. Steve Jobs has been clumsy enough to state that it is better than a laptop and better than a phone. These statements naturally led to the assumption that the iPad should be compared to those two categories of products. But let’s start from the beginning.

First, there was an enormous media hype. It had to be a revolution. It had to replace Netbooks. It had to do multitasking. It had to »do something that nobody expects yet everyone will need«. Even if Steve Jobs had pulled out a coffee making, hologram enabled super-tablet with Duke Nukem Forever pre-installed, it couldn’t have lived up to the buzz.

That said, I do not believe that the iPad will replace a lot of laptop computers or iPhones. I think of it more as a competitor to Amazons Kindle. Actually, the Kindle DX (which has the same screen size as the iPad) will cost you $489 – about the same as a low-end iPad. While the Kindle with its eInk display (which is pretty remarkable from all I’ve heard) completely focuses on textual information, the iPad is more driven by the web- and multimedia experience – two fields in which Apple has been doing quite well so far. And most hands-on reviews I’ve read so far stated, that it did remarkably well in those areas, in matters of both design and speed.

Thomas asked if we truly need a device like this in a previous post. My personal answer is maybe. Though it will never replace my computer or my phone completely, there is a certain set of things that it could do very well and possibly better than any of those other devices. Weather or not this is worth a $499 price tag will stay unanswered until it arrives in my local store. But what I do know is that Apples products have a tendency to make you want them even if it isn’t perfectly rational.

Oh, and just one more thought. Microsoft tried to stuff a full blown PC into the tablet format a couple of years ago and ingloriously failed. Let’s see if Apples approach proves to be better.