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PC Gamers, Get Out Your Penis Rulers: The Next 3DMark Is Coming [Benchmarks]

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 16:27:12 +0000

Futuremark, arbiter of all synthetic benchmarks that upend message boards and LAN party envies around the globe, is ready to make you feel bad about your rig all over again: 3DMark for Windows 8. But there’s a twist! More »

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PC Gamers, Get Out Your Penis Rulers: The Next 3DMark Is Coming [Benchmarks]

In Defense Of The Stylus

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 22:06:00 +0000

A little while back, I got an email from Atmel, one of the leading touchscreen makers, asking if I wanted to check out their latest creation: a new active stylus that works with an improved touchscreen, for stylus actions alongside normal finger-touches and technologies like palm rejection. I passed, because to be honest, it didn’t sound very exciting. It has shown up at a few other websites, though, and I thought (slightly apologetically) that I should at least watch the video. I did. And — it’s not very exciting . Yet despite being a third-class citizen in our world of capacitive touchscreens, being publicly ridiculed by Steve Jobs, and generally being considered a nuisance, the stylus isn’t something we should relegate to the company of floppy disks and CRT monitors just yet. Here’s why we can’t write it off. The first styli, strictly speaking, were used by the Romans, since they invented the word. But cuneiform writing was performed with a primitive stylus as well, and certainly it was used before then, though they were probably used more for scraping marrow from mammoth bones or the like. The point is they’ve been around for a long time because they have always offered certain advantages. They still offer them now. First, a stylus amplifies your input. With a stylus you can make quick and precise movements of a number of sizes. Ever wonder why nobody writes longhand with their finger? By amplifying small but precise movements that can be done rapidly, handwriting was made possible in the first place, as well as things like detailed drawings and paintings. Even if you’re drawing in the dirt, you do it with a stick. Second, it dampens your input. This seeming contradiction is at the heart of why a stylus, pen, brush, or what have you is so powerful. While it allows you to amplify the movements you make by extending their effective range, it also allows for more precise control by utilizing the gamma motoneuron system. This is (if I remember correctly) a sort of global tension control in your motor system that allows you to ratchet up the tension in lots of muscles in order to have more precise control over them. Have you ever noticed that you were unconsciously clenching your jaw or tightening your neck muscles while performing an action that required great precision and concentration? That’s the gamma system’s effects spilling over onto adjacent systems while it ups the quality of your hand’s movements. We use this system while we write and draw; haven’t you ever noticed how tightly some people grip their pen or pencil? By overshooting the tension required, the gamma system allows for tiny adjustments and quick but exact actions. The fine controls of our hands and fingers, however, are designed more around gripping and applying various amounts of pressure, not making tiny movements. Third, you can see what’s under the stylus. This is essential to artists, of course, but it also completes a simple visual feedback loop in which you can tell what you’re touching. With a fingertip, past a certain point it’s guesswork. You see the button, you move your finger, and then you hope. But with a stylus, pen, or cursor, you see the button, you see where your control point is, you move it closer, you see it’s closer, you move it on, you see it on, and you click, or write a check mark, or tap. You can see that these advantages aren’t just, say, 20th-century advantages, for generations that needed pen and paper to record things. A surgeon uses a sharp stylus to perform surgery. A painter uses a soft stylus to make strokes. We all use stylii with special tips to screw in screws, flip eggs, eat chinese food. The stylus isn’t a holdover from an earlier age; it’s a fundamental add-on to human physiology. So why did Jobs mock it and leave it behind? For some time before the iPhone came out, the stylus was used because it was the only option. Capacitive screens were too expensive, or not precise enough. Resistive screens offered a compelling alternative to d-pad-based navigation, and the best way to interact with resistive screens is a stylus, not your fingertip. Jobs wasn’t ragging on the stylus, he was ragging on an old solution to a problem, a solution people hadn’t bothered updating. The uses and form factors of mobile phones are such that a stylus isn’t the best solution when it isn’t the only solution; a fingertip serves much better in most cases. But there are just as many cases, as with the mouse and the trackpad , where the opposite is true. Think about the Courier and the Noteslate , both of which generated a froth of enthusiasm despite not being real. The idea was a sort of next-generation paper notebook, stylus and all. You wrote things, you circled things, you touched them with your finger if that worked, you used the stylus if that worked. Some might say it was more of a throwback than a look forward, a product that clung to outdated notions of how we interact with information. Outdated as opposed to when – now? Does this imaginary interlocutor think that in 20 years, we’ll all still be using 10-inch glass screens, running our fingers across them, doing pinch-to-zoom? This excellent “brief” rant on interaction design points out just how shortsighted today’s devices are: entirely abstract, using next to no natural inputs or gestures, and totally inflexible. Seeing the things cooked up with a Kinect suggest a fusion of the virtual and the real that makes a tablet’s flat, static window look positively primitive. But clearly, to return to the topic at hand, Atmel’s state of the art touch solution isn’t what we’ve been waiting for. An improvement to be sure, but it’s a far cry from the level of detail possible with a Bic and a sheet of paper, and until the stylus and screen pass that level of usefulness, the applications are limited (though it will likely work nicely with Windows 8). What needs to happen before the stylus becomes truly relevant again? One thing I saw earlier this year at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona was a touch system by Atmel’s arch-enemy Synaptics that fairly blew me away. A capacitive screen that could detect both conductive and non-conductive items (say, a gloved hand or stylus), but passively, unlike Atmel and others’ active solutions (this has its own substantial shortcomings). Latency was also reduced by integrating the touch sensor with the display sensor. You have probably noticed that when you write something with a pen, the line appears immediately. The fact that it doesn’t do so when you use a stylus on a touchscreen is probably more disorienting than you think; you can’t error-check your own small movements at your own rate, you must wait for the machine to catch up. Low latency is a step in the right direction, and it’s one place where high-Hz display rates could be truly useful. Resolution is also important, as in so many other things to do with exactness and design. When I draw a short line and the aliasing makes it look like a tiny lightning bolt, I feel like giving up. The rumors of an iPad with a vastly higher resolution are nice, but they don’t help the stylus, since Apple has inoculated itself, rightly or wrongly, against stylus support for the rest of time. But Apple doesn’t make the displays, and these mega-resolution screens could help make the stylus worth using again. The touch ecosystem and the people within it need to realize their limitations, as well. Right now finger-based interaction is still novel, still being fleshed out (so to speak), optimized, still being applied to different models. But we’re already bumping into the borders beyond which this kind of touch, the iPhone kind of touch, will be useless. For typing, it has already proven a painful technology to use — so we have an accessory, not unlike the stylus we have mocked, for this basic act of computing. For any kind of actions that require precision, such as illustration, the capacitive screen is also useless, failing as it does to provide that feedback loop. Our interactions with tablets and phones are for the most part coarse and inexact, and entire UIs (witness iOS, which some would argue falls more on the side of simplicity than elegance) have been designed around this fact. We’ve gotten around some of these problems with clever little tricks , and we’re constantly trying to invent new ones to expand the capabilities of what must be recognized as a very limited interaction method. Sooner or later someone will stand on a stage, as Jobs did, and ask “why are we still pointing and jabbing at our icons and applications like kindergarteners doing finger-painting?” And maybe he’ll show us, as Jobs did, how long we’d been rationalizing our poor choice in interface. Will it be Atmel on stage? Synaptics? E-Ink? Microsoft? Whoever it is, it won’t be for a while. The stylus today, let us admit, is impractical for a number of reasons, both design and technical, as Atmel’s video and every device available shows. But as touch goes from novel to normal to mundane, the angst of users stymied by its limitations will grow, and with that angst, demand for something new. The mouse rode a wave in the 80s. The iPhone rode the wave a few years ago, leaving the mouse behind. The next one will leave the iPhone behind, an artifact of the late aughts. What of the stylus? If we have truly exhausted the its applications, it won’t return, but I think it’s manifest that we have not. That was a long and winding rationalization for a perhaps irrational love of the stylus. But I firmly believe that its days are not done. Its weaknesses became a problem before its strengths were given a chance to shine. The stylus is as ageless as the wedge, the wheel, the projectile. We’ve reinvented all these multiple times. When technology catches up yet again to the pen, the pen will be ready.

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In Defense Of The Stylus

The Day Privacy Died [Twitter]

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 16:00:00 +0000

The other day, while sitting in our car with the windows down, my wife and I had a heated argument. Bad words. Yelling. A fist or two slammed into our Volvo’s center console. Though we both received nominations, we never reached consensus on which one of us was wrong, and the whole thing blew over by time we pulled into the garage. More »

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The Day Privacy Died [Twitter]

BlackBerry PlayBook To Come Pre-Loaded With PressReader: Instant Access To 2,000+ Newspapers

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 11:01:26 +0000

RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook tablet computer will soon come pre-loaded with PressReader , a digital news app from a company called NewspaperDirect . The application offers one-click access to more than 2,000 ‘replica’, full-content newspapers from close to 100 countries. According to NewspaperDirect, news publications often hit PressReader before they hit the newsstands in their local markets. Some of the daily newspapers that will be available: Chicago Tribune, Daily Mail, International Herald, Irish Times, La Presse, La Tribune, Le Monde, The Australian, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail and The Washington Post. Most individual newspapers and magazines available through PressReader can be purchased for $0.99 per issue, or downloaded in conjunction with a paid subscription on PressDisplay.com . PressReader is also available for iPhone/iPad, Android phones and tablets, and Windows 7 slates.

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BlackBerry PlayBook To Come Pre-Loaded With PressReader: Instant Access To 2,000+ Newspapers

What’s Google Scheming Over At Schemer.com?

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 10:25:59 +0000

Fusible , always keeping a close eye on domain name registrations and ownership changes, has noticed that Google has taken over the domain name Schemer.com . Interestingly, that URL already leads to a Google service login page, although you’ll hit a dead end when you log on. There’s more to the story. According to Fusible, the former owner of the domain name was Meevine , a developer of mobile applications (which still owns getschemer.com by the way). Update: I’m not seeing this in the WHOIS history. Instead, it shows the previous owner of the domain name as E Bour from the company Marathon Oil for me. Either way, it was taken over by Google a few months ago. I hope they checked Urban Dictionary first. Meevine, based in Seattle, is the company behind Gatherball , an Android app that basically makes it easier for friends to plan activities (more info here ). They own the U.S. trademark for ‘SCHEMER’. Meevine was co-founded by CEO Paul Watts (formerly at Microsoft, AOL, HTC and some other companies), Ben Demboski and Jonathan Nelson (bother formerly at AOL and RealNetworks). I’ve asked both Meevine and Google for comment but haven’t heard back yet. Update: Watts says: “I know about as much as you know at this point.”

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What’s Google Scheming Over At Schemer.com?

It’s Bigger Than Ashton

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 10:02:23 +0000

If you weren’t paying attention to anything but important news today you might not have noticed that Ashton Kutcher had turned over his tweeting privileges to the social media division of company Katalyst Media. “But why?,” you ask, because it’s late and you’re wasting time on the Internet even though you’re super busy or should be sleeping . Well because Kutcher, who has about eight million more followers than you or I ever will, tweeted out something without thinking last night and, because they’re a bunch of maladjusted ugly troll people, the media pounced on him — because he’s pretty. And more importantly because what he said was really really stupid; he wondered why Penn State coach Joe Paterno was fired , when the reason he was fired was like, everywhere on Twitter. Dude, where’s my excuse? We’re all trigger happy when it comes to social media. I tweet and text the wrong people insane shit at all hours of the night just because I have the technology – true confession ( IHTM ). And herein lies the trouble with Twitter; You (and Rep. Anthony Weiner ) think it’s like texting, not realizing that your intelligible only in context tweet/text/whatever is now broadcast to an audience of 40K or 8 million of your closest followers. This explains Ashton’s admittedly ignorant tweet, and this other tweet of his , and some of my tweets and some of your tweets if you’re being honest with yourself. We’re human! Pobody’s nerfect. Earlier today I asked our new fancy Facebook sociologist writer Josh Constine, who went to Stanford so you know he’s smart because I got rejected from there, “Like what’s up with that?” about this whole mess. He said, “It’s bigger than Ashton,” explaining that because the act of tweeting was so much like texting it was more prone to human error then let’s say the act of posting to Facebook or LinkedIn. For the record I’ve never booty LinkedIn messaged anyone. But wait, before this gets out of hand, let’s all take a second to reflect on the Huffington Post’s seminal piece “Fired Over Twitter: 13 Tweets That Got People CANNED” or something. Bish please, that “canned” is in ALL CAPS so you know it’s IMPORTANT. Despite the clear risk of unfettered communication, by relinquishing editorial control over his feed to a collective process Ashton is playing it way safe. He basically ran back to the comfortable confines of old media, an act which was very “un-Internet” of him, I guess. “As of immediately I will stop tweeting until I find a way to properly manage this feed,” he wrote, “I feel awful about this error. Won’t happen again.” His solution was to hand Katalyst Media the keys to his social media kingdom, so it can vet his tweets or something, which sounds so sad. I’d rather have someone mess up every three months than be boring. I’ve never particularly been a fan of Kutcher, but I’m a pretty big fan of self-expression, even if you screw up big time. The most brilliant people are totally hated yo. Ashton, it’s not your fault that Twitter, and society, wasn’t prepared for such a disparate “one to many” ratio. So even if you were stupid and pressed send too soon, there is no Facebook or Twitter post you can’t recover from. So do it, please. You owe all those people who pressed ‘Follow’ under a certain pretense at least that. Image: @Aplusk

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It’s Bigger Than Ashton

Dispatch Raises $965K To Manage All Of Your Cloud Files From One Place

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 23:40:34 +0000

NYC-based startup Dispatch , which just graduated from the latest batch of TechStars NYC, has raised a $965,000 seed funding round. The round was led by Thrive Capital, with participation from SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, and a number of angel investors including Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci (who founded GroupMe together), TechStars founder David Cohen, TechStars NYC Managing Director David Tisch, Kal Vepuri, Bob Pasker, Matt Turck, and Zelkova Ventures. Also notable: Dispatch got its start at the TechCrunch Disrupt NYC hackathon earlier this year where it was the runner-up for best hack (you’ll find a backstage interview with them here ). They’re in good company — GroupMe, whose founders are participating in the funding round, got its start at a Disrupt hackathon a year earlier and was recently acquired by Skype. Dispatch is setting out to become a sort of Finder (or Windows Explorer) for the cloud. You enter your credentials for the various services you use online — Dropbox, Facebook, Gmail, Google Docs and so on — and it lets you browse through the files stored on each service from a single dashboard. You can view these files in a preview window, download them, or move them around between services by dragging and dropping files from one service’s folder into another. Dispatch won’t be available until next month and the company isn’t keen on doing a full public walkthrough just yet, but they say we’ll be seeing more from them soon. From what has been released so far, though, it looks solid — they’re clearly paying a lot of attention to making sure the UI looks polished. In the longer term, I’d like to see Dispatch abstract the cloud file system enough that you don’t have to remember whether you’re dealing with Dropbox or Gmail or Facebook — you should be able to just have your ‘stuff’. Dragging and dropping between each of these will certainly be handy, but I think the mass appeal will lie in making the cloud generally easier to use.

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Dispatch Raises $965K To Manage All Of Your Cloud Files From One Place

WP7 Apps @ Mobile Acceleration Eeek

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 18:31:49 +0000

We met with Windows Phone developers who are part of a small group of companies that participate in Microsoft BizSpark , a worldwide program aimed at helping startups use Microsoft technologies (and stick with it for the long haul). They were in San Francisco for Mobile Acceleration Week , and Microsoft has identified each as having a promising Windows Phone project. During the event, each company got help and mentoring from Microsoft, both on terms of technical and marketing expertise. Every project that was presented was intended to run on the Windows Phone platform. I have compiled some notes on what was presented, and Windows Phone users may want to take a look. WP7 Apps @ Mobile Acceleration Eeek , By Ubergizmo . Top Stories : iPhone 4S Review , Droid Bionic Review ,

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WP7 Apps @ Mobile Acceleration Eeek

Xbox Kinect Accelerator in the works?

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 10:42:31 +0000

The Xbox Kinect has been getting quite a lot of buzz lately, with its recent first birthday , the whole “Kinect Effect” and upcoming launch of the Kinect for Windows commercial program . Now it looks like Microsoft might have a new Kinect-related product in the works called the Kinect Accelerator. The folks over at Fusible reported that on November 9 th , Microsoft registered two domain names: XboxKinectAccelerator.com and XboxKinectAccelerator.net. Since Microsoft hasn’t made any official announcements and the “Kinect Accelerator” has never been mentioned by the company before in the past, we’ve got no idea what it could be. Speculations have put it as something similar to the Microsoft Research Accelerator which is used by programmers to help accelerate code execution. Other possibilities include an accessory or device for the Kinect, or perhaps even a startup camp to get developers up to speed on Kinect programming. Or the domain name registrations could be nothing as well. We’ll just have to wait and see. What do you think the Kinect Accelerator is going to be? Xbox Kinect Accelerator in the works? , By Ubergizmo . Top Stories : Epic 4G Touch Review , Galaxy S2 Review ,

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Xbox Kinect Accelerator in the works?

HTC Titan Coming to AT&T on November 20

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 10:12:23 +0000

HTC’s enormous Windows Phone smartphone, the 4.7-inch Titan , will be joining AT&T’s smartphone roster on November 20, the company has announced. The Titan’s 4.7-inch, 800 x 480 pixel screen might be too big for some, but it’s great for multimedia which makes it a selling point for AT&T. The company jokingly says that the Titan’s large screen is “probably bigger than the TV you have at home.” The rest of the specifications is solid although not groundbreaking: a 1.5 GHz single-core Snapdragon CPU, 512 MB of RAM, 16 GB of storage, an 8-megapixel camera and HSPA+ connectivity. All of that is packed into a case that measures 130.6 x 70.6 x 9.9 mm, which is bearable given the screen size. The HTC Titan will be available in AT&T’s stores and online on November 20 for $199.99 with a two-year contract. More About: att , htc , HTC Titan , smartphone , Titan , windows phone For more Mobile coverage: Follow Mashable Mobile on Twitter Become a Fan on Facebook Subscribe to the Mobile channel Download our free apps for Android , Mac , iPhone and iPad

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HTC Titan Coming to AT&T on November 20