Musician releases new single as experimental ‘Bronze’ app (Wired UK):

Founded on an algorithm that fluctuates the sections of a song around a waveform, Bronze is the first releasable format that alters the musical components of a song on each listen. Invented by Gold, along with producer Lexxx (Wild Beasts, Bjork) and a team of scientists from Goldsmiths University, Bronze is “non-interactive format in which recorded material is transformed in real time, generating a unique and constantly evolving interpretation of the song on each listen.”

 

∞ May 30, 2011

Twitter Digest for Week Ending 2011-05-29

∞ May 29, 2011

Mapping the World Through Player Death

Mapping 11 million player deaths in open world shooter Just Cause 2:

via Tom Armitage, who writes:

So it visualises both the objects in the world, and the physics of the world. Yes, there are surfaces where people have been shot or run out of health for other reasons, but then there are all the points that extruded from those surfaces according to curves defined by velocity and world-gravity. The world and the system all at once. You could, I suppose, reverse-engineer one from the other. And, of course, what you’re seeing here isn’t geography – it’s just the visualisation of a systemic layer in the game (player-death).

∞ May 28, 2011

iPad Usability, One Year Later

Jakob Nielsen follows up on his initial study in his latest Alertbox column:

iPad apps are much improved, but new usability problems have emerged, such as swipe ambiguity and navigation overload.

Added later: There’s also an updated second edition of Nielsen Norman Group’s full length iPad usability report, weighing in at 116 pages, available here.

∞ May 28, 2011

Datamosh

(via)

∞ May 28, 2011

Tweed

Tweed is a Twitter client that shows you only tweets that contain links. It turns Twitter into a reading experience more similar to an RSS reader. Makes sense if you use Twitter for discovery and pointers instead of keeping up with friends. Unfortunately only available on iPad, as i would love to have something like this for Mac.

∞ May 28, 2011

New Neighbourtweet

This is a post i should’ve written a couple weeks ago, back when i actually made the changes described herein. Alas, i was very busy back then, so i guess it’s better late than never…

Some time ago, back in 2009, i built Neighbourtweet (the original version is still available here), a simple prototype of a Twitter client that shows you tweets from around your current location. It requires minimal interaction and runs completely in your browser. It’s meant to work as an ambient display that you launch and keep running in the background, offering brief glimpses of what people in your vicinity are tweeting about.

Then about a year later i came across Dextr, a clever little Twitter client for ambient screens. When i saw this it was immediately obvious that Neighourtweet should’ve looked similar to Dextr to make it more glanceable. So a few weeks ago i finally managed to redesign Neighbourtweet.

It now works much better as an ambient information display. You can simply put it on a second screen if you’re running a multi-monitor setup:

Or you can launch it on iPad (hint: it’s web app capable, so don’t forget to add it to your homescreen) and put it in your living room:

It should also work reasonably well on iPhone, even though its primarily intended for larger screens. Anyway. I hope you like it.

∞ May 28, 2011

China Used Prisoners to Farm WoW Gold

Liu says he was one of scores of prisoners forced to play online games to build up credits that prison guards would then trade for real money. The 54-year-old, a former prison guard who was jailed for three years in 2004 for “illegally petitioning” the central government about corruption in his hometown, reckons the operation was even more lucrative than the physical labour that prisoners were also forced to do.

China used prisoners in lucrative internet gaming work | World news | guardian.co.uk

∞ May 27, 2011

Kindle Abroad

Apparently the Kindle makes for an outstanding travel companion, as i always suspected.

Having just spent last weekend abroad i was once again astounded how indispensable the iPhone was – i used it so much that the battery barely lasted a day, where it normally lasts three days during regular use. I didn’t bring the iPad though, it just felt too bulky and expendable. It might have been convenient on the plane, but other than that i had no need for it. Maybe i’ll pick up a Kindle as a travel companion, with its size, weight and battery runtime it’s just a much more portable device than the iPad.

∞ May 27, 2011

Imaginary Phone

The HCI group at Hasso Plattner Institute continues its investigation into imaginery interfaces with the Imaginary Phone (via):

Kinect must be a real boon to them.

See also: Imaginary Interfaces.

∞ May 25, 2011

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