“Racer,” allows users to put devices together and control tiny toy cars around a Hot Wheels-style stunt track by tapping and touching their own device’s screen. The track itself automatically extends across all the device screens, with different segments of the track appearing on each screen.

Via The Verge.

I’ve been interested in these connected multi-screen experiences for quite some time as I see a lot of untapped potential there. The technical challenges to make several devices work seamlessly together always seemed rather complicated, so I’m glad to see Google experimenting in this direction, even though this experiment doesn’t seem to be publicly available yet.

I have a soft spot for QBASIC, because it was the first programming language I picked up back when I got my first PC at the age of 14. I wanted to learn programming even earlier than that, but my parents refused to buy me a PC (and I didn’t have the spare funds to buy one myself at that age). I always wanted to be a programmer so I could write my own video games (I did get a Nintendo Entertainment System at the age of ten – talk about messed up priorities and opportunities…) and of course the first programs I wrote were computer games. These games were nowhere near as complex or refined as Black Annex, but this quote from the aforelinked article resonated strongly with me:

I didn’t want to ‘learn’ how to make a game—I realized I already knew how to make a game. I just had to go back to the tools I knew.

I haven’t tried my hands on creating a video game in more than a decade, and it’s probably because I find the process too daunting and I lack the faith in my skills and tools to pull off anything worthwhile. Which is a silly reason for not even trying.

It also reminded me of an article by James Hague titled Write Code Like You Just Learned How to Program, in which he shares a fun little anecdote and reaches this interesting conclusion:

It’s extremely difficult to be simultaneously concerned with the end-user experience of whatever it is that you’re building and the architecture of the program that delivers that experience. Maybe impossible. I think the only way to pull it off is to simply not care about the latter. Write comically straightforward code, as if you just learned to program, and go out of your way avoid wearing any kind of software engineering hat–unless what you really want to be is a software engineer, and not the designer of an experience.

Glass How-to: Getting Started – YouTube.

There’s something mind boggling about a fully functioning cellphone for $12 – especially if you consider Bunnie’s detailed component breakdown between this phone and a $29 Arduino.

But still, looking at this $12 phone I can’t help but wonder even more how a higher-quality product like the Nokia 105 can sell for about $20 at retail.

No wonder we are at a point were advertising agencies stuff disposable Android phones and WiFi-Hotspots inside magazines as a marketing stunt.

The new interface is said to be “very, very flat,” according to one source. Another person said that the interface loses all signs of gloss, shine, and skeuomorphism seen across current and past versions of iOS. Another source framed the new OS as having a level of “flatness” approaching recent releases of Microsoft’s Windows Phone “Metro” UI.

If this is true (and that’s a big if, as far as I remember 9to5mac isn’t particularly reliable in its reporting of rumors), it could be either great or terrible (I like my ham-fistedly skeuomorphic signifiers and affordances thankyouverymuch, that’s why I never got to terms with Android or Metro).

Everything else aside, this just freaked me out:

iOS 7 is codenamed “Innsbruck,” according to three people familiar with the OS.

I really hope we’re looking at something that will find its way into the next generation Xbox ecosystem (we should know in about three weeks), but I’m only cautiously optimistic. While the system appears to have evolved well beyond the limited confines of research labs, two limiting factors come to mind: First there’s obviously pricing, but beyond that I would imagine installation in a living room to be quite challenging without the projector getting in your way or constantly requiring re-callibration. Nevertheless, please let us have at this, preferably before 2015.

In the meantime, if you need something to read before bedtime, have a go at their CHI paper.

QFT.

Using voice, gesture, and projection, frog has turned a conference room into an environment called RoomE—a space to experience the value of room-sized computing. Computer vision and voice recognition combine to provide inputs and context to a computer, opening the way for frog to build a heads-up digital experience using light projected onto surfaces and digital control of objects.

Project site. (via)

Introducing Greenhouse from Oblong Industries on Vimeo.

The Greenhouse SDK is a creative coding toolkit for spatial interfaces by Oblong Industries, the company that created the G-Speak platform.

Haven’t had a chance to try this yet, but looks intriguing.

Whenever I see something like this I wonder how they’ll deal with accidental activations. Sure looks impressive though.

Source.

In a recent xkcd’s alt text, Randall Munroe suggested stacksort, a sort that searches StackOverflow for sorting functions and runs them until it returns the correct answer. So, I made it. If you like running arbitrary code in your browser, try it out.

Stacksort by Gregory Koberger. The infinite monkey theorem applied to programming. Brilliant.

In a world in which nearly everyone is technically a felon, we rely on the good judgment of prosecutors to decide who should be targets and how hard the law should come down on them. We have thus entered a legal reality not so different from that faced by Socrates when the Thirty Tyrants ruled Athens, and it is a dangerous one. When everyone is guilty of something, those most harshly prosecuted tend to be the ones that are challenging the established order, poking fun at the authorities, speaking truth to power — in other words, the gadflies of our society.

“We need to focus. Keep the self-driving cars, magic glasses, laptop, handheld OS, and Brazilian social network. Ditch the feed reader.”

— Pinboard (@Pinboard) March 14, 2013

Even though there’s probably no need for this amidst a sea of commentary surrounding Google Readers sudden demise, it would be weird not to write about it, considering that I’ve been a heavy user of the service for many years.

First, let me get one thing out of the way: As a Google Reader user, I’m seriously pissed off. Google is causing me a lot of trouble by breaking workflows that I’ve come to rely on heavily. Now let me be clear, I’m not coming at this with a sense of false entitlement: Google Reader was a free service and they have every right to shut it down, but as a user I have every right to hate their decision in return. There might be good business reasons for Google’s decision and it might ultimately turn out to be a good thing for a diversified, decentralized, healthy RSS ecosystem as many commentators have pointed out (Brent Simmons, Marco Arment, Dave Winer, Andre Torrez), but right now, I feel like Google is pulling the rug out from under my feet. I’m a heavy RSS user, subscribed to more than 350 feeds, and I read somewhere between 5000 and 10000 news items in a month. It’s my primary channel of news discovery and one of my primary channels for reading. No, Twitter doesn’t do it for me when it comes to keeping up with my favorite websites and writers (it’s just too easy to miss something good floating by in its ceaseless stream), my Facebook friends have terrible taste when it comes to sharing interesting, useful and intellectually stimulating articles and magazine-style readers (such as Flipboard or Pulse) lack the efficiency of plowing through a couple hundred new articles without having to worry that you might miss something. Tumblr’s dashboard is actually pretty good and convenient, but unfortunately it’s limited to Tumblr itself and there are people outside its silo that I’m also interested in following. (Which begs the question: why doesn’t Tumblr allow following outside sources in its dashboard, by way of, oh let’s say RSS? I would assume it could only increase user activity across Tumblr.)

Now when I say that I’ve been a Google Reader user for several years, a small clarification is in order: I’ve never really used the web application front-end of Google Reader. I maybe visited the website once or twice a year. But I’ve come to rely on Google Reader’s API as backend syncing infrastructure across the many devices where I use different native feed reader applications. By offering a solid and free product with a functional API, Google has managed to establish itself as the central hub in the RSS ecosystem. Pretty much any feed reader that was released in the past few years relies heavily on the Google Reader API for it to function. Netnewswire, my long time feed reader of choice on OS X desktop, switched from its own proprietary syncing service to Google Reader back in 2009. Reeder, probably the most popular feed reader on iOS, relies on Google Reader (just as many other iOS feed reader apps). And I’m gonna go out on a limb here and presume that most Android feed reader apps also rely on Google Reader, without having done a ton of research on the matter. Google Reader wasn’t so much a piece of software I used, but rather an invisible yet crucial piece of infrastructure, a piece of plumbing that made the web work for me.

And therein lies the crux of Google Reader’s unfortunate demise: There are plenty alternatives when all you want is an application that consumes and displays RSS feeds. Many frustrated users and tech websites have compiled lists of alternatives to Google Reader if all you’re trying to replace is the web application (e.g. Matt Haughey, Gizmodo, The Verge). But that’s not where the true value and importance of Google Reader resided: By shutting down the central hub that kept all other feed readers talking with each other and keeping them in sync, the Google Reader shutdown causes a giant rift in the RSS ecosystem which will be difficult to bridge. Brent Simmons already wrote about the implications of this shutdown back in 2011 and had me slightly worried about this ever since. He also shared his ideas for alternative syncing solutions (one, two, three). As the original and long-time developer of Netnewswire he knows what he’s talking about.

But aside from all the personal frustration and inconvenience this shutdown is causing me and hundreds of thousands (millions?) other Google Reader users, there’s something else truly baffling about this shutdown. Consider this: Google Reader is built on a giant archive of information chunks in a format much more machine readable than your average web page. Despite all this, Google, a company with a self-proclaimed “mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful“, didn’t consider Google Reader a worthwhile part of this mission? Google Reader is also a web service that provides Google with a tremendous amount of data about what we like, whom we follow and what we read online. As a company which makes its money by shoving targeted advertising in our face based on what it knows about us, they still couldn’t figure out how to monetize this service?

Additionally, according to a recent report from BuzzFeed, Google Reader still drives far more traffic than Google’s favorite pet project of the moment, Google+. It truly seems as if Google’s management simply didn’t have a clue what they had on their hands with Google Reader – its creator Chris Wetherell recently corroborated as much in an interview with GigaOm. That Yonatan Zunger, chief architect of Google+, turned to his G+ followers with the question what made Reader so useful speaks to this as well.

As a parting thought: Ask yourself, do you have any idea how profitable services like GMail and Drive are? I don’t, and I trust them a whole lot less today than I did a week ago.

During our research, a few consistent patterns emerged:

• Most people don’t differentiate between apps and widgets.
• Widgets aren’t widely used – weather, clock and music are the most used and after that, fewer than 10% of customers use any other widgets.
• Most of you don’t modify your home screens much. In fact, after the first month of use, approximately 80% of you don’t change your home screens any more.

I’m not really surprised by this and suspected as much for a long time. Nice to see some research (albeit only presented in this abbreviated form) to back up my suspicion.

So much for Apple needing to add widgets to iOS to stay competitive with Android…