Apple Adds Chinese Handwriting Recognition in 2.0?:
“A sign of things to come? Or just another in a long list of iPhone rumors? It appears
that Apple has included Chinese Handwriting Recognition in the iPhone 2.0 Firmware
Beta according to MacRumors.com.
Chinese users can apparently draw a character on the screen with their finger and
then choose from among options for the recognition.”
(Via GottaBeMobile.com.)
Tags: iPhone
Who Will Tell the People? - New York Times:
“A few weeks ago, my wife and I flew from New York’s Kennedy Airport to Singapore. In J.F.K.’s waiting lounge we could barely find a place to sit. Eighteen hours later, we landed at Singapore’s ultramodern airport, with free Internet portals and children’s play zones throughout. We felt, as we have before, like we had just flown from the Flintstones to the Jetsons. If all Americans could compare Berlin’s luxurious central train station today with the grimy, decrepit Penn Station in New York City, they would swear we were the ones who lost World War II.How could this be? We are a great power. How could we be borrowing money from Singapore? Maybe it’s because Singapore is investing billions of dollars, from its own savings, into infrastructure and scientific research to attract the world’s best talent — including Americans.”
My experience of Singapore is exactly the same as Thomas Friedman’s. Comparing the state of Changi Airport to Heathrow makes you weep (if you’re British) and must be a source of pride (if you’re Singaporean).
Tags: Changi airport, Economics, Singapore, Technology
Back in October, Daniel Schiappa of Microsoft noted that Microsoft’s virtual world play would come within a year - or it wouldn’t come at all. And, at last month’s Gartner Symposium IPXPO, the company’s chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie gave a strong indication that the latter is true.
However, that doesn’t mean that Microsoft is out of the virtual space at all. As Virtual World News reports, the company is very interested in one particular aspect of virtual worlds: Mirror worlds.
Mirror worlds are an attempt to recreate the real world in virtual space. Imagine the next-generation of Google Maps, which might allow you to wander through a photorealistic virtual London. By contrast, virtual worlds like Second Life take the opposite approach: the only attempts to model reality are created by users themselves.
The level of user interaction with a mirror world is, of necessity, also more limited. While Second Life might allow me to recreate London with the face of Big Ben changed to a bright yellow smiley, a mirror world could only every allow this kind of change as a temporary event. The point of them is that they reflect reality, permanently.
Mundie describes his companies interest in mirror worlds this way:
“Today there’s the physical world we all live in, and then there’s people experimenting with virtual reality type things like Second Life and other stuff. I personally don’t think that that kind of things is going to get huge traction. What I do think is the combination of sophisticated displays and direct manipulation and the ability to have the real world presented in a 3D environment as a navigation metaphor, such a you can move freely between things that you would do if you were in the physical world and doing some of the same things, whether it’s going shopping, meeting friends, or whatever. You’re doing it within a 3D virtual world, but that world is just a model of the actual world. That’s going to be quite interesting.
We’ve looked at moving in this direction. Some of the photosynth technology [a tool that allows users to turn photos into immersive environments] that we’ve released over the last year and a half, I think is a precursor to allowing everybody to participate in the process of sifting up a representation of different levels of the physical world and then using them as part of the computing paradigm.”
Ultimately, mirror worlds are the equivalent of the walled gardens which service providers attempted to foist on “their” customers during the early years of the Internet. Mirror worlds attempt to make the virtual experience familiar, which is to try to control the user’s experience.
Instead of allowing the imagination its full play, mirror worlds force users to use their imaginations in other ways, seeking what amount to virtual temporary autonomous zones within the world. As in reality, anyone wanting an alternative has to learn to live in the cracks between places, rather than within the mainstream.
Can user-created virtual worlds and mirror worlds coexist? To a certain degree, yes. However, one thing that the development of the public Internet has taught us is that, given the choice, users will gravitate towards sites which give them the opportunity for deep involvement, rather than a more linear, tied approach.
Microsoft missed the boat over user-generated content. Now, it seems, it is likely to miss the boat over virtual worlds, too.
Tags: craig mundie, Microsoft, mirror worlds, Second Life, Virtual Worlds
RSS aggregation as a friend filter:
“So - a lot of services allow you to grab all of your RSS feeds from all over the shop, and republish them in a central aggregated feed.The resultant feed - of bookmarks, tweets, flickr pics, LastFM music, blogposts, yada yada - is noisy. REALLY noisy. In fact, unless you know someone really well, it’s just too much information and you drown in it.
But there are some people for whom that much information is good, and comforting. I’d keep an eye on everything my other half was up to, for instance - not for stalking reasons, or because I want to surveil him, but because it’s nice to know whats going through his head - it’s his presence when he’s not around - as Leisa would say, it’s Ambient Intimacy.
But other people - no, I really don’t want to know their every move - I’d like perhaps a once a month update of key items.
So a social aggregator with degree-of-intimacy - where you can pick and choose elements of a person’s behaviour to subscribe to. This should couple with a few smart bits at the back which would desubscribe or deemphasise sections of a person’s feed according to your consumption behaviour. Not reading all of Friend X’s long screeds, but most of their tweets? Eventually the long screeds will drop off your updates.”
Tags: FriendFeed
Now this might just tempt me back to NetNewsWire again:
“NetNewsWire 4.0 will bring new features and changes to fall in line with NewsGator’s aspirations for taming information. At the top of the new features list will be integration with AideRSS and the company’s PostRank technology for automatically filtering newsfeeds for hot topics and headlines. NewsGator is already using this technology in its web-based client for its top 1,000 feeds, but NetNewsWire 4.0 will bring AideRSS and PostRank to Mac OS X Leopard. If you’re drowning in feeds and headlines that you constantly shrug off with the ‘mark all as read’ command, this new PostRank technology should help you to at least catch the stuff that really matters.”
Plus, there’s this wonderful news about the iPhone:
“As far as a release date for NetNewsWire 4.0, Brent has a more general Fall-ish time in mind. On top of 3.2 and 4.0 development, he’s also working on a native NetNewsWire app for the iPhone, but I can’t share many of those details just yet.”
I veer between using Google Reader and using NetNewsWire on an almost-weekly basis. I love using NetNewsWire as a client, but - despite the massive improvements that the company has made - prefer Google Reader to Newsgator on the Web.
Tags: Applications, Brent Simmons, mac os x, NetNewsWire, Newsgator, RSS
Robert Cringely thinks so:
“So why, then, was Apple quietly shopping around its entire professional application business to prospective buyers at the recently completed National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas? These include Aperture, Final Cut Pro, Logic, and Shake — applications that are hardly also-rans in their segments and none of which are antiquated in the least. Final Cut, of course, absolutely dominates the video editing business. Why would Apple want to give that up?”
John Gruber, on the other hand, thinks Cringely is “off his meds”:
“Even if Apple were to buy Adobe (a big if), and if that acquisition raised anti-trust concerns, Apple would sell the competing Adobe apps, not their own current ones. (And Cringely’s suggestion that Sony might buy Apple’s apps is nutty too — none of these apps have Windows versions, so none would run on Vaios.)”
However, in the same post, John later recants a little:
“UPDATE: So, after fishing around a bit: Selling off the pro apps division? Doubtful, but there are rumors floating around about it. Buying Adobe? Not in the cards. The only reason Apple would sell off the pro apps division would be to keep the company smaller and more focused; buying Adobe would make Apple bigger and less focused.”
For what it’s worth, I can’t see Apple selling the pro apps, mainly because a lot of the technology in the pro apps feeds into the consumer stuff like GarageBand, iPhoto, and so on - and these have proven to be far more strategically important to Apple than its hold on the professional market. Selling the apps, and presumably the teams who make them, would mean losing access to some very talented people whose technology has added much to the Mac.
Ugh, how annoying. Although I mostly use the wonderful MarsEdit for editing posts to this and other blogs, occasionally I used to use the old Wordpress Bookmarklet. However, that went missing in Wordpress 2.5, and - according to the Wordpress guys - it won’t be reappearing until version 2.6 comes out.
Help, though, is at hand. If you’re using Safari or Firefox, the old version from 2.3 still works - unfortunately, it appears to not work in for Opera users.