Announcement: you may do final turn in of your projects as late as May 10

Folks,

Unless you ask for permission before Wednesday, I expect all of you to present your projects on Wednesday @ 1 in our usual classroom.

Even if you present Wednesday, you may all continue working on your projects another week if you like. Make sure you turn them in by May 10. If you make any significant changes or do not present Wednesday, please prepare a screencast giving a new version of your final presentation.

Best,

Ben

Benjamin Watson
Director, Design Graphics Lab | Associate Professor, Computer Science, NC State Univ.
919-513-0325 | designgraphics.ncsu.edu | @dgllab

Announcement: please return your borrowed Android devices Wednesday

Folks,

Please bring along any Android devices to our final period on Wednesday.

After the class, we'll handle the returns.

Best,

Ben

Benjamin Watson
Director, Design Graphics Lab | Associate Professor, Computer Science, NC State Univ.
919-513-0325 | designgraphics.ncsu.edu | @dgllab

Find: more on the first Intel smartphone: will intel's cpus get smaller faster?

Ars thanks they will, several years faster. If they do, they will have huge market advantages, particularly power (longer battery life). The next few years should be interesting. 

Ars Technica

Intel has wanted to be a part of the smartphone market since 2005. Its Atom line of processors and systems-on-chip was developed for this market, and each iteration has got smaller and more tightly integrated. With Medfield, announced earlier this year, the company finally has the chip it needs to take on ARM head-to-head. Intel has partnered with Indian manufacturer Lava International to bring its chipset to market, and the result is a new Android phone: the Xolo X900.

The phone is not available in the US. It sells in India for about $420. The phone's specification is at the upper end of mid-range: 1024×600 4" screen, 8 MP rear camera with 1080p30 recording, 1.3 MP front camera, and 16 GB of storage. It runs Android 2.3.7, with an upgrade to version 4 due later this year. So far, so ordinary. The thing that sets it apart from its competition is its processor. It's called an Atom Z2460: a 1.6 GHz single core, hyperthreaded 64-bit x86 CPU, paired with a 400 MHz PowerVR SGX 540 GPU, and 1 GB RAM.

Find: The First Intel Medfield Phone -- competitive, but not market changing

AnandTech

For Intel, the road to their first real competitive smartphone SoC has been a long one. Shortly after joining AnandTech and beginning this journey writing about both smartphones and the SoC space, I remember hopping on a call with Anand and some Intel folks to talk about Moorestown. While we never did see Moorestown in a smartphone, we did see it in a few tablets, and even looked at performance in an OpenPeak Tablet at IDF 2011. Back then performance was more than competitive against the single core Cortex A8s in a number of other devices, but power profile, lack of ISP, video encode, decode, or PoP LPDDR2 support, and the number of discrete packages required to implement Moorestown, made it impossible to build a smartphone around. While Moorestown was never the success that Intel was hoping for, it paved the way for something that finally brings x86 both down to a place on the power-performance curve that until now has been dominated by ARM-powered SoCs, and includes all the things hanging off the edges that you need (ISP, encode, decode, integrated memory controller, etc), and it’s called Medfield. With Medfield, Intel finally has a real, bona fide SoC that is already in a number of devices shipping before the end of 2012.

In both an attempt to prove that its Medfield platform is competitive enough to ship in actual smartphones, and speed up the process of getting the platform to market, Intel created its own smartphone Form Factor Reference Design (FFRD). While the act of making a reference device is wholly unsurprising since it’s analogous to Qualcomm’s MSM MDPs or even TI’s OMAP Blaze MDP, what is surprising is its polish and aim. We’ve seen and talked about the FFRD a number of times before, including our first glimpse at IDF 2011 and numerous times since then. Led by Mike Bell (of Apple and Palm, formerly), a team at Intel with the mandate of making smartphone around Medfield created a highly polished device as both a demonstration platform for OEM customers and for sale directly to the customer through participating carriers. This FFRD has served as the basis for the first Medfield smartphones that will (and already are) shipping this year, including the Orange Santa Clara, Lenovo K800, and the device we’re looking at today, the Lava Xolo X900. Future Medfield-based devices will deviate from the FFRD design (like the upcoming Motorola device), but will still be based loosely on the whole Medfield platform. For now, in the form of the X900 we’re basically looking at the FFRD with almost no adulteration from carriers or other OEMs.

Read on for our review of the very first Intel x86 based Android smartphone. 

Find: Google in Africa: where all computing is mobile

Google Code Blog
Author Photo By Chukwuemeka Afigbo, Program Manager, Sub-Saharan Africa

Cross-posted from the Google Africa Blog

Creating applications and services that use Google platforms to make the internet more relevant to Africans is a big part of Google’s vision in Africa. This is why we are always excited whenever we come across individuals or companies whose efforts are in line with this vision. Here are a few of the interesting applications we have seen in recent months.

Battabox, co founded by Christian Purefoy and Yemisi Ilo, is an online social television platform developed in Nigeria that aims to provide everything Nigerian from music, film, street-life to news, comedy and cooking using the YouTube platform. Crowdsourcing videos is an important part of the Battabox strategy and they were able to achieve this using YouTube Direct running on Google App Engine integrated into their website. They also provided an Android App that enables users to upload videos directly from their Android phones.



Battabox website screenshot

There are many other examples from further afield. In South Africa we met Nomanini who have a Google App Engine backend for Lula, their airtime vending device, which promises to change the way airtime is distributed in the region. Envaya SMS is an amazing application that turns your Android phone into an SMS gateway and has been used by many NGOs in East Africa. SAF SMS is a school management solution built with Google Web Toolkit that has been adopted in more than 100 schools in Nigeria. We also met Serengeti Advisers, a consultancy firm in Tanzania that uses Google Chart Tools to create interactive reports on their website.


Nomanini’s Lula terminal communicates with a backend powered by Google App Engine

Read more »

Visitors from Allscripts this week

Folks

We'll be visited by three designers from Allscripts today. Please come prepared to present your projects in critique format today and Wednesday. 

Best, Ben 

Find: Nokia's quarter: bad, but then, transitions are never easy

Crossing fingers... A real third os would really spur innovation. 

The Verge - All Posts
Nokia Lumia Windows Phone_1020

Nokia's Q1 2012 financial report has just been posted, noting an operating loss of €1.3 billion that led to a net loss of €590 million for the period. The company did warn us that it wouldn't be able to maintain its earlier forecast of breaking even, and now we know the full extent of the damage. In total, Nokia sold 11.9 million smart devices during Q1, which is less than half of the 24.9 million it achieved in the first three months of 2011. This has been put down to the rapid decline in Symbian handset sales, which Nokia says have been "partially offset by growing sales of Nokia Lumia devices."

Operating losses from the Smart Devices and Services division alone amounted to €219 million, equivalent to a -5.2 percent operating...

Find: Intel inside your smartphone: intel continues to fight against marginalization

Not optimistic. 

The Verge - All Posts
via cdn0.sbnation.com

Intel's serious push into cellphones began late last year at its Developers Forum, where Google's Andy Rubin took to the stage to announce that all future versions of the Android operating system would include support for Intel's architecture. Since then, the company has shown off handsets from Lenovo, Orange, and Lava at CES and Mobile World Congress that all incorporate the Atom-based Medfield processor, and have shown impressive performance in benchmarks. With the Lava Xolo X900 leading the rest of the pack to market, track the progress of Intel's mobile platform right here.

Data: NASA Tournament Lab holds a contest for programmers who can improve access to its data archives

100tb of data! The NASA tournament lab sounds interesting. 

Ars Technica

NASA is using its NASA Tournament Lab on TopCoder to attack its galactic-scale pile of remote mission data. Over the years, NASA has accumulated over 100 terabytes of data from space missions, and the sheer size of the archive makes it difficult to manage the data and make it available.

Anyone can look at the archive at NASA's Planetary Data System website. What NASA would like someone to do is not only make that data more accessible for scientists, but also package it up for non-scientists to access and manipulate. The agency hopes that school children, teachers and parents, game designers, or almost anyone will hit up the database and find more uses for it than solely science. In a practical sense, the more people accessing the database, the better a case NASA can make for its worth to American society.

The prize is up to $10,000 (and the coveted crown for Space Coder of the Galaxy 2012) for "coders, mathematicians and creative thinkers" to brainstorm new ideas for NASA's planetary science data. You can find more details over at NASA's PDS Challenge home page.

Find: Here comes windows 8 rt, win8 for tablets

AnandTech

Microsoft Communications Manager Brandon LeBlanc has finally given us our first official information about product editions for Windows 8, which is now confirmed to be the product's actual shipping name. For 32-bit and 64-bit PCs, there will be two editions of the operating system: Windows 8, which is roughly equivalent to Windows 7 Home Premium, and Windows 8 Pro, which is analogous to Windows 7 Ultimate. Windows on ARM, now called Windows RT, is a standalone product with roughly the same feature set as the standard Windows 8 product.

Windows 8 Pro is a superset of Windows 8, including all of its features plus business and power user-oriented features like Bitlocker, EFS, the ability to boot from VHDs and host Remote Desktop sessions, the ability to join Active Directory domains. Some of these features had previously been restricted to the Ultimate/Enterprise product tier in Windows 7, and it's nice to see everything trickling down to what should hopefully be a cheaper product (though Microsoft has not yet released details about Windows 8 pricing).

Windows 8 Enterprise will still exist as a separate product available to customers with Software Assurance volume licensing agreements with Microsoft. LeBlanc noted that Windows 8 Enterprise would include features that "enable PC management and deployment, advanced security, virtualization, new mobility scenarios, and much more," but it's not certain whether these will manifest themselves as new features within Windows 8 or as additional add-ons and programs available to enterprise customers separately. Windows 7 Enterprise was functionally identical to Windows 7 Ultimate except for its support of volume license keys.

This is as simple as the WIndows product stack has been since Windows XP was introduced in Home and Pro editions in 2001, replacing Windows Me and Windows 2000 and bringing both the home and professional Windows products onto the same Windows NT codebase. Windows Vista split the lineup into four different commercially available editions - Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, and Ultimate - whose feature sets were often confusing and poorly defined. It's nice to see some semblance of simplicity restored six years later.

For a full list of features included in each edition, the original blog post is linked below. 

Find: mobile gpus better than Xbox 360 by 2014

AnandTech

Qualcomm was the first to tell us that it expects to offer console level GPU performance in the not too distant future, generally hinting that its Adreno 3xx GPUs would get us there. NVIDIA shared this slide (pictured above) with us today that gives its take on where PC, console and mobile GPU performance will land over the coming years. There's nothing too revolutionary here but it does provide an interesting visual for much of what the GPU vendors have been talking about for the past couple of years. 

The solid lines are estimated performance, while the dotted lines are trends. According to NVIDIA, somewhere in the 2013 - 2014 timeframe is when we'll get Xbox 360-class GPU performance out of mobile SoCs. The console line only has two points (Xbox 1 and Xbox 360), while the mobile line starts with the original iPhone, moves up to Tegra 2 and then follows Tegra 3.

Job: ARA is hiring

Folks, a former student of mine has a few job opportunities at ARA locally.

Best,

Ben

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Christopher Sexton ARA/SED <csexton@ara.com>

Hi Ben –

 

Our company is doing some hiring right now, specifically in the group that I work in. If you’ve got any bright students looking for full time jobs after graduation, I’d love to talk to them.

 

Specifically, I’m involved with the hiring for 3 postings: SED-2012-101, SED-2012-112 and SED-2012-113.

 

http://www.ara.com/Careers/ara-job-search.htm

 

Here’s a short blurb – we’re hiring at a few different levels (junior entry to more experienced).

 

Applied Research Associates, Inc. (ARA), a national leader in scientific and engineering research and development, is seeking a staff software developer to join our Decision Systems Group in Raleigh, NC. The selected candidate will develop, code, test, and debug new software or enhancements to existing software under direction from senior developers/engineers. Our development approach fosters communication and collaboration across multiple scientific disciplines, and provides all members of our teams opportunities to contribute creatively to our projects. The successful applicant must have skills in analysis and design of software components in an object-oriented environment. This position supports ARA’s growing work in application development for national vulnerability and event analysis.

 Position Requirements:

  • Understanding of the application development life cycle
  • Proficient with C++, Java, and object-oriented analysis & design (OOAD)
  • Possession of an Active DoD Secret Security Clearance or the ability to obtain one
  • Strong oral presentation and written communication skills

Position Preferences:

  • Knowledge of and experience working in a Scrum and/or XP software development environment
  • Experience developing Qt and/or MFC GUIs
  • Experience using modern software configuration management tools (e.g., Rational ClearCase, SVN, Git)
  • Experience using OpenSceneGraph and/or OpenGL
  • Experience with GIS Toolkits
  • Experience using XML SDKs
  • Experience in physics-based modeling, simulation, or distributed component technologies

Description: <a href=http://intranet.ara.com/tools/docs/Logocircle.jpg" width="55" />

Chris G Sexton

Staff Software Developer

Applied Research Associates, Inc.

office: 919.582.3300, direct: 919.582.3318

 

 


Find: LATCH - Methods of organising information

Media_httptonypritcha_oofjb
via tonypritchard.wordpress.com

I mentioned this earlier in the semester as a good mnemonic suggesting how to organize the information in your app.

Find: NCSU offers lawncare app

Media_httpwww2wnctcom_fsbei
via www2.wnct.com

Announcement: pencasts up

Hey folks,

I've put the pencasts of what goes on in my class online. These are audio recordings of what we say, and visual recordings of what I write or draw. You can see final resulting visual with any pdf reader, but to listen to the audio and watch the matching animation, you'll need Acrobat 10.x.

My lectures are available to anyone at the lecture notes section of my site.

Our crits and examples are available to anyone in the class (not the public) at these links:
  • Example sessions: 1, 2, 3
  • Critique sessions:
    • Pass 1: 1, 2, 3
    • Pass 2: 1, 2
Obviously we have more critiques etc. to come, so keep your eyes peeled for more!

Best,

Ben

Find: Pew - us teen voice use down, median texting up to 1800 per month!

3/4 of teens have mobiles, 1/4 have smartphones. 

Teens, Smartphones & Texting

Texting volume is up while the frequency of voice calling is down. About one in four teens say they own smartphones.

Find: Apple's Start Developing iOS Apps Today Guide Is a Roadmap for Creating Your First App

Seems like it's worth checking out....

Lifehacker

Apple's Start Developing iOS Apps Today Guide Is a Roadmap for Creating Your First AppIf you've ever wanted to create an app for the iPhone or iPad but didn't know where to start, this new, basic guide from Apple might help. It's a step-by-step overview and introduction of the tools you need and how to submit an app to the App Store.

The guide promises to teach you to create a simple iOS app and learn the basics of Objective-C, the programming language for iOS apps. Note that to actually get an app published in the App store, you'll need to have an official developer account for $99 a year.

While the simple guide isn't as thorough as taking a full-fledge class in iOS programming, and you'll still need to put in some work and read the detailed resources Apple has linked to in each of the sections, it's a nice, easy-to-read starting point that's free.

Classeval is coming April 18!

Eval time is coming!

Please go online and enter your opinion and suggestions. You should be able to use the "eval" link on the course site, or the link below.

Best,

Ben

Benjamin Watson
Director, Design Graphics Lab | Associate Professor, Computer Science, NC State Univ.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: ClassEval <classeval@ncsu.edu>
Date: Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 10:33 AM
Subject: ClassEval Encourage Students
To:


To all faculty teaching in Spring 2012:

ClassEval will open 8 am Wednesday, April 18 and will stay open until 8 am on Wednesday, May 2.  As faculty, you probably have the greatest influence on whether your students complete evaluations. Please encourage students to take the time to go to https://classeval.ncsu.edu and fill out the questionnaires posted there.  If they need help, students can send a message to classeval@ncsu.edu .

You can monitor response rates for the university, your department, and your classes hour by hour, day by day by going to http://classeval.ncsu.edu/dashboard/dashboard.cfm?reportstyle=3 or http://classeval.ncsu.edu/dashboard/dashboard.cfm?reportstyle=1 .

Reminders are sent approximately every 2 or 3 days to students who have not completed all their class evaluations. Students can stop receiving the reminders by completing all their evaluations.

Good news! The surveys are fewer questions, so should take less time.

Questions and suggestions may be sent to Lewis_Carson@ncsu.edu .


Find: Wireless carriers, US government join forces to lower phone theft

About time. 

Ars Technica

Major US wireless providers—Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile—are joining forces with the US government in an effort to combat phone theft. The Wall Street Journal reports the wireless companies will build and maintain a centralized database to track phones reported as lost or stolen. Phones on the list will then be denied voice and data service. Ideally, this makes the stolen phone virtually useless and drastically reduces resale value.

Carriers will start their own databases within six months. Those will then be combined into a centralized list over the following 18 months. Small regional wireless carriers are expected to join the initiative within two years. And as part of the plan, all carriers will introduce initiatives to encourage password protection among phone users.

Similar databases are already in-use in countries such as the UK, Germany, France, and Australia. Overall, these countries haven't seen crime completely stopped, but the number of incidents has lowered. In the US, electronics have recently begun surpassing cash as the most stolen property. Reports from The New York Daily News and San Francisco Chronicle last fall showed some startling statistics. In NYC, half of the city's nearly 16,000 robberies in the first 10 months of 2011 were gadget related (mostly phones). In SF, 40 cellphone muggings were reported in November alone.

App: Farm Story Review

Farm Story: grow fruits, raise animals and decorate beautiful farm with friends!

Farm Story is the name of the app developed by TeamLava Games, who are also responsible for producing a wide variety of different Android games such as Bakery Story, Fashion Story, and Restaurant Story. The game features the player monitoring and cultivating a farm to ultimately grow it into a lush and lavish expanse.


This app provides users who enjoy the game play with multitudes of different plants that each take different conditions to grow, and yield different amounts of profit. The game seems to have game play remarkably similar to that of Farmville, and by remarkably similar, I mean almost exactly the same game play. From the diagonal grid to the lush green grass dictating the perimeters of one's farm, to the content that can be purchased with real money to unlock in game money, FarmStory has it all. Of all the Farm Sim games on Google Play such as Farm Frenzy Lite and Papaya Farm, FarmStory has the most downloads and is highest rated with 70,000 approx. ratings with a 4.4. Overall, FarmStory seems to be a very complete and fun app!

Find: A Social Network Built for Two

Good idea. 

Technology Review Feed - Computing Top Stories
A new app gives couples a private network to share texts, videos, and virtual kisses—and shows there's space for social innovation.

Find: Prototyping an IDEO Make-a-thon

Cool idea, with a nice set of tips for similar events. 

ideo labs

Mixing makers, hackers, designers, and OpenIDEOers in IDEO’s London studio

Way back in December, some of us in the IDEO London studio started talking in a pub about some of the ideas arising out of OpenIDEO and its challenges for social good.

We wondered: How could we help the digital community build out more of these winning tech and design solutions? What would happen if we got passionate designers, hackers, and digital community members in a room with no distractions one weekend, all working towards creating physical & digital prototypes for social good? And, could we all play around with Arduino and the 3-D printer while we were at it?

Originally we thought of doing a hackathon. Then we decided to push the concept to its next iteration. How could we bring together multidisciplinary weekend project teams—not just software engineers and digital designers, but also industrial designers, architects, and problem solvers from different backgrounds? Could we create a new kind of design-driven collaborative event? Inspired by IDEO’s own maker culture, the DIY community at Maker Faire, and Silicon Valley hackathons, we decided to experiment with the concept. We called this prototype event a “Make-a-thon.”

The result was a unique London pop-up event that produced some truly original concepts and meaningful digital and physical prototypes. We hosted about 60 makers and hackers in the IDEO London studio—including 1/3 IDEOers and 2/3 UK creative community members. We used EventBrite to keep track of invitations and had a waiting list of about 65 people. Here’s what we made in a 1.5 days—and what we learned.

Read more »

Spotted: Using context to reveal factors that affect physical activity

On improving mobile devices for tracking physical activity. Dey and forlizzi are great authors. 

ACM TOCHI
Ian Li, Anind K. Dey, Jodi Forlizzi

There are many physical activity awareness systems available in today's market. These systems show physical activity information (e.g., step counts, energy expenditure, heart rate) which is sufficient for many self-knowledge needs, but information about the factors that affect physical activity may be needed for deeper self-reflection and increased self-knowledge. We explored the use of contextual information, such as events, places, and people, to support reflection on the factors that affect physical activity. We present three findings from our studies. First, users make associations between physical activity and contextual information that help them become aware of factors that affect their physical activity.

Spotted: Enhancing visuospatial map learning through action on cellphones

On learning of maps using mobiles. 

ACM TAP
Mounia Ziat, Carmen Au, Amin Haji Abolhassani, James J. Clark

The visuospatial learning of a map on cellphone displays was examined. The spatial knowledge of human participants was assessed after they had learned the relative positions of London Underground stations on a map via passive, marginally active, or active exploration. Following learning, the participants were required to answer questions in relation to the spatial representation and distribution of the stations on the map. Performances were compared between conditions involving (1) without auditory cues versus continuous auditory cues; (2) without auditory cues versus noncontinuous auditory cues; and (3) continuous auditory cues versus noncontinuous auditory cues. Results showed that the participants perfomed better following active and marginally-active explorations, as compared to purely passive learning.

Spotted: 20 Years Past Weiser: What's Next?

More post weiser stuff. Weiser really started the mobile research train. 

IEEE Pervasive Cmptg
The paper mentions that over the past two decades, the pervasive computing field evolved through roughly three generations of research challenges. Now, the scientific community, in a new research agenda book, articulates next-generation research directions as the quest to attain Weiser's vision continues.

Spotted: Interacting with 21st-Century Computers

Yes, this may be a good time to revisit weisers landmark paper. 

IEEE Pervasive Cmptg
This paper reflects on four themes from Weiser's original vision from a human-computer interaction perspective: computing everywhere, personal computing, the social dimension of computing, and . The authors review developments both in accordance with and contrasting this vision.

Spotted: From Context Awareness to Socially Aware Computing

Sounds like it may be an interesting research agenda. 

IEEE Pervasive Cmptg
The new generation of smartphones has realized the early vision of context awareness. The next step is facilitating real-world impact of more complex recognition, moving toward next-generation opportunistic recognition configurations and large-scale ensembles of networked subsystems interacting with communities of users.

Spotted: Gesture Search: Random Access to Smartphone Content

If this is what it seems to be, it's an important problem, and the solution may be good. 

IEEE Pervasive Cmptg
Gesture Search offers users an alternative to existing WYSIWYG, GUI-oriented interaction with smartphones. It supports random access of a phone's content and functionality using gesture shortcuts, so users no longer need to manually search and navigate through the interface hierarchy.

Find: Wikipedia updates mobile apps, drops Google Maps for OpenStreetMap

On the move away from gmaps. 

The Verge - All Posts
Wikipedia for iOS update with OpenStreetMap

Wikipedia has announced updates to both its iOS and Android apps — and in yet another data point in an increasingly common trend, they are both dropping Google Maps in favor of the open-source alternative OpenStreetMap. Last year Google put rate limits into place for users of the Google Maps API, and a steady string of defections has emerged in the subsequent months: Foursquare, Apple, and Microsoft have all moved to OpenStreetMap in various products. According to the Wikimedia Foundation, the move away from proprietary Google APIs will allow its app to run on "millions of cheap Android handsets" that don't utilize Google's own applications themselves. While Wikipedia is currently relying on Mapquest for map tiles, it will be moving to...

Find: The ‘Of Course’ Principle of Design

From gruber. Good principle. This is basically what is meant by affordances. 

Daring Fireball

Good rule of thumb:

Most companies (including web startups), he said, are looking to “wow” with their products, when in reality what they should be looking for is an “‘of course’ reaction from their users.”

Find: Code Academy: the student developers building the Windows Phone ecosystem

About competitions encouraging students to develop for wp7. 

The Verge - All Posts
Windows Phone student developers hero

Microsoft might seem focused on its "smoked by Windows Phone" campaign or its big upcoming Nokia Lumia 900 launch, but scrape beneath this glossy surface and you'll discover some interesting work carried on without the typical pizzazz of the marketing world. Ben Lower, a senior product manager for Windows Phone, is behind a number of efforts that focus on student developers and involve a significant amount of investment from the company. Competitions like XAPFest, Imagine Cup, and Big App on Campus have all raised awareness of Windows Phone amongst students, but do these efforts lead to reward for Microsoft? With games developers displaying a lack of interest in Windows Phone, will Microsoft's students bring new hope to its mobile...

Competition: Got apps? We want 'em!

Hey folks,

Don't think any of us are using "green button data", but just in case, here is an app competition you may want to know about:

Best,

Ben

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Brandon Hurlbut, Energy Department" <info@engage.energy.gov>
Date: 05 Apr 2012 18:43
Subject: Got apps? We want 'em!

energygov

Dear friend of Energy.gov,

I want to tell you about an exciting opportunity that the Energy Department is launching today.

We’re challenging the developer community to participate in the first ever Apps for Energy competition!

Apps for Energy challenges software developers, designers, and students to build apps that help utility customers understand their Green Button electricity usage data, take action, and make better-informed decisions.

Developers with the best apps that are compatible with Green Button data will win cash prizes. Prizes include $30,000 for the best overall app, $15,000 for the best student-built app, and seven other prizes. In total, we'll be offering $100,000 in prizes.

Apps are due May 15th, so don’t miss this opportunity to change the way millions of Americans think about their utility data! Here’s how to get started:

Got questions? We’re listening. Send us an email at apps@hq.doe.gov. Check in with us on Facebook and Twitter for the latest Apps for Energy news and updates.

Good luck!

Brandon Hurlbut
Chief of Staff for the Energy Department 

ENERGY.GOV | BLOG | PRIVACY | SUBSCRIBE | UNSUBSCRIBE | CONTACT US | MISSION

Find: Apple has a 7.85-inch iPad prototype in its labs, according to John Gruber

Why do a smaller iPad? Because iPad now is too big and heavy for reading. A small iPad could compete directly with kindle. 

The Verge - All Posts
ipad 7-inch

Apple has been working on a smaller version of the iPad in its Cupertino labs, according to Daring Fireball's John Gruber. On an episode of The Talk Show podcast, Gruber said that he's heard details of a 7.85-inch prototype that runs at the same 1024 x 768 resolution as the iPad 1 and 2. Such a device wouldn't quite match the clarity of the new iPad's Retina display, but at around 163 pixels per inch would still offer a sharpness increase over the original iPad without apps needing to be rewritten or updated. Gruber says that the device is about as tall as the 9.7-inch iPads are narrow when held in portrait orientation.

The revelation isn't necessarily surprising, as we've heard rumblings of smaller iPads before, and Apple undoubtedly...

Find: Google's homepage through the lens of 14 different Android browsers

The effect of fragmentation on visual design. 

The Verge - All Posts
Google's homepage as rendered through different Android browsers

One of Android's strengths as a platform is the tremendous variety of apps that can be found to tackle any given task. Web browsers are just one example, with Google itself even releasing a beta version of Chrome in addition to the standard Android browser — but how do the different selections stack up? Web designer Brad Frost has assembled a collection of images from 14 different Android browsers rendering the web page that is ground zero for Google's entire business: the company's search page. If you're interested in design, app development, or user experience, take a look — you'll be glad you did.

Find: Amazon's finger-friendly website redesign seemingly rolls out

As we spoke about today: amazon has redone its visual design to accommodate fingers. Can anyone find a before after pair?

The Verge - All Posts
Amazon website redesign stock 1024

Does Amazon.com look a little different for you recently? A little more streamlined, perhaps, a little easier to touch, a distinct lack of the traditional blue search bar? That's probably because the online retailer's website has received a pretty major redesign, and it's just recently rolled out to your neck of the woods. To tell you the truth, the design's actually been out for some time now — some of us at The Verge have been using it for weeks, and it's been in testing since August of last year — but we're recently receiving an influx of tips (and tweets) that suggest that Amazon just pushed hard to make the new look and feel available for more shoppers. The onus for the design tweaks are pretty clear: Amazon told the Wall Street...

Find: iPhones Have Significantly Higher Rates of Wi-Fi Utilization than Android Phones in the U.S. and U.K.

Why? Because iPhone users are geekier and know about wifi?

Comscore Releases
comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released an analysis of mobile and Wi-Fi Internet usage on smartphones in the United States and United Kingdom. Based on census-level behavioral data from comScore Device Essentials, the report studied the share of unique smartphones connecting to operator and Wi-Fi networks to provide insight into Internet connection patterns across markets. Among its findings, the analysis shows a significantly higher percentage of iPhones than Android phones connecting to the Internet via Wi-Fi networks.

Find: Phonedeck lets you manage your Android phone from the cloud and see data about your relationships

May be a good research tool. 

The Verge - All Posts
Phonedeck

Phonedeck is a new "cloud dashboard" for Android phones that allows users to sync phone data, gain insights on phone usage, and also to send and receive SMS and phone calls through the browser. The app offers some common syncing options, including contact backup, SMS logs, and social network integration. But Phonedeck's highlight is really the insights feature: the app gives statistics for each of your contacts, letting you know how often you communicate with someone and who contacts who more often. It also analyzes your phone's battery usage and can tell you the live battery level on your device. Phonedeck is free, and you can grab it right now from the Google Play store.

Find: comScore Reports February 2012 U.S. Mobile Subscriber Market Share

Android has half the market bd growing, apple 1/3 and growing, rim in giving its share to android, microsoft to apple. Still most Nokia affect. 

Comscore Releases
comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released data from the comScore MobiLens service, reporting key trends in the U.S. mobile phone industry during the three month average period ending February 2012. The study surveyed more than 30,000 U.S. mobile subscribers and found Samsung to be the top handset manufacturer overall with 25.6 percent market share. Google Android continued to grow its share in the U.S. smartphone market, crossing the 50-percent threshold in February to capture a majority share for the first time in its history.

Find: Ambient Devices CEO Pritesh Gandhi on 'glanceable' data

On information that is simple and elegant. 

The Verge - All Posts
Pritesh Gandhi

We're perpetually bombarded with information, 24 hours a day. That's just our connected reality now, and there's very little hope of escaping it. On Valentine's Day, I penned an editorial on how I believe that the secret to distilling this information — the key to preventing humans from collapsing under the ever-growing weight of this data — has been right under our noses for years.

They're called "glanceable" devices, and Massachusetts-based Ambient Devices has been developing them for over a decade. The company spun out of a project at MIT's famed Media Lab with the goal of integrating data points into our lives in a natural, organic way. Ambient's path to building a real business has been an unusual one, producing oddities...

Find: The Nokia Lumia 900 review

Gist: Not competitive with marquee phones like iPhone 4s or nexus prime, but a great buy. 

Maybe Nokia isn't going high end until the wp7 app market is competitive... Or maybe they just need a full development cycle to produce marquee hardware. 

Nice discussion of the wp7 design trade offs. Wp7: great aesthetics but low information density, and non obvious ui. Android: poor aesthetics, but good density and better affordances. I think this different experience may be a good one for wp7. 

Ars Technica

The Nokia Lumia 900 has the weight of two big names on its shoulders. It's Nokia's big re-entry into the US market; it's also the flagship Windows Phone Mango in this country. In anticipatory articles, you can hardly find the term "Lumia 900" separated from the word "premium." The phone is as important as the Samsung Galaxy Nexus was to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and as, well, every new iPhone is to iOS. 

The phone was recently announced at the two-year contract price of $99, a tag usually applied to new mid-range or old high-end phones (even more recently, AT&T announced the Lumia 900 will be free online for new customers). But the implication is that the low price is meant to attract attention to an OS that has yet to win a significant chunk of the market. It's not a reflection of the handset's quality. Because of this, we largely compare the Lumia 900 to the two flagship phones of the other two major OSes, the iPhone 4S with iOS and the Galaxy Nexus with Android 4.0. The iPhone 4 also makes a brief appearance, since it has the same list price as the Lumia 900. 

Find: Google unveils "Project Glass," augmented reality glasses

Ok, so the project really exists, if not the product. Let's watch the video in class, and courier while we're at it.

Ars Technica

Rumors have been floating around that Google is developing a pair of glasses with a built-in heads-up display, and Google confirmed the project's existence today.
"Project Glass," as shown in a Google+ page, outfits the wearer with a sleek pair of glasses with just one small lens worn over the right eye, and a camera. That doesn't mean a working pair actually exists yet—Google said photos of the glasses were posted to "show what this technology could look like" and a video was created "to demonstrate what it might enable you to do."
In the video, a guy wakes up and sees some Android-like icons in his heads-up display. He makes coffee, sees a reminder for an appointment, looks out the window, gets the weather, then receives a text message from a friend asking him if he wants to meet. He replies to the text message by voice while he's eating. The guy walks out the door and heads toward the subway when his glasses tell him subway service has been suspended. Instead, he gets the walking route from his glasses.
Later, he goes into a bookstore, asks "where's the music section?" and is given walking directions to that part of the shop—using the indoor maps technology built by Google. He sees something interesting, says "take a photo of this," and then "share it to my circles" in order to post it on Google+. Then he walks up on top of a balcony, receives a video call, and shares the view from the top of the building with a friend.
In short, the glasses will be designed to do just about everything that can be done using a smartphone, but without the massive inconvenience of actually carrying a device and using your hands. Google hasn't said how close all this is to reality, but here's the video for your viewing pleasure:

Find: The Apple iPad Review (2012)

Extremely thorough review. 

AnandTech

It has a display resolution that dwarfs most high-end desktop displays. The panel also puts a real emphasis on quality, not just resolution. For a computing device targeted squarely at the consumer market, both of these things are rarities.

Its SoC is the absolute largest ever squeezed into an ARM based tablet. The chip itself is even bigger than what you find in most mainstream notebooks. It’s expensive, it puts out a ton of heat and it offers a tremendous GPU performance advantage over anything else in its class.

And it has a battery that’s larger than what ships in the current crop of similarly sized ultraportables and Ultrabooks.

The new iPad doesn’t significantly change the tablet usage paradigm, but it does put all previous attempts at building hardware in this space to shame. It’s the sort of no holds barred, performance at any expense design that we’re used to seeing from enthusiast PC component vendors - but in a tablet...from Apple. 

Welcome to our review of the new iPad.

Find: The billion-dollar fight for control of mobile money

Nice survey of paying with phones. 

Ars Technica

"Mobile payments" is about as unsexy as technology buzzwords get. We're basically talking about phones and money. And it's hard enough to get people excited about money in the first place—unless you're receiving large sums of it, that is—let alone using a phone to make or spend it.

But it is exciting! Trust us. And there's a reason why you're going to be hearing a lot more about mobile commerce before this year is done.

Find: iOS wins over more new smartphone buyers as Android holds steady

Just about half of all phone owners have smartphones. 

Ars Technica

iOS is continuing to creep up on Android's smartphone market share, according to a recent survey by Nielsen. While iOS penetration remains a distant second to Android overall, survey respondents in the United States showed that 43 percent of recent smartphone acquirers purchased an iOS device, while new Android owners constituted 48 percent.

The percentage figures above are for "3 month recent acquirers," or survey respondents who got a smartphone in the last three months. Comparing the overall market share figures to the recent acquirer breakdown shows that Android is holding steady: 48 percent of both recent acquirers and smartphone owners in general have Android in this survey. In a survey from January 2012, 46.3 percent of all smartphone owners had Android phones. Only 32 percent of all smartphone-owning respondents now have iOS, compared to 30 percent in January.

The recent-acquirer balance has also shifted since Nielsen's January survey. At that time, 51.7 percent of 3-month recent acquirers had purchased Android phones and 37 percent had chosen iOS. In total, 49.7 percent of the mobile phone-owning public has smartphones, according to the survey.

Find: RIM CEO announces purges, wants to recapture love of enterprise IT

Rim finally begins to act. Probably too late. 

Ars Technica

Ten weeks into his tenure as Research in Motion CEO, Thorsten Heins is now readying the axe. “It’s now very clear to me that substantial change is what RIM needs,” Heins said in a conference call and webcast with investors late on March 29. As a result, he says has begun a massive restructuring of the smartphone and mobile device maker.

Part of that change includes cleaning house—a group of executives, including former co-CEO Jim Balsillie, have resigned or retired as the company prepared its financial results. (RIM took a loss of $125 million for its fourth quarter, which just ended—compared to a $934 million profit a year ago.) More may soon be swept out as Heins makes changes, and seeks to sell off or shut down parts of the business that don't mesh with his vision of a newer, leaner RIM. “We see that Blackberry can not succeed if we try to be everybody's darling and all things to all people,” Heins said.

Find: Paper By FiftyThree

http://bcove.me/fgziu0un

Ran across this sketching/drawing app, has some interesting gesture controls.