Get schooled by CNET editor Jasmine France. This week she gives advice on whether to upgrade from your current MP3 player to the new iPods released at Apple’s annual music event. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-12519_7-20015972-49.html” class=”origPostedBlog”MP3 Insider/a/p
Dolphins owner Stephen Ross has just made public his own Kangaroo TV operations, but the end product is something far different than just in-stadium televisions. The FanVision handheld (shown above) has been reportedly shopped to every single NFL team, but only a dozen of ’em decided to take Mr. Ross up on his offer (along with the University of Michigan, curiously enough). Essentially, this here handheld works only while within the stadium, enabling fans to view instant replays from multiple angles, out of town games, real-time stats from around the league, NFL Red Zone, live fantasy football updates, on-demand video from your home team, a cheerleader cam (yeah, seriously), highlight reel of the game and the actual network telecast of the event that you’re at. ‘Course, this type of fan customization isn’t exactly new — the Mariners have been offering something similar to Nintendo DS owners for awhile now — but given the high absurd price of front row seats, we’ll take any extra angles we can get. FanVision will be available within the stadiums of the signed-on teams (listed after the break) for $199 without any activation or recurring fees, though the MSRP is tagged at $259. Sure beats paying for PSLs, huh?
Continue reading FanVision handheld makes NFL nosebleeds far more bearable
FanVision handheld makes NFL nosebleeds far more bearable originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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It was almost a footnote. AirPlay, the audio streaming protocol once known as AirTunes, got just one minute of keynote time last week. But it might end up as the backbone of Apple’s assault on the living room. More »
Photograph of Stéphane Mallarmé's Un Coup de Dés, Public Domain
E-readers have tried to make reading as smooth, natural and comfortable as possible so that the device fades away and immerses you in the imaginative experience of reading. This is a worthy goal, but it also may be a profound mistake.
This is what worries Wired’s Jonah Lehrer about the future of reading. He notes that when “the act of reading seems effortless and easy … [w]e don’t have to think about the words on the page.” If every act of reading becomes divorced from thinking, then the worst fears of “bookservatives” have come true, and we could have an anti-intellectual dystopia ahead of us.
Lehrer cites research by neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene showing that reading works along two pathways in the brain. When we’re reading familiar words laid out in familiar sequences within familiar contexts, our brain just mainlines the data; we can read whole chunks at a time without consciously processing their component parts.
When we read something like James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, on the other hand — long chunks of linguistically playful, conceptually dense, sparsely punctuated text — our brain can’t handle the information the same way. It goes back to the same pathways that we used when we first learned how to read, processing a word, phoneme or even a letter at a time. Our brain snaps upright to attention; as Lehrer says, “[a]ll the extra work – the slight cognitive frisson of having to decipher the words – wakes us up.”
I think Lehrer makes a few mistakes here. They’re subtle, but decisive. I also think, however, that he’s on to something. I’ll try to lay out both.
First, the mistakes. I think Lehrer overestimates how much the material form of the text — literally, the support — contributes to the activation of the different reading pathways in the brain. This actually deeply pains me to write down, because I firmly believe that the material forms in which we read profoundly affect how we read. As William Morris says, “you can’t have art without resistance in the material.”
But that’s not what Dehaene’s talking about. It’s when we don’t understand the words or syntax in a book that we switch to our unfamiliar-text-processing mode. Smudged ink, rough paper, the interjection of images, even bad light — or, alternatively, gilded pages, lush leather bindings, a gorgeous library — are not relevant here. We work through all of that. It’s the language that makes this part of the brain stop and think, generally not the page or screen.
Second, it’s always important to remember that there are lots of different kinds of reading, and there are no particular reasons to privilege one over the other. When we’re scanning the news or the weather (and sometimes, even reading a blog), we don’t want to be provoked by literary unfamiliarity. We want to use that informational superhighway that our brain evolved and that we have put to such good use processing text.
Reading is, as the philosophers say, a family-resemblance concept; we use the same words to describe different acts that don’t easily fall under a single definition. It’s all textual processing, but when we’re walking down a city street, watching the credits to a television show, analyzing a map, or have our head deeply buried in James Joyce, we’re doing very different things. And in most cases, we need all the cognitive leverage we can get.
Now, here’s where I think Lehrer is right: Overwhelmingly, e-books and e-readers have emphasized — and maybe over-emphasized — easy reading of prose fiction. All of the rhetoric is about the pure transparency of the reading act, where the device just disappears. Well, with some kinds of reading, we don’t always want the device to disappear. Sometimes we need to use texts to do tough intellectual work. And when we do this, we usually have to stop and think about their materiality.
We care which page a quote appears on, because we need to reference it later. We need to look up words in other languages, not just English. We need displays that can preserve the careful spatial layouts of a modernist poet, rather than smashing it all together as indistinguishable, left-justified text. We need to recognize that using language as a graphic art requires more than a choice of three fonts in a half-dozen sizes. Some text is interchangable, but some of it is through-designed. And for good reason.
This is where we’ve been let down by our reading machines — in the representation of language. It isn’t the low-glare screens, or the crummy imitative page-turn animations. They’ve knocked those out of the park.
In fact, we’ve already faced this problem once. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, book production went into overdrive, while newspapers and advertising were inventing new ways to use words to jostle urban passers-by out of their stupor.
Writers wanted to find a way to borrow the visual vitality of what was thought of as ephemeral writing and put it in the service of the conceptual richness and range of subject matter that had been achieved in the nineteenth-century novel.
That’s where we get literary and artistic modernism — not only Joyce, but Mallarmé, Stein, Apollinaire, Picasso, Duchamp, Dada, Futurism — the whole thing. New lines for a new mind, and new eyes with which to see them.
That’s what e-books need today. Give us the language that uses the machines, and it doesn’t matter if they try to get out of the way.
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Researchers at UC Berkeley are developing a backpack that can automatically map out building interiors in 3D. Could it be part of Google Earth one day?
Apple on Thursday published a set of rules about the types of content that aren’t allowed in the iOS App Store, answering questions that have been bugging software developers and customers for years while introducing some new ambiguities.
Still, it’s an important step. By publishing the guidelines, Apple mobile customers will be able to know what they can and can’t get on an iOS device versus, say, an Android phone. Also, third-party programmers will have a clearer sense of whether or not to invest in developing an app, whereas before they were subject to rejection without knowing what they weren’t allowed to do. However, some developers think parts of the guidelines could be more clear.
“By no means is what they put out today perfect,” said Justin Williams, developer of Second Gear software, who quit iPhone development last year. “There are some vague areas. But compared to where we were yesterday, it’s a big improvement.”
Apple CEO Steve Jobs has described the App Store as a “curated platform” that is regulated to ensure a high quality, secure experience for customers. IPhone, iPad and iPod Touch get third-party applications through the App Store, and Apple must approve any software before it can be sold through the store. Unless you hack your iOS device, the App Store is the only way to get additional native software.
The regulated App Store model deviates from the traditional experience of owning a PC, where customers can typically purchase and install any software that’s compatible with their computers. Critics have argued that by curating the iOS platform, Apple tightly controls the mobile devices that customers own as well as the developers who create software for them.
Additionally, by not publishing the guidelines on its iOS app review policy, programmers were left guessing as to what they were allowed to create, potentially putting a bottleneck on their innovation. Publishing the list of app review guidelines — a step that Wired.com called for Apple to take in a previous editorial — addresses this potential problem of self-censorship.
“Hopefully it will give developers increased confidence when starting projects,” said Jamie Montgomerie, developer of the Eucalyptus book-reading app, which was approved by Apple after its controversial rejection. “I suspect there are a lot of interesting apps that were never made because people were scared of the approval process.”
Apple’s seven-page list of guidelines (.pdf) splits reasons for app rejections into 11 categories. Reasons for rejection range from technical to editorial offenses: Apps that crash will be rejected, for example, and apps that defame people in a mean-spirited way are rejected, with the exception of political satirists and humorists.
“We hope they will help you steer clear of issues as you develop your app, so that it speeds through the approval process when you submit it,” Apple said in a statement Thursday about the app guidelines.
The publication of the guidelines is a major step toward transparency for a company as opaque as Apple. Since the App Store opened in 2008, critics scrutinized the App Store for its undisclosed editorial guidelines, which resulted in seemingly arbitrary rejections of a wide variety of applications.
For example, Apple in 2009 rejected an app called Me So Holy, which enabled iPhone users to edit their self-portraits to look like Jesus Christ. However, Apple that year approved Baby Shaker, a game that involved shaking a baby to death. Apple later pulled Baby Shaker, admitting its approval was a mistake.
Because of its unclear app approval system, some developers gave up on making content for the App Store because they couldn’t be sure that an app would be a wise investment of their time and money. Second Gear developer Williams said he quit iPhone development last year because Apple didn’t disclose its policies.
“One of the big reasons I got frustrated was I didn’t like the black box review system, which is basically you’re submitting your apps to the review process and you have no idea what the review process is,” Williams said. “I think [Apple publishing guidelines] is a good step towards being more up front and honest about what the criteria is.”
However, Williams noted that there was still room for improvement, as several parts of the guidelines are still unclear. For example, one clause in the guidelines reads apps will be rejected if they duplicate functionality of other apps, “particularly if there are too many of them.” Williams said it was unclear how many is “too many,” and such vagueness could discourage developers from competing with other apps in the App Store.
It also remains a question as to whether Apple’s App Store is now allowing Adobe to join the iOS scene. In addition to publishing guidelines, Apple said in a press release that it was “relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to crease iOS apps, so long as the resulting apps do not download any code. This change was not detailed in Apple’s guidelines, but some are speculating that Adobe’s iPhone Packager, a tool to automatically convert Flash software into native iPhone apps, will be allowed — whereas before third-party app creation tools were banned. Wired.com’s Epicenter will have more to report soon on that aspect of Apple’s App Store revisions.
Brian X. Chen is author of an upcoming book about the always-connected mobile future titled Always On, due for publication Spring 2011. To keep up with his coverage in real time, follow @bxchen or @gadgetlab on Twitter.
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Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
Continue reading Acer Liquid Metal wraps Android 2.2 in aluminum
Acer Liquid Metal wraps Android 2.2 in aluminum originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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In the first week of the Lexus/Crave Retweet sweepstakes, we’re giving away a Sony PlayStation 3 Slim to one lucky winner.
Here’s a reason for not swapping that Nokia phone in favor of a smartphone: Nokia announced the Nokia Mobile TV Headset, DVB-H, a TV receiver add-on that turns the phone into a portable TV.
Cost, or the lack of, is the most exciting aspect of the mobile TV adapter. Since you don’t need a data plan or a Wi-Fi network, there are no hidden charges for watching mobile content, unlike other streaming offerings. It also doesn’t matter if you have a limited data plan, because the adapter doesn’t use it.
Nokia warns that DVB-H service will not be available in all areas.
The headset has media playback controls and works just for making and receiving calls. The TV receiver is built-in and also works with the Mobile TV app on Nokia’s Ovi Store.
The headset will work with Nokia N8 and other Sympian 3 devices. Expected to launch in the next few months, it will retail for €40, or approximately $50 dollars.
No stranger to E Ink wristwatches, Seiko finally brings its “active matrix” watch out of concept and onto retail shelves. Unlike previous E Ink watches that can be viewed when looking down on the dial, this watch offers a full 180-degree viewing angle.
Despite its retro look, the “Future Now” EPD watch packs plenty of future tech inside. It utilizes E Ink on an electrophoretic display. Boasting 80,000 pixels, each pixel can display four shades of grey. Solar cells frame the display.
The watch is controlled by radio movement and gets local time from the nearest atomic clock.
While exact pricing is still unknown, it’s expected to be affordable, and not sky-high luxury prices like Seiko’s previous E Ink watches. Seiko says these watches will be on retail shelves by the end of the year.
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