Hasta La Gadget!

Welcome to the 21st century, CBS. Following in the footsteps of NBC, TBS, TNT, ABC and a smattering of others, CBS has launched a new iOS app that enables iPhone, iPod touch and iPad owners to stream full-length, HD-quality episodes of CBS programming right on their mobile device. The app includes offerings from its primetime, daytime and late night schedule, with flagships like NCIS, CSI, How I Met Your Mother and The Late Show with David Letterman being called out in particular. Daytime and late night programming will be available within 24 hours after initial airing, while most primetime programs will be available on the eighth day after broadcast. For those awaiting similar treatment on non-iOS platforms, the company has assured the universe that it’ll bring similar functionality to Windows 8 and Android “later this year.”

The upside here is that there’s no mention of cost, which should ease any frustrations of having to wait up to eight days to see something that aired live on the network. Moreover, the new app will integrate the existing CBS Connect App experience by the start of the Fall TV season, bringing a polished second-screen experience to those watching CSI, Criminal Minds, Hawaii Five-O and NCIS: Los Angeles. Now, if only we could convince every other channel to distribute its content over the web without arcane restrictions, we’d be happier than Gallagher at a farmer’s market.

Filed under: Software, Mobile, Apple

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Source: App Store (iTunes)

Look, Will Arnett is hilarious. His gravely tones are also just as romantic in person as they are on television. And he took the stage here at D:Dive Into Media 2013 alongside Mitch Hurwitz (creator of Arrested Development) and Ted Sarandos (Chief Content Officer & VP of Content at Netflix) in order to talk about the changing world of original content production. Outside of making jokes about premiums paid for getting props back in order to create a new generation of Arrested Development (seriously, they sold the Aztec Tomb “immediately,” per Arnett), Hurwitz and Arnett both agreed that it’s a completely different dynamic in creating television for the internet.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD

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Charlie Ergen, chairman and co-founder of Dish Network, was the keynote speaker on the first night of the D:Dive Into Media conference in Dana Point, California., and without question, he’s going to be a tough act to follow. The hour-long conversation touched on everything from Ergen’s expertise at the blackjack table to his belief that there are just two kinds of people in the world — “those who get results, and those who make excuses” — but host Peter Kafka dove right into the major issue at hand: the Hopper. Head on past the break for a rundown of the interview.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD

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Days before CES 2013, a mysterious new tablet computer has emerged, along with a short film that gives us a brief look at the device. Apparently, the enchantMOON is some sort of “hypertext authoring tablet” designed for the creation of HTML5 content.

Specifically, enchantMOON is described as “a digitizer pen-driven tablet device designed to let anyone program and share HTML5 games, applications, and interactive publications without writing code.” Presumably, the tablet renders code using the Open Source enchant.js framework, since it appears they’re both coming from the same company, Ubiquitous Entertainment.

The concept sketches here by designer Yoshitoshi Abe doesn’t really tell us much about the tablet, other than the fact that it doesn’t look like any other tablet out there.

Nor does the early prototype photo taken here with Ubiquitious Entertainment CEO Ryo Shimizu:

Image: AV Watch

It’s got a science-fictiony look to it that makes it look like some sort of gadget out The Matrix, with a built in handle that can be used for carrying or as a stand. From an article over on Japan’s AV Watch [JP], I’ve gleaned that the tablet will have a magnesium alloy body, and a 7-inch screen. It will also have a minimal user white-on-black interface which is centered around the use of handwriting recognition and converting drawn images to vector art. Specs are sketchy at this point, but it appears that it will run on a ARM Cortex A8 CPU with a Mali400 GPU, with Android deep under the hood.

Image: AV Watch

And to go along with the Sci-Fi/Anime theme, they’ve created an enchantMOON short film series, inspired by Alduos Huxley’s Brave New World, and directed by Hiroaki Yuasa. Japanese film director and animator Shinji Higuchi (Evangelion, Gamera, The Floating Castle) is also involved in the project as “CVO” – Chief Visionary Officer. Gee, I’d like a title like that. I guess since I’m the boss, I can do that.

Here’s the first part:

And here’s part two:

Nope, still doesn’t tell us much about the tablet, but they’re definitely going after a part of the market that other tablet makers haven’t been too successful at – content authoring. I think my iPad is a stellar device for content consumption, but I’ll still take my desktop or laptop over it in a heartbeat for web development and authoring. I’m hoping that they’ve got something special up their sleeves, but if nothing else, they’ve piqued my curiosity.

We’ll have to wait a few days until CES starts to find out what all the mystery is about enchantMOON, but I’m definitely intrigued.

The Raspberry Pi mini computer that’s become popular with the maker community but was originally conceived as a device to help kids learn how to code has had the lightweight TinyBASIC programming language ported to it.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation noted the development in a blog post – explaining how it’s received lots of emails from parents who haven’t done any programming since their school days but still have books on BASIC, and want to be able to share the programming language with their kids

The good news for those people, and for anyone else who wants to learn BASIC from scratch or revisit an old friend, is that TinyBASIC is now available for the Raspberry Pi. Andrew Lack has ported this very lightweight editor, interpreter and graphics package to the Pi, and we think it’s great.

The Foundation says it’s considering bundling TinyBASIC “as part of the standard Raspbian image” — but it wants to test the waters first to see how popular the language turns out to be.

The blog post also notes that while the GOTO function is included in the most basic version of the TinyBASIC port (called vanilla) — to allow for beginners to take their programming baby steps — the function can be disabled in another version (called raspberry) to ensure budding programmers are given the chance to learn structured programming.

The TinyBASIC port consists of an editor, called TinyBASIC One, which allows programs to be inputed, edited and run; the BASIC interpreter — including support for language features such as PRINT, REM, LET, STOP and GOTO — and in the raspberry flavour additional features include WHILE/WEND and REPEAT/UNTIL loops (but not GOTO).

The port also includes support for drawing basic shapes, via the DRAW function.