Hasta La Gadget!

Yesterday at BlackBerry World 2011 we were fortunate to sit down and chat with Chris Smith, Senior Director of the BlackBerry Developer Platform, along with Rasmus and Karl from The Astonishing Tribe. One of RIM’s recent acquisitions, TAT is known for some rather, well… astonishing user interface designs, and for infusing a bit of magic into some of the PlayBook’s apps, such as the bundled picture viewer and calculator. We were shown a number of demos, including the downloadable Scrapbook app, a rather nifty contact list, and a location-aware news reader. Over the years, TAT has built an engine and framework that make it easy for developers to create powerful and attractive UIs, and some of this will be making its way into the PlayBook’s native software development kit sometime this summer. Along with support for Open GL ES 2.0, SQLite, cURL, and POSIX (amongst others), this NDK will provide API’s to control the audio system, the cameras, and the sensors — possibly even code to enable stereoscopic 3D output over HDMI, as demonstrated before. We know that’s a lot of exciting stuff to sink your teeth into, so be sure to get a taste of it by watching our video.

TAT-astic native PlayBook development discussed and demoed on video originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 05 May 2011 08:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve seen augmented reality done what seems like a million different ways, but we’ve never seen it quite like this. The New York Times reported Wednesday on a forthcoming iPhone app called Aurasma that has the power to turn ink-and-paper publications into interactive mine fields. Aurasma, conceived by enterprise software firm Autonomy, uses a scaled down version of the outfit’s IDOL pattern recognizer to identify images stored in a vast database, and then converts those images into related video. Unfortunately, the first release of the app, scheduled for sometime next month, comes in the form of an AR advertisement / game for an unidentified upcoming movie, and the company’s founder seems solidly focused on the technology’s marketing potential. No word yet on when or if we can expect to see our New York Times come to life, as seen in the video at the source link below, but if this is the future of augmented reality, count us in.

Continue reading Aurasma’s AR iPhone app to turn everyday objects into multimedia triggers (video)

Aurasma’s AR iPhone app to turn everyday objects into multimedia triggers (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 09 Apr 2011 01:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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So, here’s a thought. Why, if you were a dutiful Adobe employee, would you waste countless days and weeks creating what could very well be the next big iPad app, only to deem it a concept and never actually promise a real release? Exactly. During the 2011 edition of Photoshop World, a bigwig from the company took the stage in order to showcase what could soon be possible with Photoshop on-the-go, and if you’ve been wowed by the powers of Photoshop Express, you’ll be utterly floored by what Adobe has been able to do here. The wildest part, in our estimation, is the absence of stuttering when manipulating multiple images and applying filters, but then again, they may be working with a pixel-optimized set of shots (versus a full-size RAW, for example) in this particular demo. As we said, no one’s even confirming that this has any hope of breaching reality, but we’re going ahead and making the outlandish assumption that Adobe’s not just wasting our (and its own) time by showcasing this in public. Video’s below, bub.

[Thanks, Nick]

Continue reading Adobe demonstrates legitimate Photoshop capabilities on iPad, deems it but a concept (video)

Adobe demonstrates legitimate Photoshop capabilities on iPad, deems it but a concept (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 31 Mar 2011 14:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The perks of living in a big city, eh? Citizens of Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco are being treated to some three-dimensional March madness from the guys and gals at Nintendo. For the remainder of this month, Ninty’s 3DS handheld will be available to try and play in so-called Demo Pods (see above) at strategic locations in each marquee city. The Mii Maker app, nintendogs + cats, Madden NFL Football, Aslphalt 3D, and a selection of other games will be preloaded and waiting for you, letting you have a taste of what’s to come on March 27th. See Nintendo’s PR after the break for the full details.

Continue reading Nintendo rolls a 3DS Demo Pod across US, gets gamers salivating for March 27th launch

Nintendo rolls a 3DS Demo Pod across US, gets gamers salivating for March 27th launch originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 11 Mar 2011 09:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Great graphics are often a component of great video games, but fancy physics can help too, and last week Havok announced that it was bringing those to Android, along with all of the requisite development tools. That means smartphones with Android 2.3 or up can potentially enjoy the same procedural animations and pretty dresses that we’ve enjoyed on PC and home console for years, and as the first gamer-centric smartphone with Gingerbread on board, Sony Ericsson’s forthcoming Xperia Play got to be the first to demo them. Watch a pickup plow through road hazards, a gorilla get catapulted across a football field, and an Assassin’s Creed-esque warrior run, jump and climb with the best of them in the video above. Oh, and just so you know, we got a (very brief) hands-on with all three demos in person at GDC 2011 last week, and each was practically enjoyable enough to be an Android game of its own. The realistically bouncing ball’s in your court, developers. Don’t let us down.

Continue reading Havok physics engine comes to Android 2.3, demoed on Xperia Play (video)

Havok physics engine comes to Android 2.3, demoed on Xperia Play (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 05 Mar 2011 23:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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