Spy.Ocell

ocellnuri posted a photo:

Alison was playing Rolando on my iPhone tonight and got the little round guy stuck INSIDE this obst

ocellnuri posted a photo:

flickr.com/photos/bdmckeown/

ocellnuri posted a photo:

ocellnuri posted a photo:

It's really hard to avoid taking this picture when you go to the beach. At least it is for me.

ocellnuri posted a photo:

A collaboration between Bryan Tarnowski, Ben McKeown, Marshall Alderman, and Chris Owens.

An homage to Jill Greenberg.

ocellnuri posted a photo:

A collaboration between Bryan Tarnowski, Ben McKeown, Marshall Alderman, and Chris Owens.

An homage to Jill Greenberg.

ocellnuri posted a photo:

A collaboration between Bryan Tarnowski, Ben McKeown, Marshall Alderman, and Chris Owens.

An homage to Jill Greenberg.

ocellnuri posted a photo:

A collaboration between Bryan Tarnowski, Ben McKeown, Marshall Alderman, and Chris Owens.

An homage to Jill Greenberg.

Here’s a nice unintended benefit of having multiple devices wrapped in the same material. Both my iPhone and Macbook Pro have skins on them from www.bestskinsever.com. (So does my DS) Highly recommended skins, though you need a mind for detail when installing them. Especially when you’re installing sheets as large as the ones for the Macbook Pro’s lid. It gets a bit tricky, but well worth it!

I was extremely fortunate and surprised to get an <a title="Amazon Kindle" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FI73MA?ie=UTF8&tag=ocellblog-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000FI73MA"">Amazon Kindle as a graduation gift. Apparently after you’ve earned an undergraduate degree, people assume you can read!

I have also been a big fan of Instapaper for a while. Instapaper is a web service that lets you bookmark websites for reading later. What makes it unique, though, is that it will format the pages into text-only pages, perfect for mobile devices and clean reading. Saving pages is accomplished through a javascript bookmarklet that works in your desktop web browsers as well as mobile browsers that support javascript. To make things even better, there is now an Instapaper iPhone/Touch native application (free and pro versions [iTunes links]) that will cache unread webpages onto the device’s internal memory. I made great use of this feature while traveling in Boston’s subways over the summer. I’d often lose my cell signal, but I still had plenty of content to catch up on.

It dawned on me that Instapaper would be a perfect application for the Kindle. The Kindle’s screen is a complete pleasure to read on for extended periods of time, unlike the small iPhone screen. Also, the free EVDO data connection lets it take advantage of web services anywhere you can get a Verizon signal. I did a quick Google search to see what I could find about Instapaper on the Kindle and came across a great blog post on spontaneousderivation.com. If you leave the Kindle’s browser in standard mode, you can take advantage of Instapaper’s great mobile device interface, with simple text formatting and quick loading. However, if you set the Kindle browser into the advanced mode, you get an extremely nicely formatted Instapaper index page. Clicking on the “text” link in Instapaper for an article delivers a fast and clean copy of the web article. It really is a perfect match.

Even more exciting, the developer of Instapaper, Marco Arment, has plans to further optimize Instapaper for the Kindle once he can get his hands on one himself. I’m looking forward to it.

I hope this helps any Kindle owners wondering how to best read web content through the Kindle’s slow and limited web browser.

ocellnuri posted a photo:

Such a perfect combination.

www.instapaper.com

ocellnuri posted a photo:

It's great to have some quality family time.

Now you know where I get it from.

The past few days I’ve been getting some random hits on my design portfolio from Mobile Safari, the browser on the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. Unfortunately, the content of my portfolio is displayed through a flash slideshow, which doesn’t work at all in Mobile Safari, so visitors would just be getting a blank white page.

The last couple nights I threw together an iPhone/Touch optimized version of my portfolio. It will automatically load if you go to design.ocell.net on an iPhone or iPod Touch. There are some tweaks I’m going to keep making, but I’m pretty happy with it so far. At least I have a mobile copy of my portfolio with me at all times now and I don’t have to worry about syncing changes manually.

If you’re using Firefox or Safari, you can manually invoke the interface on your desktop by going to http://design.ocell.net/iphone/, and you’ll at least get a rough idea of how it works.

This is all thanks to SlideshowPro Director and iShowPro.

Via: ComputerWorld.com

I’ve been wondering when this was going to happen.

I’ve had a concept like this in my head for a while (why haven’t I sketched the ideas out before now?) and I believe I’ve seen a few concept designs along these lines, but Lenovo has finally brought a dual screen laptop to production. I’m not talking about a small Microsoft Sideshow enabled screen, but something that could actually hold something useful like a webpage, grid of thumbnails in Lightroom, or application pallets.

The Lenovo Thinkpad W700ds (any gamer will see the ds as an obvious acronym) takes a 17″ Thinkpad and adds a 10.6″ vertically oriented screen on to the side. I’m assuming the screen slides out from a pocket in the lid. It can be tilted up to 30º.

As an addition to the W700 model line, the W700ds boast other features that are rare on a laptop, like the Wacom tablet built into the palm rest. With built in color calibration hardware and a screen that Lenovo claims holds 72% of the AdobeRGB color gamut, the machine is aimed squarely at the professional photography crowd. The $3,600 starting price also says “pro,” while the 2 inch thickness and 11 pound weight scream “desktop replacement.” With quad cores and a workstation Nvidia Quadro graphics card, I bet it’s a dream to work on. I hope we see more laptop designs embrace the concept of useful secondary screens.

ocellnuri posted a photo:

The past few days I've been getting some random hits on my design portfolio from Mobile Safari, the browser on the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. Unfortunately, the content of my portfolio is displayed through a flash slideshow, which doesn't work at all in Mobile Safari, so visitors would just be getting a blank white page.

The last couple nights I threw together an iPhone/Touch optimized version of my portfolio. It will automatically load if you go to design.ocell.net on an iPhone or iPod Touch. There are some tweaks I'm going to keep making, but I'm pretty happy with it so far. At least I have a mobile copy of my portfolio with me at all times now and I don't have to worry about syncing changes manually.

If you're using Firefox or Safari, you can manually invoke the interface on your desktop by going to design.ocell.net/iphone/, and you'll at least get a rough idea of how it works.

This is all thanks to SlideshowPro Director and iShowPro.

If you know me, you may know how much I love www.mint.com, the financial tracking and organization site. It can automatically import your financial activity from a ton of banks, and does categorization, trending, budgeting, and spending comparisons with users in your area. The downfall, though, has been that Mint has lacked mobile device access. Some of the site could be access, but it was pretty heavy and formatted for a large screen. Also, features like trending are flash based, and wouldn’t work at all.

Mint has launched an iPhone/Touch App [iTunes Link] that fills this need, at least for Mobile Safari users. I still hope they launch a more generic mobile site for other device users, or at least native apps for Blackberry and Windows Mobile. As an iPhone user, though, I’m completely elated, as I now have a mobile glimpse at my financial situation.

The app is a bit limited right now, it’s focused purely on viewing data. I’d like to see the ability to edit the categories of transactions instead of just viewing what’s already set. I’d also LOVE to see the ability to add cash transactions from within the app, since that would let you track cash spending in addition to the check/debit/credit transactions that are already tracked. Overall though, the app is a great start, and the limited features it has right now keep the app simple, fast, and easy to use.

Check out the Mint App features page at mint.com

Via: Technabob

Mini has released a print ad in Germany that takes advantage of augmented reality technology to give you a virtual model of the new Mini convertable. When you go to the special Mini website you can launch an applet that ties into your webcam and looks for the print ad. Hold the ad up and you get a 3D model of the car. Unfortunately, the application is Windows/IE only right now, but if you’re on a Windows machine you can print out a PDF of the ad and try it out yourself.

Check out the Technabob post for more information and a video.

My friend Henry also pointed me to this article on artoolkit for the iPhone, which gives developers the ability to roll out this sort of interactive media on the handheld. It would be amazing if applied to print ads in the city, with 3D models and even video trailers for movies being overlayed. Nearby WiFi access points could be installed or leased to provide bandwidth (perhaps the AR application used could automatically connect to WiFi hotspots with certain names).

On December 17th (two days from when I’m writing this) I’ll be walking across the stage at North Carolina State University to recieve my undergraduate degree in Industrial Design. That’s sort of relevant to this post, but I also just like how the words look when I type it out.

While searching for the best way to get my career started I want to make sure that my portfolio website is going to communicate my work in an interesting but unobtrusive way. I’ve always felt that a good portfolio website should have very little that gets in the way of the actual work, but of course it still needs to be fun and easy to use. I’ve been using SlideshowPro for Flash along with Director to handle the back-end of uploading, resizing, organizing, and displaying my portfolio images and videos. The combination has been great.

I found a great example of how to use external elements in the flash document to load the gallery thumbnails into a filmstrip navigation bar. If you own SlideshowPro, you can find it on the downloads page. I spent some time with the action script and adapted it to fit my site. I think the result is a much cleaner and intuitive interface. I have a couple more bugs I’m trying to hunt down in the actionscript, and I am going to make the type more consistant, but I think it’s a decent start.

Links

http://www.slideshowpro.net http://design.ocell.net

ocellnuri posted a photo:

Microsoft has released its first full iPhone app, Seadragon [iTunes Link]. Seadragon is Microsoft Lab’s technology that lets you quickly pan and zoom a gigapixel image while streaming the content over your connection. Only the section and detail-level of the image you want to see is loaded on your device, making the technology a perfect application for a mobile device with limited bandwidth and memory. The application can load large panoramic and gigapixel images, as well as Photosynth photo libraries. In my brief trial of the app I couldn’t get the Photosynth library listing to load, but you can see a video of it in action at the Microsoft Labs Blog post.

My favorite image in the sample collection so far is “Running the Numbers” by photographer Chris Jordan. You see a classic pointalism painting, but as you zoom in you see that the image is built by hundreds of thousands of aluminum cans, a real great example of the power of Seadragon.

Seadragon is free in the iTunes App Store

Seadragon Goes Mobile: Microsoft Live Labs