By Art We Must Attain
Taken from The Combustion Chamber
Taken from The Combustion Chamber
Taken from The Combustion Chamber
Microsoft can’t seem to make much of a dent in the mobile market (more like a ding, not to be confused with a Bing):
Microsoft has reportedly developed an Android application with the sole purpose of stealing users away from Google. According to a report from CITE World, the company will be releasing the “Switch to Windows Phone” application on Android to help users change platforms. The application is able to “find identical or replacement applications” for Windows Phone 8 to replace a user’s old Android apps, thus making the transition far more bearable.
How awesomely ironic would it be if Microsoft started a ‘switch’ ad campaign like PC-underdog Apple did in the 2000’s?
I can dream, can’t I?
I’m not sure what’s inside Apple’s insanely great data centers, but apparently not my synced Safari tabs (some of ’em), nor sequential transcripts of my Messages.
Yes, it still seems Google is getting better at design faster than Apple is getting better at web services.
via Kickstarter
So I’ve done it again. I’ve launched another Kickstarter project.
It’s called, Grown In the Garden (State). It features 54 actors, musicians and TV personalities from my home state of New Jersey.
I’m producing a poster, a deck of cards and a couple t-shirts.
(the poster is still in-progress)
Haydn Shaughnessy at Forbes is worried about Samsung’s success (via BGR):
Samsung Electronics continues its astonishing launch program by introducing the Galaxy Note 8.0 into the US, tomorrow, April 11th, having quietly launched in the UK last week. But is the Korean company stretching itself too far, too fast?
This is why you have to take tech press with a grain of salt. Actually, with a salt lick.
Shaughnessy sees Samsung’s success as a bad thing. And if they were doing poorly and not exceeding estimates, that would be bad too.
And Eva Mendes is too hot.
You can’t win with these guys. Anything for a headline.
NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has some smack talk about the iPad:
Huang went on to explain that the iPad is capable of games that are “vintage 1999,” while the Kepler Mobile chipset can handle high-dynamic-range lighting and active shadows, features not found in today’s mobile games.
He’s CEO of a graphics processor company who’s chips are not in the iPad, so I understand why he’s saying what he’s saying.
I just hope he understands what makes the iPad the most successful tablet in the world. It’s not the graphics processor (It’s worth noting the CPU in the 4th generation iPad is no slouch).
A game’s first priority is to be fun. Bleeding edge graphics are nice to have, not a requirement—particularly on tablets. In fact, there’s a whole sub-genre of 8-bit games that’s hugely popular on smartphones and tablets. Three I have on my iPad 2 are Canabalt, Ridiculous Fishing and The Incident.
So brain games might be bullshit:
The answer, however, now appears to be a pretty firm no—at least, not through brain training. A pair of scientists in Europe recently gathered all of the best research—twenty-three investigations of memory training by teams around the world—and employed a standard statistical technique (called meta-analysis) to settle this controversial issue. The conclusion: the games may yield improvements in the narrow task being trained, but this does not transfer to broader skills like the ability to read or do arithmetic, or to other measures of intelligence. Playing the games makes you better at the games, in other words, but not at anything anyone might care about in real life.
via Co.Design