In Cell Studio I've been working on a nifty little app for your mobile device that helps you take panoramic pictures. This functionality has long been around (and often underused) on digital cameras but not available for the camera on your phone. In the app, images captured appear on the left hand side of the view finder, while the live preview show up on the right. As long as users go from left to right, and line up the images, the end results are generally pretty good. The images are uploaded to the server where they are put together based on their order of arrival (hence, the assumption of left to right). The next step will be to tie this to Flickr and to do more stitching type functionality on the server before the file is posted. It would also be beneficial to add optional features like direction and image size. The app was written in JavaME. If anyone is interested in trying it out feel free to contact me.

Labels: mobile

Whoa! What is that weird eyeball thing? That strange eyeball is a Chumby widget. A what, you're probably asking? A Chumby is a piece of soft technology that brings us a little closer to some of the services that the web has to offer. The little guy has a touch screen, speakers, a wifi connection, it can respond to physical interaction (such as squeezing the corner) and most importantly it has an open and flexible interface that anyone can write widgets for. Widgets are written in Flash and deployed through the Chumby server. If you watch, the image to the left it will change and another widget will take its place. The widgets can be grouped into channels which are also configurable through the Chumby web interface. I haven't gotten my hands on one yet but I've been looking forward to building and testing my own widgets. I'll be putting together a few ideas of my own over the next few days so check back soon to see what I come up with! In the mean time, if you have ideas for what you'd like to see on a Chumby send them in!

Labels: chumby ITP Flash physical_computing

Over the weekend I put together a video made from some of the clips and photographs taken on our recent trip to Austria. I only got through the first few days of our trip! It was getting pretty long and the song I chose was over so I decided to stop right there. I'm not a 'motion guy' so all you professional film makers, Academy Award winners, and effects people who might be reading this (you know who you are) cut me some slack. Alright? I had fun making it. But not as much fun as I had while we were there. So cheesy but so true... Enjoy!

Labels: vienna

I was pleasantly greeted this morning by by the reassuring tone that a text message had been received on my phone. Who in their right mind is texting before 8:00am? Could it Bukhin coding till the sun has come up? A long lost relative that has found their way to New York? No none of that, it was even better. Yahoo! had so generously informed me that the
Yahoo! Go 2.0 Beta Beta is now available for download. I downloaded, ran the installer and I'm quite pleased with the service so far. Search, Maps, Email, Flickr, News, Sports, Finance, Entertainment, and Weather all in one place, my pocket.

The free service, like Yahoo!'s web based services is ad supported and you know what? I don't mind. Most people I describe this too cringe a bit, but no one minds this with search, right? When we look at the ad model being expanded off the web to places like the airline industry (Ryan Air), ad supported services are something that we'll need to live with if we intend to continue with the proliferation of consumer culture. The Flickr ads at the top of the Finance section did throw me off a bit before I understood that they were ads on the top and not section titles, but if it were a Coke ad there would be no confusion.

I do like being able to access all of these services in one place. I can view Flickr steams to see who's of my friends are posting new photographs, get news, weather, and maps all in one place. This is an enormous improvement over how I was looking at all these services previously with Yahoo! or Google's mobile web (WAP) sites.

I did find a few bugs, for example I wasn't able to upload photos to Flickr because the application could not access my photo library locally (even thought I agree to when it asked repeatedly). For Flickr uploading, I like the the way ZoneTag uploads directly when you take the picture as opposed to uploading it later through the Go app. However, I'm sure at times it would be a nice feature to have.

Overall, I like Yahoo! Go 2.0. The download was fast, the services work and it migrated all of my Yahoo! account information effortlessly and accurately. If you have supported mobile device and a data plan I'd suggest giving it a try.

You missed it. I almost did too. Today was the last day of the Ron Mueck exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. Tricia and I managed to sneak in a visit this afternoon and we're glad we did. The exhibition wasn't extraordinarily thought provoking in terms of making you think about feminism, or political reform, or in redefining a new socio-political context for post modern existence. Rather, visitors of the exhibition are generally captivated as Mueck's larger and smaller than life size figures entertain you you simply by staying still.

One specific element of Mueck's work that I did find particularly interesting is that the representation of the figures are so real that they seem foreign and strange. Possibly its their scale, or, maybe its their gaze but, I couldn't help wondering: Have we become so used to looking at an idealized form of ourselves that when we see what we're really like we don't recognize what we really are?

Although there was no photography permitted in the exhibition, The Brooklyn Brooklyn Museum has a good Flickr set of the set up. Also, the Kehinde Wiley painting mimicking Napoleon has got to be one of my favorite paintings ever (not available for viewing on his web site).

Labels: Brooklyn Museum, Ron Mueck