As you can tell from my Flickr feed I've been eating well and hanging out with puppies. Also of note, the baskets to the left were brought back from South Africa as gifts from our neighbors who's cat we were watching. They were purchased at a market outside Cape Town.

I was extremely excited by these because I immediately recognized them as being made from phone wire. You see, during our discussion in Mobile Applications Design class last semester a presentation was given on mobile phone use in developing nations. What was additionally discussed is how in some place traditional phone lines have been taken down because their raw materials can be used to create more usefully things like baskets! Whether these Zulu phone wire baskets were created form 'recycled' materials or a Zulu with an ax is probably somethings I can only speculate on. Either way, I love them!

Labels: mobile

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