Tuesday, October 04, 2011
Future SpaceX rockets will set you down gently after your long commute (video)
Elon Musk's space ferries will one day require nothing so prosaic as parachutes to soften their landings. Instead, SpaceX's latest 'Dragon' design will rely totally on rocket boosters for the final leg of its descent. In fact, take that notion and triple it: it's intended that each of the Dragon's three sub-sections will be able to return to earth separately under boost power, making the system 100 percent reusable. Check out the slick animation after the break and then see this for a dose of reality.
Children's Portrait Photography with Tamara Lackey: Introduction
Celebrated children's photographer Tamara Lackey leads a special 3-day worldwide workshop on the magic, art, and business of child portrait photography.
Take a live, front-row seat with Tamara as she works with a wide range of kids. You'll watch as she works to put them at ease, gets them laughing, and coaxes out their natural personality for fun poses and great family portraits.
More importantly, you'll be part of an ongoing weekend conversation with fellow photographers around the world about how to grow your own successful portrait photography business, while balancing personal and professional lives.
This episode is part one of our two part interview with photographer and director Chase Jarvis.
This episode is part one of our two part interview with photographer and director Chase Jarvis. Tamara met with him in his sleek Seattle studio. In the episode, Chase shares his journey to becoming a 10 year “overnight” success, which included more no’s early on than you might think, and just how much inspiration for his visionary work comes from outside of photography.
At a recent event at the Children's Museum of the East End in the Hamptons, Tamara sat down with author and television host Katie Brown, of The Katie Brown Workshop on PBS and Next Door with Katie Brown on Lifetime to discusses success, balancing motherhood and working with photographers.
Photoshop Touch apps and SDK extend desktop functionality to iPad and other tablets
Any discussion about Adobe and the iPad seems to always devolve into a Flash vs. HTML5 debate. For today at least, Adobe's hoping to temporarily refocus the conversation on a trio of new tools that extend desktop Photoshop functionality to the iPad via native iOS apps. First up is Adobe Eazel, an iPad drawing app that lets you create a five-fingered painting on the iPad before transferring it back over WiFi to the Photoshop application running on your Mac or PC. Adobe Nav turns the iPad into a Photoshop companion device by extending live controls and menu bars from the Photoshop workspace to the iPad's display. Finally, there's Adobe Color Lava which turns the iPad into a hi-tech color mixing palette. Of course, these are just the first in what Adobe hopes to be a full range of Photoshop extensions hitting app stores just as soon as devs get their talents around Adobe's Photoshop Touch programming tools (consisting of a Photoshop scripting engine and enhanced SDK) for Android, BlackBerry, and iOS devices (available for Mac and Windows platforms today). Expect to see the Eazel, Color Lava, and Nav Photoshop Touch apps arrive next month -- alongside the 5.5 update to Adobe's Creative Suite (and free Photoshop update for CS owners) expected on May 3rd -- with prices ranging from $1.99 to $4.99. Until then, why not feast your eyes on a video preview posted after the break?
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Lego Tries Augmented Reality With “Life Of George” Game
The game marks Lego’s further attempts at capitalizing on its strong lead in children’s toys into new markets. The impetus for Life Of George is based on the success of the Lego series of video games (Lego Harry Potter, Lego Indiana Jones, Lego My Dinner With Andre) as well as its quiet but apparently popular Lego Universe, a brick-based MMO. By adding a casual game like Life of George, with it’s candy-coated graphics and clever gameplay, you grab the kids who may not want to bring their entire Lego collection to Grandma’s but still want to play with their blocks. As a parent, I find that the game is also helpful in teaching counting and hand-eye coordination as you need to find blocks as quickly as possible and then smoosh them together.
Naysayers will note that George does not offer much in the way of imaginative play and I’d agree. But, as we all know, making the thing on the Lego box is often far more exciting than making another “car” using the big green board and a bunch of bricks. There’s a reason behemoths like the 1200-piece Millennium Falcon exists: people love to build things with Lego, but they don’t always want to be structural engineers.
To be clear, Life Of George is a casual game in the vein of Cut The Rope or Angry Birds. You play it for a while, maybe forget about it, maybe dump all of the pieces into the main Lego box down the line. However, at $29 plus a free iOS download (a price I suspect will go down over time) it’s a fun way to interact with your Lego using electronics.
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Video: Jeff Bezos Demos The Kindle Fire
The highlight of today’s Amazon event was when CEO Jeff Bezos finally announced the Kindle Fire about midway through. We captured it on video, and you can see for yourself how Bezos introduced the device.
He demos the unique interface, which highlights the media you’ve interacted with most recently. There is also Whispersync for movies, which lets you pick up watching a movie where you left off when you move between devices. And he even plays Fruit Ninja to show off the dual-core processor’s speed.
You can also watch our hands-on videos for both the Kindle Fire and Kindle Touch to see the devices in action some more (but the one above is the only one with Bezos). And here is more coverage of the Kindle Fire and the rest of the Kindle family.
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