Wednesday, January 15, 2003

Will we soon use curved screens with our PCs?. Before working at Microsoft Research Labs, Gary Starkweather invented the laser printer at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center and won an Academy Award for his work on film scanning. Now he's developing a new computer display. Kristi Heim has the story. Starkweather has found that using a semicircular monitor three times as wide as the standard one can improve people's productivity, allowing them to take advantage of their peripheral vision and to spend less time opening and closing different windows. Ordinary computer users have displays that cover less than 10 percent of their physical work space. Meanwhile, they have to sort through an ever-increasing deluge of electronic information. Starkweather's new prototype screen is 12 inches high, 44 inches wide and curved 90 degrees. He uses digital light projectors and telescope mirrors to remove the distortion caused by the curved screen. The screen is five times as bright as a standard cathode ray tube or liquid crystal display monitor, helping to reduce eye fatigue. What about price and availability? For now, Starkweather's large screen display is still in the prototype stage. A few hardware makers have expressed interest in Starkweather's screen, but it's too early to discuss specifics, he said. The model cost about $25,000 to build, and replacing just one of its light bulbs costs about $400. This is still much more expensive than a couple of traditional monitors, so Gary Starkweather is busy working with cheaper technologies. To make such larger displays economical for the mass market. Starkweather thinks the answer lies in micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) technology -- tiny mechanical parts fabricated from silicon that perform functions like sensing motion or deflecting light. Inexpensive silicon chips incorporating MEMS technology, combined with a miniature light source, create a new kind of display module. The module consists of mirrors and shutters on silicon with tiny lenses twice the diameter of a hair. The prototype may look -- or not -- like the illustration shown on page 18 of the PDF version of a presentation Starkweather gave on June 18, 2002, "Increasing Screen Size, Valuing Productivity." Source: Kristi Heim, San Jose Mercury News, January 11, 2003 [Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends] 7:44:37 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

The Topic Exchange. New and improved. Thought I'd mention something new I've been hacking on for the last few evenings. It's not all done yet, but people are e-mailing me about it so here's a bit of an introduction:     The Internet Topic Exchange It's the first (as far as I know) real-life implementation of Ridiculously Easy Group Forming. Basically, it lets you create sites like KMPings just by filling out a form. Once you've created one, you can send TrackBack pings to it, and see them like so. There's also RSS for the aggregator junkies. With any luck Matt Mower will be supporting it with his LiveTopics tool, so it'll be trivial to use from Radio as well. Any suggestions / feature requests? Comment [Second p0st] Indeed I will be.  I hacked in the basic support for the configuration of this feature last night (since I was working on preferences code anyway).  Adding the ping code as another publishing activity should be trivial. What Phil has done is to implement a very simple, elegant, solution along the path of the BlogPlex idea I've been working towards.  With the Topic Exchange, it will be simple for users to cluster around topics simply by using them. What might be interesting is to combine this with the idea of synonyms (from XFML) so that even when people don't use exactly the same topic name, if they are talking about the same thing, they can still cluster with everyone else!   [Curiouser and curiouser!] 7:43:20 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Danger announces its moblog - Hiplog. Michael from Danger says that they have been moblogging internally since the launch and I think that some of the code from HipTop Nation came from Michael. Michael, is this the same code you are running on Hiplog? Anyway, congratulations. This is great. Bridging the gap between hardware companies and the Net... Smartmobs January 12, 2003 Danger, Inc. is finally catching up with its fan base, launching Hiplog for users of the Danger Hiptop to moblog — months after HipTop Nation was launched by Danger HipTop enthusiasts. (Thanks, Fabio!) Got a hiptop? Then spit it out! Hiplog is blogging by hiptop. Send email from your hiptop to hiplog@hiplog.com. The subject of your message becomes the title of your hiplog entry. The text of your message become the text of the entry. Want to make your hiplog a photojournal? Take snapshots with your hiptop and send them to hiplog. It's as easy as sending email. Posted by Howard at 10:54 AM [Joi Ito's Web] 7:42:22 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Cool DHTML HelpTips. Want some good ToolTips, check out the Help Tool Tip from WebFX [demo]. There's all kinds of good stuff on this site, including this very slick sortable table demo [how it works]. [Raible Designs :: We Build Web Apps] 7:40:41 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Would You Like Some RSS with that Site?. Audrey "A web-based RSS feed aggregator." [News Is Free: Recent Additions] I don't see an actual demo yet, so I eagerly await its completion to see if it will help me demonstrate "the power of RSS news aggregation." (Hint: say the phrase in quotes in your best "power of cheese" voice.) Will also sent me a link to something that looks somewhat similar that I think is called Credence. He must be experimenting with news aggregation today because he IMs, "just started playing w/ newzcrawler this morning. it has an rss autodiscovery doohickey integrated w/ ie, so when you hit a site that has a feed, it offers to subscribe for you." Too - pause - damn - pause - cool! Hey, Userland - can Radio do this? [The Shifted Librarian] 7:26:47 PM    trackback []     Articulate []