When I first heard about Chrome OS, Google’s browser-oriented operating system, I dismissed the idea. I thought it was stupid to build your computer architecture around Internet browsing. But my opinion is slowly changing. We are in a transitional period.
All our favorite desktop applications have been creeping into the browser:
www.hobnox.com – A Reason-like modular (and gorgeous) synth workstation www.aviary.com – A suite of creative tools: photo editor, vector editor, texture creator, sound editor www.quakelive.com – Fast FPS gaming in browser. By John Carmack himself www.google.com/docs – And of course, your basic office productivity apps
The direction all this is heading is plain as day. These sites prove that the domain of the browser is not limited to the old way; Hotmail and Mapquest. The browser, as inefficient as it may be, can run our fat apps too. I’m not saying the desktop application will go away. Maybe I will say that in another year.
It began to sink in last week when I was working on a Flash app using an AS3 library for sound synthesis; true realtime DSP in Flash. Our high level languages are getting rich and fast enough to support this kind of thing. JavaScript or some other browser-embedded language is next.
The world has been waiting for something to replace Flash and Java. The problems with Java are a topic for another day. The browser itself needs to be that platform. And that’s why I am beginning to like the idea of Chrome OS. Microsoft trotted out Silverlight and I don’t know enough about it to say one thing or another. Maybe I’m too political. I’d love Silverlight if it was Google’s product, that’s for sure.
Microsoft’s ubiquity is coming to an end. It’s sad, because as a developer, all I want is one platform to develop for. The name of that platform is secondary. The reason I always used Windows is because it had the most application support. However, the web browser provides another path to ubiquity. The time has come to strip back the layers: running DSP in a Flash plugin within Firefox within Windows XP? How about running DSP in a standards-based, platform independent browser language that gets compiled on the fly to machine code on a light Linux kernel? That’s the promise of Chrome OS.
I’m obsessed with getting externalized sounds out of headphones. It turns out this is darn near impossible. Using head-related transfer functions to filter the sound and emulate a “transaural” (loudspeaker) source is only the tip of the iceberg… Read more at binaural audio remixing.
I spent the afternoon yesterday trying to reproduce the soundfield created by the speakers in my room over my headphones. The most direct way to do this, I figured, was to use my open-air headphones to pick up the sound as if they were a pair of (not very sensitive) microphones. I plugged my headphones into the microphone jack, put them on as if I was listening (except I flipped the earcups so that the transducers were facing out), and recorded as I played really really loud music out of my speakers. I cleaned up the audio and switched my headphones from the microphone jack to the headphone jack and played it back. The result was at least as good as binaural room impulse response convolution, but still didn’t convince me that the sound source was outside of my head.
I plan to transition from MySQL to PostgreSQL on the Stractor project very soon. PostgreSQL is so difficult to pronounce that I’ve ignored it until now, but the capabilities of the PostGIS extension are too good to pass up.
The primary benefit of the PostGIS extension is that the geographic coordinate – a point on the globe – is a native data type. This means that queries based on the geometry of a sphere are readily supported, and you don’t have to worry about stitching the boundary between 1° and 359° longitude, since PostGIS knows they are adjacent.
High dollar affiliate
marketing promotions – banks, loans, credit cards, mortgages
rescuetime.com
time tracking
80k-
Premium accounts $9/month
for long-term (1 year+) data view and trend analytics
loopt.com
social/location sharing
120k
$13 million investment.
Location based advertising, virtual coupons i.e. Jack-in-the-Box
restaurants
Premium accounts $3/month for enhanced iPhone push service
foursquare.com
social/location gaming
400k+ rising
$1 million investment.
Just launched. Location based advertising
gowalla.com
social/location sharing
150k+ rising
Location based advertising
brightkite.com
social/location sharing
200k-
Looks like a 37 signals
site. Awesome ad offerings: In-App, Mobile Web, SMS, Web, Site
Takeover, In-Map, Sponsorship. Targeting: Location, Behavioral, Time of
Day, Activity, Demographics, Language, Content, Weather. Great example
here.
mapmyfitness.com
fitness/mapping
600k- seasonal
Sleazy looking site.
Saturated w/banner ads. Tiered premium accounts, $30-$60-$100/year.
Sent them a ranting comment a while back and received a thoughtful
response, though.
In order to use the 120 fps Playstation Eye camera with your IR multitouch table, you have to remove the infrared blocking filter built into the camera and add your own visible light blocking filter.
This can be accomplished in a few short steps detailed here at the nuigroup forums, and a floppy disk material can be used as your visible light filter. Cool!
Here’s the hacked camera in action.
No visible light, and the IR lights from the remote are white hot. Cool!
I’m working on a multitouch implementation of virtual air hockey in Processing using the awesome JBox2d library. This involves a few hacks and workarounds that might be useful to share with others.
Developing a business plan for Stractor. I would rather focus on organizing the technical challenges but I’m putting that aside for now.
One problem I have with the site is the domain name. I originally decided on the name Stractor due in no small part to the availability of the domain name “stractor.com.” Just days after I initially found it available on nsi.com, it was registered to Oversee Domains. That was very frustrating. I had already branded a bunch of things Stractor so I registered stractor.info as a stop measure. I immediately emailed Oversee Domains about my claim on the name Stractor. They responded with a request for trademark documents.
I would like to trademark the Stractor name but I am uncertain of whether this would secure the name from Oversee Domains even if I did. Does it matter that I’m registering the name after they bought the domain?
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