Category: Technology

Typographic Synthesizer – So Good It’s Magic!

You know sometimes when you see something so amazing that you almost forget to breathe while you’re looking at it. Well I’m just about finished hyperventilating after the end of this video.

The guys at Meek.fm have created something that creates an incredible relationship between typography, sound and a control surface. You can tweak type using knobs, and the sound is generated by the form of the letters. It’s nuts. Totally nuts.

I also love the modesty of the video, the fact it ends with an almost slightly unsure: “OK, that’s it. Thanks”. If I was wearing a hat I’d take it off to these guys.

Facebook Add To Friends QR Code

This is bloody great.

Facebook app + QR code. Sounds like someone playing ‘cool shit mashup’. But here something’s been made that is much greater than the sum of its parts.

It’s really simple. You add the Facebook app. Click ‘make my tshirt’. And you’re pretty much done. A custom QR code t-shirt is generated that you can buy immediately.

(If you’re still not getting it, basically if someone takes a photo of the funny thing on the front of your t-shirt you’ll be added to their friends on Facebook).

Whether you’d actually buy or wear one, that’s not the point. It’s just one of those really simple ideas that makes me go: “Yeah, that’s cool, I’m a bit jealous”.

Add to friends Moo stickers – I think that’s what I want… In fact they shouldn’t be too hard to hack together – provided that the stickers are big enough and hi-res enough to capture the required detail for a QR code… Hmmmm

Via: The ever excellent Random Culture

NewsGlobe

NewsGlobe

Charticles one day, NewsGlobes the next. It’s all getting a bit ‘Day Today‘ round these parts.

NewsGlobe is a project that’s come out of the next.yahoo.net stables. There’s a description of how it came about here.

For last month’s Yahoo! Hack Day, I decided to show off some of the impressive capabilities of the latest Adobe Flash Player and ActionScript 3 by building a visually interesting new way to browse Yahoo! News top stories. In a surprisingly short amount of time, I was able to mash up two existing Yahoo! services, and then represent the information in a virtual environment I call the NewsGlobe.

I love the non-committal use of ‘surprisingly short amount of time’, in my head that means a few hours. I’ve got a hyperactive head sometimes.

But I really would love to know how quickly this was pulled together. Because although, as the author admits, it’s not perfect. It is a slick piece of interface design which I’m sure will be imitated widely. And once you’ve built the engine there’s lots you can do with it…

My mind’s drifted back to The Day Today and I can’t help thinking about building News Kidneys or 3D Currency Cats:

currency cat

Powerpoint Karaoke

All this Pecha Kucha stuff is starting to get a bit dreary.

The idea of PowerPoint Karaoke seems a lot more random and challenging.

Basic idea is: people stick real presentations ‘in a hat’, then presenters get allocated a random presentation and have to present it as best they can.

There’s a great description of how to do PowerPoint Karaoke at Heathervescent.

There doesn’t seem to be many of them on popular video sharing sites (yet). There’s a few in German, but here’s one in English from BarCamp LA. You’ll get the idea:

Who’s in?

Oh and if you want to ‘do PowerPoint Karaoke’ there’s a nifty presentation randomiser that works with Slideshare, you just enter a tag and it pulls in random presentations for maximum randomness…

The Best Online Music Toy Ever

This is the simplest and best thing I’ve ever seen for creating music fast. It’s massively usable. You can literally get into it by clicking a few keys – admittedly you’ll be making derivative euro-dance. But it’ll sound totally competent no matter how incompetent you secretly are. Go there and have a play, it’s blooming awesome: http://www.tony-b.org/. Really. Do. It’s great.

Even thought the music is really cheesy playing with this put a real smile on my face!

Via: Beatportal

Oh My, That’s Lovely


Magnetic Ink, Process video from flight404 on Vimeo.

Beautiful computer generated art, made by the supremely talented Flight 404 using Processing. Personally I think the whole thing is really helped by the use of non-computer music.

If you liked that, here’s another.


Solar from flight404 on Vimeo.

Tutortainment or Entertorials

Connected to the entertaining demos post the other day. I love the way that these Photoshop Tutorials manage to tell a story of marital breakdown and infidelity through a bunch of nerdy design-tip-screencasts.

I was laughing out loud at them last night. And now I’ve seen them on Photojojo too so I know it’s OK to confess my love for them in public.

They wouldn’t work if the balance of tutorial vs comedy wasn’t spot on. But it is. So that’s OK.

Warning: contains painful comedy and associated swearwords.

You suck at Photoshop – Episode 1

You suck at Photoshop – Episode 2

You suck at Photoshop – Episode 3

Originally via Lifehacker – it’s nice to see that productivity geeks have a sense of humour too ;-)

For the Twitter Haters

If I didn’t have Twitter I wouldn’t have had these nuggets delivered to me. Two of the most important things I’ve read in some time…

tweet from Hugh MacLeod

Russell on Time

You can’t say that Twitter’s useless now. This proves it.

I hope Russell and Hugh don’t mind me posting these, I figured that they’re out in the public Twittersphere (or whatever it’s called).

Mac Software Bundle

Mac Heist

If you’re a Mac-head it’d have been hard not to have noticed MacHeist over the last couple of weeks. Basically it’s a bunch of small software makers who’ve joined together to bundle up their software at a too-good-to-miss price point. You can get 14 different packages for the princely sum of $49 (for us UK’ers that’s a double-good deal at the moment). But it’s only available for the next couple of days – don’t miss out.

Plus they’re giving away 25% of the proceeds to charities you can choose which one(s) you support.

It’s worth it just for Snapz Pro and Appzapper alone. I’m just trying out some of the others and think that 1password could be a total blinder, and Pixelmator looks like a great photo editing package for those of us that can’t justify spending lots on Photoshop. Plus there’s some games in there and some other handy apps I’ve not dug into yet.

I like MacHeist both as a bundle of software. And as a promotional mechanic too. Not sure how the economics work for the individual publishers, but it’s certainly a great way of getting their stuff out there and creating a wide and deep online footprint for their products.