Developages - Development and Technology Blog

Filed under: Cellphones

Mmm, touchscreens. Expansive, gorgeous touchscreens. That pretty much sums up our initial impressions after taking one hard look at James Piatt’s Plica concept. As you can tell, this foldable cellie opens up to reveal a pair of touchscreens just begging to be used for web browsing, texting and photo viewing. There’s also a mini-USB port and a headphone jack, though we’d certainly be interested to see how he plans on slipping a battery in there that lasts more than a hour or two. Can we get a major handset manufacturer to look in this direction — pretty please?

[Via gadgetell]

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Robots

Remember that one time when you went fishing with your dad, and you got a bite and lugged the fish onto the dock, only to watch it thrash around on the dock for a little bit like the most pitiful thing alive, so then you felt bad and threw it back, but even then you still knew he would hate you forever for putting him through that? Yeah, well Flapper is that in robot form. It’s Crab Fu’s latest RC robot project, featuring that trademark uncanny valley look and motion of Crab Fu, in a convenient fish form factor. Video is after the break.

Continue reading Crab Fu’s Flapper fish bot creeps us the hell out

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Original post by Paul Miller

Filed under: Robots

Traditional fish should definitely start keeping their guard up, as we’ve seen a noticeable influx of robotic alternatives flapping around here recently. Joining the school today is the Robofish, a robotic swimming creature developed at the University of Washington. Reportedly, a trio of the units have been built, and during a recent workshop, the bots were able to communicate with one another and successfully swim in either one direction or in different directions. Eventually, researchers hope that these mechanical animals could explore underwater caves, track moving targets or plunge beneath ice sheets, but there’s still work to be done before the creature’s coordination ability is up to the challenge. Just keep swimming, just keep swimming…

[Via Slashdot]

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Wait, you did name your guppy Dory, right? Whatever your household fish is named, you can certainly give it a fresh purpose in life with the RhythmFish — if it were more than a mere concept, of course. The setup surrounds your fish with webcams and monitors its movements via sensors in order to translate all of that data and put forth a visual interpretation. In all honestly, it’s probably just some sort of randomizer hooked up to a Windows 95 screen saver, but a boy can dream, can’t he?

[Via OhGizmo]

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

The Professor is a new micro-feature wherein we roundup a handful of interesting and informative gadget-related science stories from the week and present them to you, the reader, in an easily digestible liquid form.

Continue reading The Professor: Victorian heat sinks, new spacecraft, alien-language translators

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Original post by Joshua Topolsky

So I get Six Apart’s Movable Type newsletter which talks about how they want the Movable Type community to help make Movable Type faster. After all, Movable Type is open source now, so what better opportunity than to ask the community for help making Movable Type faster, right? Interested, I decide to click through and lo & behold their Movabletype.org website is down. Oh, the irony! No doubt Wordpress fans will seize upon this shortly to add to the Movable Type vs. Wordpress war.

Below is a snippet from the newsletter, which is interesting for MT fans, including myself. I’m just hoping the outage doesn’t last long since I’d like to grab a copy of the code to try out.

MT: Faster and More Fiery!

Okay, so we’re not setting Movable Type on fire. But the important news is, the Movable Type team is on fire, working to soup up your site with a bunch of new powers from performance enhancements to some exclusive new location-based features. Here’s a peek at what’s on tap, as well as a chance to show your support for MT.

FASTER!

We’re always on the lookout for ways to make the Movable Type platform better. And first among those improvements is pure performance. From publishing pages to leaving comments to managing your blog, there’s no part of working with MT that wouldn’t be better if it were a little more zippy.

So we’ve got the entire MT team — all over the world — focused 100% on making MT faster. And, even if you’re not a coder, you can help out in the effort — we’ve made an experimental version of MT that’s got a performance monitoring system, the equivalent of hooking an athlete up to a bunch of medical sensors. The anonymous data that this custom version of Movable Type collects can be sent back to the team, so they can see exactly where improvements need to be made.

Want to find out how to get the code, how to share your data with the team, and what else we’re doing about making MT zippy? Check out our post on the Movable Type Community blog.

A Movable Type Exclusive: Yahoo! Fire Eagle

From his first days working on Movable Type 1.0, our co-founder and CTO Ben Trott has always been interested in connecting the platform to cool web services, especially ones having to do with location. (Or, as geeks call it, geodata.)

So naturally, when our friends at Yahoo! launched their new service called Fire Eagle, which is all about connecting together applications that can use or provide location data, we knew exactly what Ben would be hacking on. As a result, Movable Type is the first and only blogging platform in the world to have an advanced plugin for connecting your blog to this exciting new service, provided directly from the person who first coded on the platform itself.

Best of all, this innovative new capability connects to the last exciting new feature we released for the platform, Movable Type’s Action Streams. Action Streams collect all of your activities from the different web services you use around the web, and let you publish them easily on your site under your full control. And now every time your Fire Eagle location changes, you can share it with whomever you choose using the power of Action Streams.

To find out more about the Fire Eagle plugin for Movable Type, you can read about it from Ben Trott himself, get started by grabbing the free plugin for your Movable Type install, and make it even more powerful by combining it with the free Action Streams plugin. We can’t wait to see what the creative minds in the Movable Type community do with all of these new capabilities.

Related Entries

Original post by nafiz

Filed under: Displays

Sometimes one display isn’t enough. Sometimes you need two. Sometimes you need eight. When you need eight, you’ll probably want to contact the folks over at Humanscale — an ironically named company that creates mounts that are decidedly inhuman. Take the Paramount Parabolic Multi-Monitor Display, for instance: a rack for your bank of eight monitors that’s a guaranteed must-have for your elaborate array of “stalking” screens in the basement of your creepy estate. We’re sure there are uses for this beyond tracking the every movement of your house-guests, but we don’t want to know what they are.

[Via Crave]

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Original post by Joshua Topolsky

Filed under: Robots, Wearables

It’s still awaiting formal clinical trials, but Dean Kamen’s so-called “Luke” artificial arm has already gone through its share of tests, which we can now thankfully catch a glimpse of courtesy of a new video from the folks at IEEE Spectrum Online. That same video also helpfully provides a few more details on the arm, including word that it can be controlled through a variety of means including foot pedals, nerves or muscles, and that it packs force feedback to give the wearer an indication of grip strength, among other suitably sci-fi-like things. Of course, none of this exactly does the arm justice, so be sure to check out the video at the read link below to see it in action for yourself.

[Thanks, Sarah]

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Original post by Donald Melanson

Filed under: Robots

As if robots didn’t already have enough of our jobs, a group of Dutch inventors have now taken the wraps off their new car-fueling robot, which they hope will one day be filling up your tank at a gas station near your. Coming in at the relatively bargain price of €75,000 (or $111,100), the bot can apparently identify cars as they pull up, and reference them against a database to determine the type of fuel cap and the fuel type to use, which should avoid any mishaps. Somewhat interestingly, the inventors admit that the technology isn’t an entirely new idea, and they give credit for the inspiration to the robots used for milking cows, saying that “if a robot can do that then why can’t it fill a car tank.” While it’s apparently not a done deal just yet, the team say they hope to roll out the robot to a “handful” of Dutch gas stations by the end of the year.

[Photo courtesy of Reuters/Michael Kooren]

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Original post by Donald Melanson

Filed under: Cellphones

Plenty of waterproof phones and other small weatherproof devices have made it off the assembly lines and into our clumsy clutches, but P2i, a small spinoff company using tech originated within the Defence Science and Technology Lab in England, could be bringing waterproof gadgets to the masses. The Ion-Mask is a special invisible coating that is chemically bonded to the device and repels water. It should allow waterproofing to make it into devices that are too small for the seals that are usually used to do the trick. Devices can have joins and gaps coated for a general level of water repellence, or have individual components treated for even more protection. The tech was originally designed to repel toxic vapors and liquids from soldier uniforms, and could also be making its way into athletic shoes. Three leading phone makers are apparently in discussions over using the tech in upcoming phones.

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Original post by Paul Miller