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World: r3wp

[Tech News] Interesting technology

Henrik
19-May-2010
[4985x2]
Maxim, maybe it depends on the size of your hand and possibly a thicker 
iPhone, but I can browse photos, make calendar appointments, browse 
webpages, select music and type with one hand easily on the iPod. 
No gestures needed. I'd think I have average size hands.
Pinching is harder, though.
AdrianS
19-May-2010
[4987]
yeah, or more than one point touching
Maxim
19-May-2010
[4988]
I have rather long fingers... I'm not saying I can't ... just that 
its awkwards to use one handed.   naturally, I'll always end up using 
it with the phone in my left hand and my right hand touching the 
surface.
Henrik
19-May-2010
[4989]
I was wrong about pinching. It's actually quite easy if you practice. 
Just trying it now.
AdrianS
19-May-2010
[4990x2]
the other thing that it seems you're not seeing Henrik is that this 
would be particularly useful for handling actions across multiple 
apps where there is no simple cross app touch only interface defined
you can pinch one handed an iPod/iPhone? - gotta see that
Maxim
19-May-2010
[4992]
thumbs don't have near the same mobility and speed as the other fingers, 
unless you only use rotation of the first knuckle. 


the momet you have to flex the thumb, it becomes slow.   which is 
why we'll naturall hold the phone laterally and browse using thumbs 
sideways... but doing so vertically isn't nearly as ergonomic.
Henrik
19-May-2010
[4993]
AdrianS, and I think you're underestimating what it takes to learn 
and do these things in practice.
Maxim
19-May-2010
[4994x3]
pinching one handed isn't hard... just not very ergonomic.
(even with large hands)
usually the thumb will stay put and only the index will move around, 
for example.
AdrianS
19-May-2010
[4997]
pinching while holding (not resting) the phone in one hand?
Maxim
19-May-2010
[4998]
yes.
AdrianS
19-May-2010
[4999]
not resting on a table, I meant
Maxim
19-May-2010
[5000]
yep.
Henrik
19-May-2010
[5001]
Maxim, yes, when not moving the thumb it's easier.
AdrianS
19-May-2010
[5002]
talking about lousy UI
Henrik
19-May-2010
[5003]
Adrian, have you ever used an iPhone?
Maxim
19-May-2010
[5004]
its not about the UI, its about how the fingers work.... people implementing 
gestures often don't even look at their hands to realize how each 
finger has its own specific optimized movements.
AdrianS
19-May-2010
[5005]
use an iPod
Henrik
19-May-2010
[5006]
the touch UI is quite fantastic. maybe that's why I fail to see how 
gestures will improve things.
AdrianS
19-May-2010
[5007x3]
what this tech offers is complementary to touch
just as this has only certain practical applications, so does touch
use the most appropriate UI for any context
Henrik
19-May-2010
[5010]
right. the guy in the video chose really poor applications for gyro-based 
UI control.
AdrianS
19-May-2010
[5011x3]
for example, voice could be used to augment the motion sensing
I agree, some of the things shown were not very practical
but for myself, I see some real cool possibilities
Henrik
19-May-2010
[5014]
voice for me could be useful as a replacement for typing, but not 
much else. you again have to remember a set of commands to manipulate 
a user interface. the intelligence here is still not Star Trek level, 
and I don't think it can be useful for more than dictation generally, 
before we get to that level.
AdrianS
19-May-2010
[5015x3]
I would think that you could do some pretty accurate distance measurements 
using a combination motion tracking and camera
one or two word voice commands (i.e. a limited grammar) is not hard 
to do and would just add to the kind of gesture filtering that can 
be done
what I meant by distance measurement is to calculate how far away 
something is
Maxim
19-May-2010
[5018]
the iphone has usefull voice driven interface.  play "song tile" 
  call "contact name"  etc.
Henrik
19-May-2010
[5019]
maxim, yeah, it doesn't work very well for me.
Maxim
19-May-2010
[5020]
you do have to speak "computer" well   ;-)
Pekr
19-May-2010
[5021x2]
http://www.osnews.com/story/23322/BREAKING_Google_Opens_VP8_Codec_Enables_it_on_YouTube
bye bye, H.264. This is how patent parazites as MPEG-LA loose their 
future oportunities ...
Maxim
19-May-2010
[5023]
oh don't count this as done... H.264 is a better codec, and MPEG-LA 
will surely try to go to court with some patent infringement.


but hey, we've got google fighting it (which has some cash), so court 
case could be lost by MPEG-LA.
Henrik
19-May-2010
[5024]
if they don't, they at least deserve a kick in the groin.
Ladislav
19-May-2010
[5025]
H.264 is a better codec
 - which criteria did you use to find this out?
Maxim
19-May-2010
[5026]
its the latest codec to be standardized, and its the basis for all 
high-quality compression on DVDs and Blue-Ray.
Henrik
19-May-2010
[5027]
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=377

A comparison.
Maxim
19-May-2010
[5028]
overall conclusion of that very detailed analysis:


VP8, as a spec, should be a bit better than H.264 Baseline Profile 
and VC-1.  It’s not even close to competitive with H.264 Main or 
High Profile.  If Google is willing to revise the spec, this can 
probably be improved.
Pekr
19-May-2010
[5029x2]
http://videojs.com/- cross browser video html5 player, supporting 
VP8
Chrome Webstore .... https://chrome.google.com/webstore... now they 
steal our idea of rebrowser .....
BudzinskiC
20-May-2010
[5031]
Google has been playing around with that idea for a while, kind of 
announced it a year ago actually in the Google Wave group because 
they needed a way to allow people to make money with robots and gadgets. 
Robots and gadgets are both web apps and Chrome OS only runs web 
apps. They would be stupid not to do this, they *need* an app store 
for web apps.
Henrik
20-May-2010
[5032x3]
https://chrome.google.com/webstore

This seems pretty interesting.
Hmm... I didn't see Pekr's link, sorry.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/05/20/1332214/German-High-Court-Declares-All-Software-Patentable?art_pos=2