Techtrends

The AIR is a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows web developers to build and deploy web applications to the desktop. AIR is targeted at developers who are currently leveraging web technologies, such as Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript and Ajax techniques to build and deploy rich Internet applications.

AIR allows applications to be built using Flash, Flex and HTML , JavaScript or a combination of both. Flash based applications will be able to include HTML based content, and HTML based applications will be able to use Flash based content. In addition, Adobe AIR applications can integrate closely with PDF documents. AIR application is free to download and use.

Similar Applications:

Microsoft Silverlight - is also a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of Microsoft .NET–based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight is able to make applications that blend desktop applications with internet applications.

Google Gears – Google recently released a beta version of its open source technology – Google Gears – which is a browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality.

JavaFX – JavaFX from Sun Microsystems is also to create a new family of products based on Java technology designed to enable consistent user experiences, from desktop to mobile device to set-top box to Blu-ray Disc.

. Read full story .

Lua is a new, powerful, fast and free scripting language which is used in many industrial applications like Adobe Lightromm and games like World of Warcraft.

The specialty about Lua is its simplicity and easy to learn and write code. It integrates with Java, C, C++, C#, Smalltalk, Fortran, Ada, and other scripting languages like Perl and Ruby. So it is easy to extend features of programs written in other languages.

Pronounced as‘loo-ah’, was developed at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

Lua was born way back in 1993 atTecgraf, the Computer Graphics Technology Group of PUC-Rio, and is now housed at Lablua. Both Tecgraf and Lablua are laboratories of the Department of Computer Science.

Lua is distributed in a small package that builds out-of-the-box in all platforms that have an ANSI/ISO C compiler. Lua runs on all flavors of Unix and Windows. For documentation and download, visit at: Lua.org

. Read full story .

. Read full story .

Source: softpedia.com

. Read full story .

Upcoming is a social events calendar from Yahoo. It allows users to configure their own events for certain locations. The new release of Upcoming modified and updated to provide special events for musicians, artists, and like others. It also makes deeper integrations with Flickr. So the users are able to customize the appearance of a certain event as well as share their own photos with other members of the service. For full details visit Yahoo’s Upcoming or their official blogpost
. Read full story .

Printing technology is on its way to be new high. There are many breakthroughs in printing in recent periods. For example Kodak introduced an ink and paper that lasts a century. Now it is possible printing without ink by a new technology, Zink.

Zink is a new technology which required zero ink for printing. It generates the required color images and photos without using ink, toner or ribbon!

The technology introduced a new category of printers and papers that work as an integrated system to print with a unique technique. The technology uses a patented Zink paper, an advanced composite material with dye crystals embedded inside and a protective polymer overcoat layer outside. Before printing the dye crystals are colorless, so Zink looks like regular white printing paper. The Zink printer uses heat to activate and colorize these dye crystals.

Visit the site

. Read full story .

Adobe Soundbooth CS3 is a brand new application built in the spirit of Sound Edit 16 and Cool Edit that provides the tools to video editors, designers, and others who do not specialize in audio need to accomplish their everyday work.

What is the Soundbooth CS3 beta?

Soundbooth is built for video editor, web designers and developers, motion graphic artist, and other creative professionals. It delivers tools for audio editing, cleanup, sound design, and music creation all with in a familiar Adobe interface. With a set of powerful and intuitive tools, Soundbooth enables even those with very little audio experience.

Why both Adobe Audition and Adobe Soundbooth?

While Adobe Audition is designed to give audio professionals in music, film, video, and radio a flexible audio production toolkit that can handle a broad range of audio engineering tasks, Adobe Soundbooth is focused on creative professionals without audio expertise, or those who prefer an application focused on making short work of the most common tasks they handle every day. The tools in Soundbooth CS3 remove the mystery from editing while preserving superb sound quality.

Full details available from Adobe

. Read full story .

Maxthon is currently one of the most popular browsers on the Internet, being based on the Internet Explorer engine but offering almost the same functions as the Mozilla Firefox browser. The browser has had over 80 million downloads, and over half of its users are in China. Maxthon-originated searches may account for up to 25% of total Baidu traffic (search engine from China), according to one source.

At the very least we expect the strategic deal to involve replacing the default search option in the browser from the Baidu search engine in China and Yahoo in other countries with Google search. The deal may also go beyond search and involve integration with other Google services directly into the browser. Maxthon would then be promoted on Google as a preferred browser.

Source from: Techcrunch

. Read full story .

Yesterday I posted an article on Yahoo’s new search engine Alpha. Here is another one, more or less the same, from Google, Searchsmash. Searchmash was especially designed by the search giant Google with testing reasons to allow the company to test all the new features before they are implemented into the well-known Google product.

“Some features of SearchMash may enable you to interact with search results beyond simply clicking through a result or navigating to another page of results. It may record the use of these features in a non-personally identifiable manner to evaluate their usefulness.

Information collect through SearchMash will only be used to evaluate, research, and analyze the ideas and features offered on the site and will not combine or otherwise correlate information (such as cookies or log data) from SearchMash with information we may have from your use of our other services.”

Go to Searchmash Go to Alpha

. Read full story .

Lonely planet, publisher of the famed travel guides, announced the launch of LonelyPlanet.TV. Lonely Planet is enlarging its online presence to include more user-generated content. For LP.TV, this UGC (user generated content) is very focused on video contributions from travelers all over the world.

Lonely planet uses Reality Digital Opus, a digital media hosting platform from Reality Digital to launch the new website. It provides Lonely Planet viewers with a more participatory environment that includes blogging, video sharing, forums, geo-location information and more.

Visit Lonely Planet Tv

. Read full story .

Samsung has developed a 64 GB flash-solid state drive (SSD). The 1.8”-type flash-SSD is based on an 8GB single-level-cell (SLC) NAND, which provides higher performance over conventional SSDs.

The flash-SSD is a secure and reliable means of storing data which can access data quite fast. The new flash-SSD’s read and writes performance increased by 20 percent and 60 percent respectively over the 32GB flash-SSD introduced last year.

It is expected that the new SSD’s ability to perform over conventional moving hard drive may replace it in the near future.

. Read full story .

Google has officially unveiled a new feature called ‘Plus Box’ on its search engine page. With this new feature, Google enables users to see more information about individual search results. For example if you search for a well known restaurant, you will also be provided with a map. Depending on the search query and location, the user will see a little ‘plus’ sign and address information under the search result.

Now it shows two types of Plus Box results: stock information and maps. You can find a plus box next to the home pages of companies listed on NYSE, NASDAQ, and AMEX. Clicking the plus box icon for any of these companies displays the latest stock price, chart, and company information.

Report from Google official blog.

. Read full story .

Apple TV is a set top box that enable to stream digital content from any computer running Mac OS X or Windows with iTunes onto a high-definition widescreen television. You can watch movies, TV shows, movie trailers, podcasts, and photo slide show from your computer on your TV. Apple TV puts your iTunes library such as movies, TV shows, music, and podcasts plus movie trailers from Apple.com on your TV.

Apple TV connects to your TV via an HDMI port or component video and audio ports and its built-in, superfast 802.11 wireless capability syncs your iTunes library from any Mac or windows PC. Connect Apple TV to your TV and open iTunes on your computer. iTunes wirelessly detects Apple TV. And if you don’t have wireless capability, you can connect Apple TV to your network using an Ethernet cable.

Requirements: Widescreen TV, Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later, Windows XP SP2, iTunes 7.1, HDMI cable or Component video cables and analog audio cables.

TV with 1080i, 720p, 576p, or 480p resolutions.

. Read full story .

Google has launched a new service wherein you can 'design' and decorate your homepage with the features you like. Google’s Personalized Page is an interesting product that allows you to create your own Google homepage.

You can have your own clock, calendar, themes, the list is not ending. The new stuff themes can be change dynamically according to the user's time of day or local weather conditions. The product was improved with gadgets support, enabling users to place little utilities able to increase the functionality of the product by adding simple functions like Google Search, date and time.

Google also created a new option for Personalized Homepage placed above the search engine, allowing you to quickly switch to the classic view.

. Read full story .

Pictures fade when they're exposed to light, air pollution, moisture, and heat. Kodak introduced a new technology in printing paper that last inkjet prints for 100 years. Not a big deal in this digital age, since we can store image in digital media and reprint. But Kodak likes the idea of long-lasting .

‘Colorlast’ technology introduced by Kodak shields your pictures from heat, moisture and light so your prints will last over 100 years, even when they're displayed at home unprotected.

>Kodak ‘Colorlast’ Technology locks ink molecules into the image layer, protecting your picture from fading factors like heat and light. Using a unique blend of mordant in the bottom two layers, along with nanoparticulate ceramic particles in the top layer stabilize the image. Kodak scientists have engineered a significant leap in longevity and color reproduction. The proprietary three-layer coating controls smudging, speeds dry time, and increases ozone fade resistance.

. Read full story .

QuickTime Virtual Reality is an interesting concept by apple that moves the photographic image from the flat 2D to 3D imagery. QTVR allows users to interact with images instead of just looking at them on the computer.

That is, for example, we can see a photograph of a mobile phone from its front, back, top, below, left, or right – just like rotating the phone-with the mouse – a useful tool for product manufactures to present their product.

Now we can see how it works? If You take photos of your mobile phone from its front, left, right, behind top and bottom – then the software puts them together and make a spherical 3D image that it display as a movie. We can see this MOV file in the quick Time player by keep the left mouse button pressed and moving the mouse.

When seen in a browser (streaming) the image are loaded in to the player one at a time and you can clearly see the 3D grid that is being used.

For those who like QTVR software click here

If you want see an example of QTVR click on the image to download a sample QTVR file (740kb)

(Quick time player should be installed)

. Read full story .

Pipes is a free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You needn’t to know any technical knowledge to build pipes. You can create Pipes for many purposes. Maybe the most common is combining all your favorite feeds, but there are more sources available. The current list of sources includes: Yahoo Search, Yahoo Local, Fetch (RSS feeds), Google Base, Flickr etc. Each source can be searched or queried using either pre-defined or user-defined parameters.

Let’s begin to build a basic Pipes-feeds. This is only a basic idea, but once you created, you can edit it to create the ultimate mash-up.

Go to Yahoo Pipes and click on MyPipes (you should have Yahoo Id). You will get a visual interface editing page (see the image)

You can drag and drop items from the left side bar menu to this editing page. For example, from menu bar, under Sources, drag Fetch onto the editing field. You’ll see an URL box.

In the URL field add the RSS URL you wish. You can add several feeds by dragging more Fetch box on to the editing field. You can also add more URLs by clicking the “+” sign next to URL in the Fetch box. Put URL address in all URL field.

Next Drag a Union box (Look under operators menu on the side bar) onto the editing field. Connect the outputs of your Fetch boxes to the inputs of the Union box by clicking and dragging your mouse from point to point.

Next drag a Filter box (shown under operators menu) onto the editing field. Connect the output of the Union box to the input of the Filter box. Connect the output of the Filter box with the input of the Pipe Output. (See the image).

The Filter box allows you to filter your content. It is necessary to use a filter to limit the data flow to a manageable level, because we are using a number of feeds that will provide numerous head lines to us which is inconvenient. Click on the title and contains boxes to see the many possibilities. You can select from the list you don’t need and you can also select either block or accept.

Finally click on save button on the top of the editing field, and name your Pipe. On the MyPipes page, you can click Publish button to make your Pipes public. Here you may need to put some short description and tags. Click on Run this Pipe to see the aggregated feed you’ve created.

. Read full story .

NEC, a Japanese company, has announced the development of an automatic multimedia blog creation system, which has been embedded into PaPeRo, a personal assistance robot.

PaPeRo (Partner-type Personal Robot) has its natural expressions and ability to remember its owners' interests and preferences. It was designed to bring about a more natural interface with which people can easily and automatically benefit from the Internet. It can easily access Internet without the use of a keyboard

Its ability to interact naturally with people opens up a variety of application possibilities. It can be used as an automatic multimedia blog creation tool. When a user begins to talk about their events with PaPeRo, the system records and analyzes it. Following this, PaPeRo searches for suitable multi-media content on the Internet, including images, illustrations and music, which are automatically uploaded and edited along with the video recording on the user's blog.

PaPeRo has been developed using the latest technologies. Main features are given below.

Weight: 5.0 kg; continuous operation time: 2-3 hours; Built-in Internet wireless modem handset; USB 2.0; microphones for detecting the direction of the sound, as well as for recognizing certain sounds; a video camera with CCD sensor; sensors for ultrasonic, step height, elevation etc.

More details and functions are available from PaPeRo’s home page

. Read full story .

Microsoft is providing the opportunity for game developers to participate the Dream-Build-Play game development contest, offering a $10,000 grand prize and the opportunity for a winner’s game to be published on Xbox LIVE Arcade.

Prize includes an opportunity for the winner to receive an Xbox LIVE Arcade publishing contract, providing a chance to showcase the winner’s game on Xbox LIVE Arcade.

Dream-Build-Play is open to any user of XNA Game Studio Express, including the Garage Games Torque X platform. No purchase is necessary to compete.

The contest ends 2 July 2007, and winners will be announced 13 August at Microsoft Game fest 2007 in Seattle.

Dream-Build-Play is a global contest that offers aspiring game developers the opportunity to showcase their innovation and talent to the world. More than 20 winners will be selected to win fantastic prizes with a total value of more than $40,000 from Microsoft, Alienware, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Inc., Autodesk Inc. and Softimage Co.

Click here to enter the contest

. Read full story .

Adobe and Photobucket have announced a partnership to integrate Adobe web-based video remix and editing technology directly into the Photobucket user experience, giving Photobucket users direct, free access to its digital video editing tools.

Photobucket users can combine images and video with captions, bubbles, frames, transitions, music, and other effects by dragging and dropping content to a scene line. Clips and content can be reordered, trimmed, and split directly in the scene line in a web-based environment.

These free services are expected to be driven by advertising revenue - and by offering customers simple upgrade paths to Adobe Premiere Elements and Adobe Photoshop Elements software, both market leaders in the home digital video and photo editing space.

. Read full story .