Archive for January, 2010

My Apple Tablet/iSlate Thoughts

Monday, January 18th, 2010

My opinion: This machine will eventually replace the laptop in many (the majority?) of use cases, as well as expanding the use of computers throughout our lives.

As commonplace as the laptop is, it still has many flaws and drawbacks towards a pen and paper. Sat in a meeting or lecture, pulling out a laptop puts a barrier in front of you and except in certain circles, this can be very off putting. Hardly anyone I know at University uses a laptop in lectures, even in Computer Science it’s under 20%. All the notes are available as PDFs, everyone has a laptop, but nothing beats pen and paper…yet.

A tablet as a computing device is much more likely to replace a (paper) notebook. It will sit flat on a desk, unobtrusive and subtle. In a lecture the Professor won’t see you staring into a screen, you will appear like any other person, making notes on a flat device, but I can go home and see all the same annotated notes on my computer and view them on my iPhone when I’ve got a few minutes to spare. I can even see a tablet being pulled out in a boardroom setting. A quick glance down to look at your notes, flip over to your calendar, look up some quick figures for the point you are about to raise.

We’ll see what happens on the 27th, but I’m sure it’s going to shake things up more than people think. Laptops don’t make sense and a tablet does. This isn’t an Apple Kindle.

As an additional thought, could this mean the resurgence of the Desktop PC as a hub in the home, with creative tasks in mind?

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Stripy Box Records and CSS3

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

I’ve been playing with some rotating cubes the last few days. First a quick introduction:

CSS3

With the launch of modern web browsers like Firefox 3.5, Google Chrome and Safari 4, a whole new range of effects have become available to web developers through CSS3.

One of the more exciting additions is transforms and animations. Skipping over the philosophical argument of whether or not CSS should be concerned with these action based functions, we can get some really impressive functionality.

Sadly, a lot of this work seems to be tainted by the lack of standards. Everyone is building in support for these fun new properties (it’s even promised in IE9) but we’re going back to proprietary CSS. Things are finally getting to the point were you can stop worrying about IE6 hacks but (for now) a transform property will have to look like this:

-moz-transform: rotate(40deg);
-webkit-transform: rotate(40deg);
transform: rotate(40deg);

It’s a conscious move on the part of Mozilla and Webkit to not support the standards until they become…standard (see W3C Draft Transform Standards). But for now it’s just introducing a whole load of effects which will only work in one browser or other…

Which brings me on nicely to what I’ve been playing with and which only works on Safari 4.

Stripy Box

When I was about 14, some of my friends formed a band. The Russian Wind Up Penguins (website still archived here) and obviously it needed a record company to release its version of teenage punk. Gave me the perfect excuse to play around and create Stripy Box.

Stripy Box Logo

It’s actually one of my favourite logos that I’ve created. At the time I spent a while trying to make a rotating cube using Flash which ended up horribly glitchy and slow.

Glitchy Rotating Cube

Click on the image to see the old Flash site. When playing around with CSS3 I found a great demo of a spinning cube with text on all faces, so I shamelessly borrowed the code and stuck my Stripy Box images on the side. Twenty minutes later and I have a wonderful keyboard controllable, glitch free rotating cube.

CSS Rotating Cube

Again, click the image to see for yourself (only works on Safari, remember). Mainly done using CSS3, in fact if I had a bit more time I could remove the keyboard control and have it rotate by itself with even less (maybe even no?) JavaScript.

Amazing what progress has been made. I look forward to seeing what else CSS3 has to bring. If you’re on Safari 4 (I really hope you are) then try out this demo of a flickr browser. Really awesome and so, so smooth.

Let’s just hope the standards get sorted before the community diverges too much.

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