…starts with a nice morning walk in SF.
Microsoft’s Virtual Earth 3D still is an impressing technology, but Google’s catch up isn’t bad at all too.
Somehow it reminds me of Amazon A9’s ambitious street views, seen a couple of years ago. Unlike Amazon, who only had street views available if I recall correctly, Google can offer this nice feature, which definitely provides very helpful information for travelers finding a particular place in an unknown area, as addition to already existing mapping features. That way they can easily evaluate user acceptance and benefit of the new 3D-like feature and decide later if they’re going to extend it to more cities.
The main advantage over Virtual Earth 3D is probably that Google’s Street View doesn’t ask – assuming an available Flash plugin – for installing any additional program. [via TechCrunch]
Presentation software shouldn’t crash, right?
It’s not about losing unsaved data, it’s about embarrassment and breaking the flow.
It was the first time I tried Keynote, mainly because we wanted to show a large Quicktime movie and I thought we’re on the safe side to embed the movie in Keynote rather than in PowerPoint. All test runs of course worked just fine, but the application crashed during the presentation, fortunately at the end, there were only a few seconds left, so it wasn’t a big problem, but it shouldn’t happen with presentation software anyways.
Due to a really exhausting move and two weeks of office abstinence I’m offline since more than 10 days now, can’t remember when I did that for such a long time, probably during the nineties where only modem connection were available and website took ages to load. But I desperately expect the new dsl-modem/router/ap to arrive every day now. Thanks to some nice bars nearby with free wifi I can get at least a bit of my online dose once a week or so.
However, tomorrow I’m giving a short presentation at the CORP Conference (Competence Center of Urban and Regional Planning) in the afternoon session from 2-3.30pm. It’ll be about an exciting project we did last year, exciting because it was pretty unusual for us to do an animation film about regional structures. So if you happen to be there, feel free to drop by and say hi. I doubt I’ll spend much time at the conference because the new apartment still needs quite a lot of my attention. But I’ll certainly make a quick round to see what’s going on and talk to some people there.
It’s probably only a small step for mankind, but a major improvement for any Firefox user on Mac OS X: the next version of the famous open source browser comes with good looking Mac OS X native form controls. Anyone interested can download an early preview here.
In the Google documentary on ARTE somebody told a story about how his grandmother discovered Google: she typed ingredients she would like to eat in the search bar and Google returned recipes for dishes with exactly those food combinations. Today, thinking about lunch, I tried the same and it worked very well.
Wouldn’t that be a nice fridge feature?
Based on the food what’s left, the fridge looks up and suggests recipes. Nowadays one could extend it even with some community features. Like last.fm tracks the music users play on iTunes, the fridge robot scans the food in the fridge and recommends recipes, based on profiles of other users with similar fridge content and taste.