This is the best and most amazing thing we saw at the conference that wasn’t directed by James Cameron: Zebra Imaging boldly proclaims that they “produce the most innovative holographic products and technology in the world,” and after an in-person demo, you walk away convinced. Words can’t describe what you need to see with your eyes, so check it out (demonstrated by Zebra’s Michael Klug):

What a sweet idea! My favorite part is at the 1:23 mark. If you’re into 3d modeling, architecture, or new displays check out this video.

via core77.com.

Every nerd can appreciate a good Quake port.

Check out the whole article here. Check out the source code here.

“It’s a little slow… but we haven’t really optimized this yet for this sort of thing.”

This appears to be a gigantic understatement. Why would I want that UX on my phone?

Check out the full article here. Via: daringfireball.net.

When Russell Brown of Adobe approached us about doing a Photoshop 20th Anniversary app, we were immediately excited (if you’ve seen Russell’s show, you know that his enthusiasm is what you might call highly infectious). His proposal was to boil the functionality down to the 1990 “Levels” control panel, which he felt was the original soul of Photoshop. The app would load an image from the user’s iPhone photo library, allow multiple changes with live previews, and then let them save the modified image back to their library. In short, it would combine the nostalgia of seeing old-school Photoshop UI running on today’s iPhone with a genuinely useful photo-manipulating function.

Really cool stuff. Retro feel, modern application. Check out the article here.

If you follow the winter Olympics at all, I’m sure you heard about Shaun White’s amazing snowboarding performance. He’s already won 2 gold medals, and has had incredible runs. Being the nerd that I am, I wanted to checkout his performances again online.

Not actually a Hippie

I headed over to nbcolympics.com and found the video. Instead of watching my favorite Hippie soar through the air strapped to a piece of wood, I was greeted with the message “You’re one simple step from…”. What the hell? I watch video all the time on NBC, what gives? The culprit is Microsoft Silverlight.

NBC decided to use Microsoft’s Silverlight platform to deliver it’s video. I don’t get it. The web is getting closer and closer to handle video natively with HTML5. Even if they decided that HTML5 wasn’t up to the task, they could have used Flash. Flash is already on 98% of computers worldwide, even I begrudgingly have flash installed as I’ve accepted the fact that the move to HTML5 video won’t happen as quickly as I would have liked.

Instead of using Flash (or progressive HTML5), NBC chose to push another proprietary format on us. The web is (admittedly slowly) moving to standards, yet a multimillion dollar MEDIA company doesn’t get it. What a great opportunity they had to push open standards. I hope NBC got a nice fat paycheck from Microsoft for doing this.

Inconceivable

The moral of this story is never make your users jump through hoops to view your content, try your product, or use your services. You’re just giving them an excuse to leave. Please don’t pull this sort of crap. Please.

Have something to say about this article? Follow the discussion over at news.ycombinator.com or send an email to editor@codesketch.com. Also feel free to follow us on twitter @codesketch.

The combination of Thomas’ programming abilities with John’s pragmatic design background led to a collaboration between the two brothers to develop more processes and improve on the initial application.

Even though the process led to interruption in Thomas’ thesis work, the brothers released “Image Pro” in 1988.

John suggested that they begin to sell Image Pro as an application.

Read more about the humble beginnings of Photoshop at webdesignerdepot.com.

After a long battle with hackers who have been successful at jailbreaking the iPhone from one version of the OS to another, Apple is now taking a more personal approach to locking down the device. It’s been reported that known iPhone jailbreaking/unlocking hackers have had their Apple IDs banned from Apple’s App Store.

The capability to run apps in the background is one of the reasons why many people look to jailbreak the iPhone.
(Credit: Screenshot by Dong Ngo/CNET)
One of those hackers is Sherif Hashim, who recently found an exploit in the latest iPhone OS version 3.1.3 that could unlock the baseband version 05.12.01. Sherif now gets a message saying that his Apple ID is banned for “security reasons” each time he tries to access the Apple’s App Store.

Read the full article on cnet.

With Opera Software’s announcement that the company is this week demonstrating an iPhone-app version of its eponymous Web browser, we’ve seen quite a bit of commentary about the app being dead in the water, along with some legitimate speculation as to whether or not Apple will approve a third-party Web browser. (The company hasn’t yet submitted Opera Mini to Apple for approval, although our colleagues at Macworld UK got a look at it earlier today.)

Apparently Opera Mini is ridiculously fast, and (oddly enough) Opera won’t allow anyone to take pictures or video of the application in action.

Read the full article here.