Anthony Milner

Mark Cohen recently blogged about a very cool web application called animoto which let’s you build video animations very quickly. It was timely because we wanted to produce a short animation to showcase our recent work and this allowed us to knock one up in minutes. We could have spent $$ doing this professionally and may still do so but this is a very cool and easy way to proof of concept the idea. This was produced in 15 minutes…

Thanks Mark (and animoto)

The Sydney Morning Herald ran a Washington Post article today by Rick Weis titled “Washington abuzz with talk of dragonfly spies”. The military have always been ahead of the curve when it comes to technology but the idea of a miniature fly embedded with cameras is just too cool. If you grew up during the golden years of flight sims, playing games such as F-19 Stealth Fighter, F-16 or the trusty Microsoft Flight Simulator (and dreamed about one day being able to afford your own remote controlled airplane or helicopter) then you’ll probably agree that the notion of a remote control electronic dragonfly is pretty cool.

Robobugs could follow suspects, guide missiles to targets or navigate collapsed buildings to find survivors.

From an engineering perspective…

The rules of aerodynamics change at very tiny scales and require wings that flap in precise ways – a huge engineering challenge. Scientists have only recently come to understand how insects fly. The CIA was amongst the first to tackle the problem. The “insectothopter”… looked like a dragonfly and contained a tiny petrol engine … declared a failure because it could not handle cross winds.

And as we say in the software development world if it’s already been done why not integrate with a 3^rd party product

…Defence department researchers are experimenting with putting computer chips into moth pupae … and hatching them into healthy “cyborgs moths” … whose nerves have grown into their internal silicon chip so that wranglers can control their activities…

Of course like all software integrations there are risks…

Even if the technical hurdles are overcome…they can get eaten by a bird, they can get caught in a spider web.

It’s almost time to cue the James Bond music. So how do you tell if your dragonfly is a spy?

Eye witnesses [in Washington] all reported seeing at least three dragonflies manoeuvring in unison…[however] … Dragonflies never fly in a pack.

Here’s a cool way to promote that position you’re trying to fill.

 http://www.standoutjobs.com/

I couldn’t help noticing at Web Directions the number of Macbooks in use by attendees and speakers. I usually see designers holding their little white and silver babies but today it was rare to find a anything but a Macbook. How times have changed.

After months of brainstorming, soul searching, creating and refining we have launched our beloved new logo.

Its got colour, its got transparency, its got a dose of web 2.0. It will predominantly be displayed with its strapline “Enterprise Content Management”

 So what is that colourful symbol thingy in the logo?

The motif is 6 overlapping transparent blocks each with its own colour. Each block represents a system, component or module which is integrated to provide a complete end solution. Its also quite artisitc and conveys a sense of our creative design capability. Deep and meaningful interpretations aside it can also be said that this is simply a clean and fresh look. The logo was designed by our Creative Director, Penny Bristow. She is one creative lady and we’re fortunate to have such talent on board.

When I squint at the blocks I see a flower – I guess that’s OK because essentially the blossoming of a flower is akin to the blossoming of thoughtful and intelligent software.

What do you see? Leave a comment…

Ok this has turned my world of images on its head. It’s like someone just discovered that the world is round or that humans can fly, ok that’s an exaggeration but it still knocked my socks off. In the world of web development images are fixed. Page layout can be dynamically resized, but images once cropped and optimised remain fixed. Well actually not anymore, as Ohgizmo reported a couple of days ago…

Ariel Shamir of the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science in Israel has developed some software to automatically [resize images], in realtime no less. Watch and be amazed :

Here’s a couple of clever search mashups. Searchboth and GahooYoogle. Both let you do a simultaneous search on Yahoo and Google with the result sets layed out side by side. Great for comparing the impact of your SEO campaign. Interestingly GahooYoogle suggests that “70% of the first 100 results are different, on average.”

A small team at Microsoft’s developer division in Redmond have recently developed a Silverlight app for creating mashups. Its called Popfly and lets us visually build social networked, mashed up websites i.e no programming skills. Its free and comes with 25mb of storage. The Popfly team at Microsoft call this “democratised development” – making development approachable to an entire class of people that want to “create” without necessarily having to write code. At the moment all this coolness is invitation only so stay tuned for a Popfly app.

Footnote: How do we* manage to keep coming up with such cool product names – Silverlight, Popfly, Picasa, Skype? Surely we’re due to run out of all options and permutations quite soon :-)

*as in the human race 

This is the new Microsoft Surface. I’d love one in my living room. In fact I reckon they should go one better and do a wall surface with a Wii style interface.