PJH Studios

Category: Technology

Mostly related to issues surrounding technology and computers, main include current events or news.

  • Lost World’s Fairs

    Lost World’s Fairs show cases how damn awesome HTML5 is in the hands of a capable designer. Initially, the project came about when Microsoft asked the designers to showcase Internet Explorer 9’s support for WOFF.

    Says Jason Santa Maria:

    Today marks the beta launch of Internet Explorer 9. To celebrate the release, Nishant Kothary from the MIX Online team at Microsoft reached out to me to help showcase its support of WOFF.

    Atlantis is the most clever of the trio, using page scrolling to the effect of traveling down, down, down to the ocean floor.

  • The Wilderness Downtown

    The Arcade Fire released their second video for their latest album The Suburbs with, The Wilderness Downtown.  It’s a synthesis of web technology, music and video to create an experience.  It uses HTML 5 to drive much of video so for now Google Chrome or Safari 5 are the only browsers that can play it fully.  (Firefox can, albeit somewhat lacking).

    Before the video begins, you’re asked to enter the street you grew up on, and then the video begins to load.  In the video, multiple screens pop up, one with video of a unisex person running through a suburban street and other windows playing animations.  You’ll write a message to your younger self, and that address you entered will appear as a Google Earth flyover.

    This isn’t their first foray into viral, interactive videos.  With their last album, they released a web video, Neon Biblethat let you interact with Win Butler’s hands.

  • iPad a tool to help those with autism

    Random, assorted specification lists can’t prepare for possibilities like this. A family in California is finding that their son with severe autism may be benefiting from interactions with an iPad.

    So when Leo took it in his small hands as if it were an old friend, and, with almost no training, whizzed through its apps like a technology virtuoso, his mother gasped in amazement.

    Scientific studies are still new but promising.

    So far, only one study is looking at the newer iPad. “Touch Technologies in the Classroom” is under way at Beverly Junior Public School in Toronto. Rhonda McEwen, an assistant professor at the iSchool at the University of Toronto who is running the study, introduced iPods and iPads into six classrooms of autistic students at the school in February.

    McEwen is still gathering data, but she says the feedback from a initial round of teacher interviews has been largely positive. One teacher said students’ attention spans seemed to be lengthening. Another had tears in her eyes when she explained that she had been working with a boy for two years, unsure of whether he understood language. “With the iPod, for the first time, he was able to demonstrate that he did understand,” McEwen says.

  • Susan Orlean discusses the iPad

    Susan Orlean discusses, at length with Glenn Fleishman, her use of an iPad. She candidly describes her use with the insight of an anthropologist–observant not only on the physical, but the social and much broader social contexts:

    And while you can do that with your phone, it is so much more visual, and almost tactile and alive doing through the window, the iPad. And that’s how I feel. I just feel like it’s a window. Literally, it even looks like a window.

  • Netflix and creative destruction

    Creative destruction is a concept of capitalism, where the business innovations of today, destroy the innovations of yesterday.  Netflix is finding out that those red envelopes aren’t enough to keep the lights on forever and is investing heavily in video streaming technologies, lest they become like Kodak.

    Kodak just misjudged how fast consumers would give up on film and start snapping up digital cameras. And it misjudged its ability to outrun both trends.

    Plus, they had the foresight to get their company name right:

    But Reed Hastings, the founder and chief executive, and early employees, recognized that delivery of movies over the Internet would replace the mail carrier soon. They named the company Netflix, not Mailflix or DVDs by Mail.

  • Flipboard

    Flipboard is a damn, clever iPad app.  It takes streams of content such as Twitter, Facebook, various RSS news feeds and transforms the assortment of text, hypertext and pictures into an enjoyable experience.  Flipboard uses a newspaper-like metaphor for pulling content together and users swipe to flip pages.  Tweets are artfully rendered, and those that link to articles elsewhere, the articles are expanded.  Logging into Facebook makes browsing the Newsfeed like you’re catching up on your friends with a digital late edition newspaper–minus the spam of quizzes and Farmville clones.  Further, if logged in to Twitter or Facebook, you can comment and interact with the content.  What’s interesting is that the web page fades away and content becomes forefront to the experience–which is how it should be.