Apps - Experimenting

To begin with understanding how apps work, i looked at Googles App Inventor. App Inventor is a part of Google Labs, a playground for Google Engineers and adventurous Google users.

You can build many different types of apps with App Inventor. Often people begin by building games like MoleMash or games that let you draw funny pictures on your friend's faces. You can even make use of the phone's sensors to move a ball through a maze based on tilting the phone.

But app building is not limited to simple games. You can also build apps that inform and educate. You can create a quiz app to help you and your classmates study for a test. With Android's text-to-speech capabilities, you can even have the phone ask the questions aloud. To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a professional developer. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app's behavior.




I have attempted the 'cat' tutorial to understand what is involved in the creation/distribution of Android Apps. Below is a screenshot of me using App inventor.

Journal Task – 3 user based websites

For our journal task we were asked to find 3 websites providing user generated content

http://www.photobucket.com/

Photobucket is an image hosting website allowing users upload photo content varying from personal to professional photography photos. Over time the website has broadened their content allowing users to upload videos too. The website structure is very simplistic with the simple navigation bar at the top and sub categories to the left, thus allows more space for user generated content to be listed. The use of colour has been kept minimalistic using blue and cream as the centralised colours plain against the varied content uploaded.

http://www.cafepress.co.uk/

Cafepress is a template and user driven website offering users to purchased custom made t-shirts. Users can either upload photos to templates or upload their own designs to share. This also offers fan bases e.g. Twlight to generate content and share their passion for the film. The website uses the top-down navigation keeping it simple; also using bright clean colours making it look busy.















http://www.dailymotion.com/

Dailymotion is about finding new ways to see, share and engage your world through the power of online video. You can find/upload videos about your interests and hobbies, eyewitness accounts of recent news and distant places. The website is very self explanatory with the simple navigation bar and big headings showing where you are. The use of a star rating allows the users to view categories in a different way, allowing them to view comments from other users.

Chip of the future

Scientists at IBM have a new type of digital media storage meaning such consumer products like mobile phones, iPods and many other devises will soon be able to hold 100 times more information than they can now. So that means an iPod would be able to store more than 500,000 songs.

The latest release from IPod at the moment is the release of the iPod Nano Chromatic is the 4th Generation IPod and 2nd Generation IPod Touch, released around Sept. This devise offers storage in either 8GB or 16GB.

Looking at the range of iPods you can clearly see that they all vary in size, shape, visually and usability. Take the IPod Classic. You can store thousands of songs, interface is simple but the size of the devise is huge compared to others. It may be possible one day to have and iPod so small you could embed it into a ring shape to fit the size of your finger for example and have wireless headphones? There’s a possibility!

The future for IPod at the moment is looking like they are going for smaller devises and more storage space but maintaining IPods visual look. But it makes you wonder the fact that this chip from IBM could one day revolutionize into a superchip, personal server or maybe even in a few years be a multi-functional devise?

Also new technology is not just becoming more advanced with space hey require less power.
In a paper published in the current issue of Science, a team at the company's research centre in San Jose, California, said that devices which use the new technology would require much less power, would run on a single battery charge for "weeks at a time, and would last for decades.

Chips that require less power could mean that people in society can save more on energy on their Electric bill, due to the fact they only have to charge it on average every fortnight instead of every other day.

IBMs new Racetrack memory technology changed the way information can be stored as a pattern on a nano wire which means more durability due to no solid data being held. They use a base which is a shape of a racing track so information is always moving and don’t require more space. The data is read by having a second nano wire which races around and picks up information as when it needs to.

IBM New Racetrack Technology video




Reference:

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3728060.ece

From Times Online
April 11, 2008