Digital Buzzard

Digital Bizzard is taking a short vacation to NYC. We’re checking out the sights and sounds and will report back soon. Meanwhile, keep an eye on my Twitted feed for updates.

Digital Buzzard is looking for contributors! This is currently a one-man blog, with aspirations of growth. Are you a tech-loving gadget geek? Or are you media luvvy with a passion for digital? Whatever your interests, if you think its right for this blog and you can string some sentences together in a half-readable way, drop a line to elpablo@digitalbuzzard.com with your bio, a sample of your writing and a couple of topic suggestions.

Apple’s 2009 WWDC will be held, as it is every year, in San Francisco’s Moscone center. And every year, the preceding months are full of rumour, speculation and anticipation as to what new bright and shiny device Steve and his cronies will reveal to the hordes of fanboys, tech-bloggers and gadget addicts in attendance.

The smart money this year is on an update to the ultra-successful iPhone 3G. An improved camera, video calling and higher speeds are all fairly safe bets, and the 3.0 firmware currently in the hands of many developers confirms a lot of this with hidden screens and references to hardware not in the existing handsets.

Perhaps most interesting is the possibility of a magnetometer built into the next device in the iPhone family. A post on the Nokia Blog describes this piece of technology (already in the Nokia 6210) very well:

A traditional compass only works when it is held horizontally. As Paul Coulton recently described in his Forum Nokia Blogs posting, the Nokia 6210 includes a 3-axis magnetometer. Through some calculations, it is possible to find out the absolute direction in which the phone is facing, no matter how the phone is oriented.

So what does this mean? Well, the addition of a magnetometer would allow the iPhone to not only provide an accurate location (via GPS), the orientation of the phone (via the tilt sensors) but also determine in which direction the user is facing. This opens up a vast number of possibilities for the iPhone development community.

For example, we already have street maps accessible on the iPhone, and we can use the touch screen to rotate a 360-degree image of major cities worldwide. The magnetometer could further enhance this by allowing the user to rotate the image by pointing the phone in the right direction. Taking this idea further: you could stand in a street and hold your iPhone up – it would determine where you are, and in which direction you’re facing. Then, using the camera, an application could overlay information on the live image, such as directions, information on the area or advertising from the shops and businesses around you.

The potential applications aren’t just functional either. Augmented Reality, the technology of overlaying 3d images onto live video footage, is already showing huge potential in the gaming industry. This technology was used in the PS3 game ‘Eye of Judgement’ where a combination of the PS3 Eye camera and specially marked trading cards relayed the play area to your TV screen complete with animated 3D characters.

Animator David O Reilly has created a of a simple but effective mockup of an animated character that gives the appearance of being 3-dimensional. This could become reality if a magnetometer is present in the device.

The ability to use this technology in a mobile device is exciting – the National University of Singapore’s Mixed Reality Lab created a live version of Pac Man in the streets of Singapore. There’s no reason this couldn’t be recreated on the iPhone, removing the need for backpack-sized wearable computers as used by the participants in this experiment.

The opportunities are vast, and the iPhone development community has already proven itself to be innovative in its usage of the existing hardware. Let’s hope the Magnetometer is more than rumour and that we see some novel approaches to navigation and gaming applications if it the hardware is present within the next-gen iPhone.

How important is a first blog post? The likelihood is that this post will be read by so few people, so perhaps it doesn’t matter. Then again, first impressions are important, right? I thought I’d take a look at the ‘first posts’ on some of the more well known sites in the blogosphere – was their potential apparent at that early stage?

bOINGbOING.net – Interview with Ren and Stimpy Creator John Kricfalusi – December 1998

This is the earliest content I can find on this popular webzine/blog – a stirling start from the mysterious ‘Otto Matik’ (bOINGbOING founder Mark Frauenfelder). These guys had been doing the ‘zine thing for about 10 years by then, so I suppose they had a head start. They site still provides interesting, weird and wonderfull content today, and is headed up by a crack team of writers – including the fantastic Cory Doctorow.

TUAW.com  – Hello World – January 2004

TUAW has been around since 2004, and is part of the Weblogs inc. group of blogs. The first post in January of that year comes from Sean Bonner, establishing himself as a true Mac geek and credible source of Apple news:

the day it came out my family bought a Macintosh 512. It came standard with no internal hard drive, 512k of RAM, a 9” b/w monitor, it could read single-sided floppy discs and was screaming fast at 8Mhz. I’ve been hooked ever since

Sadly, the pressures of blogging took their toll and Sean bowed out in August of the same year.

The Official Google Blog – A good way to get rid of bad software? – April 2004

About a year after acquiring Blogger, the official Google blog was launched. The first post came from Jonathan Rosenberg, the SVP of Product Management, and addressed the growing  problem of adware on the internet. The post draws on Google’s ‘Do No Evil’ philosophy and links to their page on software principles. This intensely boring start was quickly followed up by an intro from Evan Williams, plugging their re-launched blogger service, and promising to reveal:

What Larry had for breakfast. What Sergey thinks of that Hellboy movie. Which Dawson’s Creek character reminds us most of Eric.

Oh, and of the blogs mentioned here, Google’s first post was the easiest to find. Which is what you’d expect, really.

kotaku.com – Sequel to Popular Game Being Made – July 2004

Ignoring the disclaimers, staff credits and Gawker Media ‘Terms of Use’, Kotaku’s first post (with any real content anyway) reveals a sequel to Wolfenstein is in the works. There’s also a FAQ a few posts back, proclaiming ‘X-Com: UFO Defense‘ to be the best game ever, and explaining to the internet users of 2004 exactly what a ‘blog’ is…

Lifehacker.com – Event reminders with Yahoo! Calendar – January 2005

Gina Trapani starts how she means to go on, with a useful tip for Yahoo! Calendar users (are there any left, 4 years later?). Lifeahacker’s ‘launch’ post comes about 10 days later, and lays down the site’s ultimate aim to explore ‘the endless possibilities of technology and how it can improve our lives’. Such as how to cure poison ivy with vodka and how to avoid wallet butt bulge.

So ends my first post, thoroughly researched and aimed to inform. Comment away, people.