I can hardly contain myself...

 

OK, so this is all Apple will show us. We are to infer from this that on March 2 the iPad 2 is coming out. Nice use of the number 2, and that calendar page is strategically ripped so as NOT to show us that front facing camera we have all been waiting for (or have we ?).

Patience, my friends, patience. All will be revealed in due course.

More on bird addiction

As I posted earlier, the Angry Birds addiction is still quite prominent out there in the mobile world (as well as on less mobile equipment ever since the introduction of Apple's App Store on the Mac with its own version of that famous franchise's game). So last week we heard of an interesting development: another famous iOS game, apparently the "Top Paid App Of All Times", Doodle Jump, will get a Hollywood tie-in. Universal have announced that the main character of their movie Hop will feature in Doodle Jump as a promotional download. 

Now the makers of Angry Birds, Rovio, will release a version of the game set in Rio. Why Rio you ask ? 20th Century Fox will be releasing a movie by that name and some of the characters from that movie will appear in the game as well. Check out the trailer below for more on that.

This new trend of Hollywood-iOS tie ins is interesting. While for now it seems to center on "games to cartoons" connections, it would be interesting to see what other forms such tie-ins might take. Other than that, so long as we get new birds to fling at pigs, who are we to complain ?

Tech-Year In Review

As we approach the end of the year it is appropriate to do a quick review of the best and worst tech that appeared in the market. But it's always best to leave such things to professionals. Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal considers the iPad to have been THE product of 2010. Here are his views on the best and worst of 2010. (Give the ad at the beginning of the video a few seconds to run first).

...and not a minute too soon

Back in May I reported on the expected Fall arrival of a cool product called the Clamcase. Like often happens with these sort of things, the product's introduction got delayed. In fact, in the meantime, the video that I had embedded in that long ago post has also been removed due to some copyright infringement. Instead a new one was posted which I am including here. It now appears this product will start shipping in January...just in time for the expected announcement of the iPad 2. Still, given how many iPads were sold to date, owners of the original iPad might be interested in sprucing up their tablets using what still appears to be a compelling product.

Bird Addiction

I admit. I came late to this one. Simply because I am not big on computer games. This is something I have always wanted to get into, and yet very rarely would it happen. I would see people around me spend weeks on end with MYST or some shoot'm up engine, and though I would try to develop the right kind of enthusiasm for it, somehow it wound't stick. Over the years there were probably 3 or 4 games that I would stay with until I reached some level of proficiency, but overall it just wasn't my thing.

And then I installed Angry Birds HD on the iPad. The rest is a blur. It used to be that I would get very productive with work late at night. These days late at night is usually accompanied by the sound of birds crashing through wood or glass and pigs puffing away. 

Angry Birds is one of these phenomena whose success was probably a bigger surprise to the people who spawned it than to the public at large. I doubt the small Finnish company that came out with the game ever expected that they would sell 50 million copies of the game across pretty much every mobile platform available by the time the game marked its first birthday. And all this with a project that cost them $100,000 to develop. It just goes to show that sometimes less is more and that a well executed simple idea can often trump multimillion dollar sophistication without making too many waves.

The game has also managed to cross over into popular culture, with Angry Bird Halloween costumes, TV skits, and now Angry Bird cakes.

Of course Hollywood is never far behind when a story meets with such success. The people at Rovio have been very clever about that as well. First of all they have the in-game trailer which hints at potentially something more. 

And finally, lest anyone have any doubt about it, they produced this cinematic trailer which seems to intimate that the Angry Birds would one day grace the screens of our neighbourhood multiplex.

This too shall pass one day. But until then I will continue to feed this addiction with total abandon. Better let the birds be angry than me.

The iPad Theorem

Ever since the introduction of the iPad a great number of people have been saying that it will change the face of education. The first time I saw that potential in person was with the introduction of Theodore Gray's The Elements ebook for iPad. Suddenly there was a way to literally manipulate the elements of the periodic table and learn all about them in a fun and exciting way.

A few months down the line and we finally start to see something even more exciting. One of the major school textbook companies, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, has launched a pilot project to teach Algebra to California high-school students on the iPad. Apparently 400 students will participate in the project, with one group using the app and a control group using a regular textbook.

They even produced a cool little video that both illustrates how this app would work, but personally I find it exciting because it fires up the imagination and you start realising that in a few years time schools will look very different to what we know today. Maybe our kids won't have to "shlep" such heavy bags full of textbooks to and from school anymore. Instead of "Take out your Ancient-Greek history book and turn to chapter 4", they will hear "Take out you pad and turn to location marker 1467". It will make perfect sense to them. Probably will sound like ancient Greek to us.

Long lost love

I had left her behind. I had turned my back on her. It was January of 1986, we had been close for a couple of years, and the day I left Belgium I simply walked away without giving her another thought. It took almost 25 years for me to start remembering those long ago years, to once again think about the times we had spent together. To remember how she felt to the touch, to imagine her luscious curves and the unique sound she made when my fingers would touch her just so. Yes, you guessed it: I finally dug out my old bass guitar left behind in a locked case in Antwerp a quarter century ago.

It's been two weeks now since I got her back, twenty five years since I last attempted to play bass. It's safe to say that this time around my approach is a little more methodical. I probably learned more about playing the bass in the last two weeks than I had those couple of years way back when. I still sound like crap, but I have hope that one day I might even sound halfway decent. 

But this time around I was able to marry my love of music with my love of tech like never before. One of the reasons the bass guitar came back into my mind was the introduction of one of the coolest apps I have yet discovered on the iPad. Actually it is a combination of hardware and software. The hardware part is the iRig and the software is AmpliTube, both made by a company called IK Multimedia. iRig is an adapter that allows you to hook up a musical instrument to your iPad (or iPhone/iPod Touch) and get sound output. AmpliTube for iPad is a collection of software based amps, effects and other musical tools that previously would have meant carrying tons of gear around with you. 

Rather than write some sort of review I shot and uploaded a short video that shows this gear in action. I have seen a lot of videos online showing mostly guitar players putting the iRig/Amplitube combi through its paces, but so far no bass players doing their "thing". I have however heard of at least one electric violin player using it as well, so I am sure we are only in the very first stages of a modest revolution in the way musicians perform.

Forgive all the screeching though. Remember, for all intents and purposes I am really still a newbie.

The App that makes you go "WOW" !!!

Every once in a while a product comes along that just makes you go "Wow !". One such product was just released last night. It's a new app for the iPad called Flipboard. I haven't spoken much about my iPad experience in this forum since I obtained mine. Truth is I have been too busy using it to write about it. It is safe to say that Flipboard will turn me into an even bigger iPad addict than I have been till now. Essentially this app turns your Twitter and Facebook feeds into a personalized magazine that updates itself constantly. I can't think of a more perfect platform to use such an app than the iPad. Check out the video to get an idea of what Flipboard looks like.