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Kinect enabled head-tracking previewed in Forza 4 spotlight video, turns heads (video)

Ever since Johnny Chung Lee was snatched up by Microsoft’s Project Natal team to work on Kinect, we’ve been curious to see how his Wii head-tracking skills would come to fruition on the device. This week, an Inside Xbox episode shows us how it will work with Forza 4, and the Kinect enabled head-tracking appears to run fairly smoothly compared to others we’ve seen (just try getting similar results on Gran Turismo 5 with a PlayStation Eye). There’s no word about other titles planning to make use of this new feature, but we’ll surely find out more while we’re at E3 next week, and possibly get some hands heads-on time while we’re at it.

Kinect enabled head-tracking previewed in Forza 4 spotlight video, turns heads (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Jun 2011 23:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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InVision Looks Like a Web Designer’s Dream Come True

InVisionLogo.jpgCreation of an attractive and compelling web app prototype is no small task, but a new startup called InVision offers a framework to do so that looks easy, fast and like a real pleasure to use.

The service lets designers drop image files into its web interface, then create clickable hot-spots on each page. The next page each spot links-to is chosen from a drop down menu of images uploaded and the end result is a stitched-together series of pages that can be shared publicly with a single URL and commented on. It looks really nice and is priced from free for a single small project through $75 per month for up to 25 simultaneous projects with unlimited collaborators. I saw one error in the account creation flow, but otherwise the service appears to work well as promised.

Sponsor

It looks like a lot of hot designers are already excited about the service and the company says it’s got thousands of signups already, despite getting very little press coverage in the week since it’s launched.

Trying to create a free account resulted in an error message each time I tried to do so, but my account was in fact being created and I got verification emails each time I tried. Otherwise it appeared to work really well and was very fast and easy to get started with. Check out the demo video below.

Building to Learn

As Tom Hulme, Design Director at IDEO (designers of Apple’s first mouse, Microsoft’s second, the Palm PDA and much more), told BoingBoing in an interview today, “Building to learn is a really important part of our approach – it’s the idea that we should prototype as quickly as possible to test ideas. Building stuff forces decisions, centers everyone on the idea at hand, enables valuable feedback from users.”

A service like InVision seems likely to be useful in that kind of strategy.

InVision was created by Epicenter Consulting, an 8 year old firm in New York. There are already many app wireframing apps available on the market (see Balsamiq, MockFlow and iPlotz, for example) but InVision appears to be winning hearts early with its ease of use. Smashing Magazine’s Editor in Chief Vitaly Friedman called it “very promising.”

UX designer Rachel Anna Lehman said this morning that she’s excited to do some wireframes with InVision and then user testing of them using Silverback. That does sound like fun.

“You can do a similar thing in Fireworks, but this makes it a lot easier,” mobile UX designer Brianne Baker told me after looking at the service. “The service’s resources section is cool too, they offer links to various wireframe kits and UI kits all in one place. Of course it depends on your workflow, not everybody prototypes like this. But it looks pretty awesome.”

Discuss

Windows 8 apps to be built in HTML & JavaScript

w8ui

Apps that use the “new Windows” approach to programming will be built in HTML and JavaScript, said Windows president Steven Sinofsky at D9′s Windows 8 announcement today.

Windows 8 will run traditional Windows applications as well, but the company will encourage developers to adopt this new approach to application development that depends on the new wave of web technologies.

We’ll have to see how this fits together with leaked information from January about development technologies Microsoft reportedly codenamed Jupiter and Mosh.

Apple allows a similar approach, although their focus is clearly on getting developers to work with Objective-C, creating apps that can be sold in iTunes. Outside of that model, developers can create mobile applications for iOS using HTML and JavaScript and allow users to save bookmarks to them as apps on the home screen.

In Windows 8, each app the user installs will have its own tile in the Start pane, an interface that’s a hybrid of user information and application navigation. One of the tiles that can be seen in the screenshot above is for a Windows Store. Presumably, Microsoft is following Apple’s lead on this one, and the Windows Store will be a lot like the Mac App Store.

If you’re a developer who wants to get into the practical details of Windows 8 development, Microsoft has set up an event called BUILD for this September.

Twitter Blindsided Ecosystem Leader Twitpic With Photo Product

Yesterday, leading up to today’s announcement of Twitter’s new photo sharing capabilities, we reported hearing that Twitter had approached some ecosystem players months ago about their potential move into the arena. One player not consulted? A massive one: Twitpic.

“We never heard from Twitter that they were building a photo feature,” Twitpic founder Noah Everett tells us. That’s interesting since yFrog and Plixi (formerly Tweetphoto) were approached, we’ve heard. Also clearly approached, Photobucket, which ended up scoring a deal to host the images for Twitter.

Twitpic, the longtime leader in the space, understandably, is annoyed by this.

“We understand that Twitter owns and controls the platform, but a clearer roadmap from them and better communication would have been appreciated by us and all the developers,” Everett says. “We’ve always had Twitter’s best interest in mind with building and running Twitpic, we would have hoped the same from Twitter, at least in the form of better communication,” he continues.

Ouch.

This is the same complaint that many ecosystem players have had over the past year with Twitter as they continue to “fill holes” in their product. Many have spoken about being blind-sided as Twitter moved to essentially crush their businesses — businesses built on top of Twitter, mind you.

But it seemed that Twitter had finally learned their lesson here given the talks with yFrog and others well ahead of a launch. Apparently not. Those may have been more about deals for the product (or more), it turns out.

Twitter is clearly free to do as it pleases, and absolutely has a duty to do what they think is in their best interest business-wise and product-wise. But the continual pissing off of the ecosystem partners creates an atmosphere of bad blood. It is business, not personal, but for the players like Twitpic, it must seem like both at times.

“Twitpic will continue to run just as we always have. The brand we’ve built is strong,” Everett concludes. All I know for sure is that they appear to be another tale that will cause third-party developers to sleep with both eyes open.


How Twitter Works as a Q&A App [INFOGRAPHIC]

If you think about it, Twitter actually serves as one of the most widely used and engaging Q&A apps.

Around 3 million questions are asked on Twitter each month, and the questions range from tech support and product recommendation requests to job and relationship advice, as well as pleas for new music.

And the more followers you have, the more likely you are to ask them questions publicly. People with fewer followers tend to send questions via direct messages. But around 20-30% of asked questions never get answered.

The below infographic from Q&A service InboxQ contains tons of fun — and valuable — facts about how Twitter is being used by average folks and businesses to ask and answer questions.

Twitter, like many modern social media tools, can be just about anything you want to make it. Do you often use Twitter as a Q&A platform?

Click image to see larger version.

[Source: InboxQ]

More About: infographic, q&a, twitter

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