We’ve seen a dozen iPad cases with keyboards now, but Crux has gone the extra step by incorporating a battery in the shell for an extra 7.5 hours, plus a touchpad. Is that worth $250? No. [Crux via UberGizmo]More »
All I will say about this is that if you consider lending your iPad to your feline for some browser-based cat-game fun, please oh please wear a screen protector. Won’t someone think of the chiiiiildren! [Games For Cats]More »
Businesses are buying up iPads like crazy, but half of them don’t know what to do with the tablet devices once they hand them over to their employees.More »
Our attention was drawn to the personal site of Bret Victor at WorryDream.com today by Gizmodo. We’re impressed.
This is a site built by the man who designed the original iPad and iPod touch interface, the interactive data graphics in Al Gore’s iPad book on climate change, engineered an analog-modeling synth, a train trip scheduler with an innovative UI and many more projects in Victor’s huge portfolio.
The site takes the newest technologies and pushes them to the edge to create a dynamic, interactive, always-moving site. That shouldn’t be a surprise. Victor is a man who thinks a lot about the newest concepts in interface design, as evidenced by his thoughts on dynamic pictures.
And some pages make the most of old technology to get a beautiful result. Take a look at his bio: it looks great, but it’s made of simple, static image files.
One thing that many will be surprised to learn: there’s no Flash involved. WorryDream joins sites like Agent 8 Ball that achieve things traditionally only possible with Flash on the back of HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.
It’s not without its flaws. It can be a touch slow, and the interface wouldn’t exactly make Jakob Nielsen happy, but we don’t care: this site looks amazing, and such flaws are to be expected when it comes to highly experimental concepts.
If you’re interested in interface design and just how far current technology can be stretched, you’d do well to keep up to date with everything Victor does.
Amazon Cloud Player has been laying low following its scuffle with Sony Music, but that hasn’t kept the company’s developers from rolling a crucial new feature out — support for Apple’s iOS devices, which it didn’t have on day one. Despite running in the Safari browser window, we’ve confirmed that songs will indeed play. If you’ve got a device handy, give it a try yourself; otherwise, we’ll update with impressions a little later this evening.
Update: Great news — we ran the Cloud Player on an original iPad and iPhone 3GS without a hitch. In fact, there was very little (if any) lag or time delay when buffering a new song, and were able to refresh playlists and other information quickly. The interface of the Cloud Player is almost the same as — if not identical to — the page that loads up on your computer browser.
Even better, the Cloud Player works flawlessly with the multitasking controls in iOS; the usual forward/pause/volume options are all usable as you play Angry Birds. Sadly, there is just one bump in the road that keeps the process from being perfectly smooth: mobile Safari prohibits you from doing drag-and-drops, which adds a couple extra steps to the process of adding songs to your playlists. Take a look below for some screenshots of the Cloud Player in action.
Sean Hollister contributed to this post.
Amazon Cloud Player streams tunes to iOS, following silent upgrade (updated) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 07 May 2011 22:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.