Keene-haywood

The followers of all things start-up at TechCrunch just posted this about an HP, Yahoo, Intel combined launch into testing cloud computing. I am willing to bet it will get cloudier.

Keene Haywood (University of Texas@Austin - DIIA)

software, webapps

oh my...

The changes to Google Maps are subtle but nice. Specifically, the Directions feature has been moved down to the left and now sits next to your My Maps tab. The Directions interface is also changed to accommodate the new placement on the page. The column tab for hiding the left hand column is now at the top of the column and is more obvious (I circled the tab in red below to really make it obvious). Previously, it was just a small little triangle midway down the column that casual users probably missed. Hiding this left hand column gives you more screen real estate for the actual map (very handy on notebook screens). Also the colors have been changed to a nice light blue which is easier on the eyes. Also, the Print, Send and Link dialog boxes were also given a facelift. These are just the more obvious changes I have noticed. If you seen any other changes, post them here in the comments.

Hello everyone. I am off to the Colorado high country for a week of lung exercise. I will return the week after next with more content and inspiration from the highlands of the Rocky Mountain state. Have a good week!

Keene Haywood (University of Texas @ Austin)

Apple fans may be so overly enthusiastic about their devices because Christmas comes several times a year for the faithful when Apple releases new products and makes new announcements. Heck, the rollouts should be on an iCal calendar pushed out by Cupertino HQ. In any case, the four pronged launch last week of the iPhone 3G, the 2.0 version of the iphone software, MobileMe and the iPhone/Touch Apps store gave much fodder for frustration and joy. When I upgraded my iPhone to v.2.0 and started loading up on free apps, I was a kid in a candy store. How cool!...Well that excitement lasted about a day when all of a sudden my apps were crashing left and right. I could not get anything to launch after the initial installation. Hmmm.... it turns out that its easy to forget that the iPhone is running the Mac OS X and now that applications are being installed, all sorts of "interesting" things can start happening.

Many of you have undoubtedly heard of Dr. Michael Wesch by now. His Web 2.0 YouTube videos have been viewed millions of times. His work is rapidly breaking the traditional education mold of how today's students learn (or don't learn as the case may be). He has embraced many of the emerging social networking tools and has taken a critical look at the brief history of YouTube. A cultural anthropologist by training, Wesch is applying this to how students learn in this new digital media age and what it means for the future of education. Recently, Wesch posted another stellar video of a presentation titled A Portal to Media Literacy he gave at the University of Manitoba on June 17, 2008. The YouTube video is just over an hour long but well worth watching in its entirety...

Unless you have somehow happened to miss the news the past few weeks, today Apple finally rolled out its long anticipated new 3G iPhone along with the MobileMe and the new iPhone Apps store. And somewhere over in Cupertino, there are no doubt dozens and dozens of Apple employees who dread these rollouts. Hyped to the hilt and covered by the media to a suffocating extent, any new product out of 1 Infinite Loop always faces slings and arrows to some misfortune as well as praise. The antiperspirant must be handed out in cases at Apple's HQ during these times. Today's rollout was no different.

When Apple bought the NeXT OS almost twelve years ago to save its own troubled next generation OS efforts, the Mac platform suddenly became a very viable platform for researchers in the fields of medicine, physics, biology, geology, chemistry and genetics to name a few. Built on the tired and true rock solid foundations of UNIX, the new Mac OS X was now capable of running many UNIX programs developed by scientists. One computer could run Mac OS X and Unix. Furthermore, when Apple integrated Intel chips into their computers along with Boot Camp and third party virtualization programs such as VM Ware and Parallels (let's forget about VirtualPC shall we) began appearing, Macs now supported Windows as well, giving three bangs for the buck. Now, one computer replaces three on the desk of researchers...

Digital cameras. Everyone seems to have one, and boy aren't they great! Instant gratification. But can your still or video camera shoot 1200 frames per second?

I apologize for the two week pause in postings. I was attending the fabulous NMC annual summer conference in Princeton, NJ. I am sure many of you might have been there. I then took a few days of vacation and just returned to the summer heated Austin landscape. I will be dishing out some new content very soon, so stay tuned fair readers.

Keene Haywood (University of Texas@Austin - DIIA)