Got to love xkcd.

xkcd – A Webcomic – Nowhere.

So Google Wave is out, well, a “preview” version of Google Wave is out. I received my invite in my inbox this morning along with about one hundred thousand others. What does it look like?

Nothing remarkable looking there really, but what’s behind it is a little more fascinating (if you’re a nerd). What is that fascinating technology? Synchronous communication – as you’re typing the text appears on your Wave companions screen.

Whilst at first this may not sound like much, I’ve slowly found my head filling up with the possibilities. Here’s a test case:

I recently was providing some support to a client. We were chatting in Skype and I was using TeamViewer to connect to their computer. As I could see their screen I could see what they were typing. Watching them type I knew what their question was after they’d written a few words and was instantly able to compose my answer. Often I’d finished my answer before they’d finished typing their question. I’d have to wait for them to finish typing, send their message, and then I’d instantly hit send on my message. They must have been a little confused: “How can he answer so quickly?!”

I was their caped crusader, their saviour, the support guru with mysterious powers of IT knowledge. Doing this I realised how IM is somewhat frustrating – how long do we spend watching ‘Timmy is typing…’

Google Wave finishes with that – now communication is as synchronous as a conversation. What’s more is it’s all open source and adds a massive extension function to allow you to plug Wave into a myriad of possibilities around the web.

Interested?

As you can see in that image above, I have some invites left. Less than six though – I’ve got three left, if you’d like one, leave a comment here and I’ll send an invite to the email address you use for your comment.

I’m an ardent Firefox user – have been for years and despite all the developments in other browsers on the market, Firefox still provides me with everything that I need, and none of the other browsers come close.

Still, every once in a while I’ll spend a bit of time in Chrome or Opera – usually when I’m working on music and don’t want to open my last Firefox session which, inevitably, will consist of about 20 tabs.

Today was one of those cases where I found myself using Chrome to check my feeds and I noticed a post about Microsoft giving away copies of their web development tools. I headed over to the MS site and lo and behold I could not watch any of the demo videos due to a lack of Microsoft’s Silverlight product – a bit of a competitor to Adobe’s Flash.

I tried to install Silverlight and what message do I get but:

Microsoft Silverlight may not be supported on your computer’s hardware or operating system.
This Web browser or operating system may not be compatible with Silverlight. Please review the system requirements and, if you wish to proceed, choose the link for your operating system.

Even better is that they include a table of compatibility that doesn’t even acknowledge Chrome (not to mention Opera):

Silverlight Compatibility List

I wonder is that an intentional dig at Chrome? That wouldn’t really make sense if Microsoft want to push Silverlight as a real alternative to Flash.

Strangely, one of the Silverlight developers blogged about hacking the detection scripts to allow installation for Chrome. This was back in February and yet they still haven’t sorted out support nearly 8 months and 2 versions later. This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me at all.

Anyway, the result was that I quickly stopped bothering to look at the MS web developer site.

There’s some amusing back and forth going on over at patphelan.net regarding a post about battery life on the iPhone and how little use it is to him if it’s going to die after 4 hours.

…4hrs later it was dead as a dodo.

No phone, no email, no effing way of getting the SIM out, no access to a charger and lots of missed calls.

I rushed back to the office dreaming of electricity for my paperweight, gave it a quick charge and my life was good again.

It was gone again 4hrs later, this resulted in a hilarious quest for a paper clip in the Mespil Hotel, (they dont do paper clips) got a result though, bought a packet of safety pins in a chemist and suddenly I was good to go in my E72.

I delved into the comments thread leaving my thoughts, but nothing beats Bernard Tyer’s comments which you should check out.

I have always found it remarkable the lengths to which iFans will go to excuse design flaws on Apple’s behalf.

Microsoft's Courier Tablet

Wow, this looks like quite a nifty product. Some real thought going into UX and UI design. Read the full article over on Gizmodo for more information

It feels like the whole world is holding its breath for the Apple tablet. But maybe we’ve all been dreaming about the wrong device. This is Courier, Microsoft’s astonishing take on the tablet.

To watch the video, you’ll first need to install the flash player.

‘ Courier is a real device, and we’ve heard that it’s in the “late prototype” stage of development. It’s not a tablet, it’s a booklet. The dual 7-inch (or so) screens are multitouch, and designed for writing, flicking and drawing with a stylus, in addition to fingers. They’re connected by a hinge that holds a single iPhone-esque home button. Statuses, like wireless signal and battery life, are displayed along the rim of one of the screens. On the back cover is a camera, and it might charge through an inductive pad, like the Palm Touchstone charging dock for Pre.

via Courier: First Details of Microsoft’s Secret Tablet – Microsoft courier tablet – Gizmodo.

Well this looks like quite a change for Nokia. Very interesting to see the linux-based Maemo OS in action, which you can see in the video demonstration below.

Last 100 had this to say:

Nokia N900

Despite being pitched as the closest thing to a PC that fits in your pocket (”PC-like experience on a handset-sized device”) — a common theme in the marketing of all recently released smartphones — the N900’s UI appears to be extremely finger-friendly and optimized for its 3.5 inch 800 x 480 pixel (resistive) touch screen, where the previous and slightly larger N810 (4.1 inch) was stuck in a PC-centric UI design paradigm.

And unlike the N810 and, for some critics, the company’s recently released flagship Symbian powered smartphone, the N97 (see my review), the N900, on paper at least, has the processing power to match its UI and computing ambitions – an ARM Cortex-A8 processor running at 600MHz with OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics acceleration.

via Nokia can do UI design after all, Linux-based N900 unveiled | last100.

Excellent video that I recommend getting your eyes around. It was made in collaboration with The Scratch Perverts, Foreign Beggars, Shlomo and Will Clarke with sound design by Will Cohen.

More info to be found at www.neurosonicsaudiomedical.com and Motionographer. Thanks to Nialler9 for sharing and Alan C for sending this on.

One would imagine having 64 bit computing as a physical possibility for the past 6 years would have meant that software makers would be on top of this opportunity but, remarkably, in the power-needs world of music production nothing could be further from the truth.

I’ve recently started work on a new film project and felt that now might be the time to consider moving to a 64 bit version of Windows in order to take advantage of a system with 12Gb of RAM – something that could greatly benefit the use of the Vienna Symphonic Library – however I couldn’t have anticipated just how complicated such a move could be.

Issues

It’s remarkable how unprepared some of the software makers are. I’ve been testing on a spare machine and so far I’ve found:

• Propellerheads Reason will not work with Cubase 5 64-bit, but will work when Cubase is running in 32-bit mode;
• Apple Quicktime will also not work with Cubase 5 64-bit;
• It appears that the Waves plug-ins won’t work if the OS is 64-bit.

I haven’t even gotten round to testing a few other crucial items. What amazes me though has been some of the responses from software vendors, including one who point blank didn’t know whether their software would work when Cubase was running in the 32 bit emulation environment on a Windows x64 OS. I tested it for them and reported back – um, is there a reason we shell out hundreds and hundreds of Euro for your software?

It appears that I’d be foolish to even contemplate switching to a 64-bit OS for the foreseeable future. I really do want to embrace this as the way forward but there’s just too many potential pitfalls that it seems like a bad idea. This means that I’ll have to drop this fresh install of Windows 7 RC from the laptop and then I have to try and work out whether I’m going to go with Vista32 or XP. It also means that there’s crap all point in me purchasing more than 4Gb of RAM for my new machine (and of course I’d still only have about 3Gb of addressable RAM because my graphics cards will take up some of that addressable space). Arse and feck anyway.

Of course, as everything barring Waves will run in the 32 bit emulation mode, perhaps it still would be worthwhile..

Perhaps I’m just wrecking my own head – but I keep going round in circles on this.

Fair play to the guys at VSL though for pushing forward on the 64 bit end of things, including their new plugin bundle, the Vienna Suite.

Invisible Agent, Irish electro, techno and all-sorts record label, have just pushed out another of their patented “Agent Casts” (a pod-cast with more “invisible”).

Check it out over here: John Dalton playing a blend of straight up Techno – download it for free.

Tracklisting

1. Gerald Mitchell – Out the Boat
2. Gaetano Parisio & Danilo Vigorito – Logica EP C1
3. Alba Patera – Cag
4. Jeff Mills – La Force
5. Gary Martin – Puna Kauai
6. Leni Faki – Lusaka Pt.2
7. Mark Williams – Love Club Pt.2
8. Bryan Zentz – D-Clash
9. Leandro Gamez – You are Poison
10. The Deacon – Multi-Dimensional Drama
11. John Dalton – After
12. Gayle San – Get Serious
13. Ben Sims Vs Mark Broom – City Life
14. Rino Cerrone – Total Off
15. John Dalton – Trial4
16. Diego – Mind Detergent (Robert Hood Mix 2)
17. Deetron – Don’t You Know Why?
18. Gerald Mitchell – Freedom Dancer
19. John Dalton – Tint
20. Bandulu – Deadly Ride

via New Agent Cast (DJ Mix) from John Dalton (August 2009) – Invisible Agent.