Tweet of the Day: How AirPlay Is Apple’s Little Thing to Make a Big Difference

When we’re constantly barraged with new computers, smartphones and tablets, it’s hard to take the time to appreciate small details that have a lot of significance. Take AirPlay, for example: a feature integrated into Apple’s iOS devices to wirelessly stream content to the new Apple TV.

That feature has the potential to be killer, even at its most practical level, my friend Arnold Kim of MacRumors.com points out in today’s Tweet of the Day: “didn’t really occur to me before, but instantly streaming iphone 4 captured vids to appletv via AirPlay is a pretty killer feature.”

Think about it: You shoot some video of your kids running around in Disneyland, and when other relatives visit you whip out your iPhone, tap “AirPlay” and boom — that video is streaming to your Apple TV and playing on the big screen.  (You can do the same with a photo slideshow, or some new music you just bought off iTunes).

Sharing personal media isn’t normally so seamless: You usually have to attach a cord and copy a file onto a drive, or at least yank out a photo card and stick it into a reader to undergo some sort of uploading process. Streaming is instant.

Here at Wired.com we’ve pondered about the big-picture potential for the Apple TV to be a real game changer thanks to iOS and AirPlay. If third-party apps such as Hulu, Netflix or ABC Player are able to incorporate AirPlay to wireless stream online video content to a TV without requiring a mess of cords or extra accessories, then Apple TV might finally be a smashing hit. Turning the iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad into a multimedia remote was a clever move that effectively turns Apple TV into a media ecosystem built around iOS mobile devices. Wired.com chief Evan Hansen thinks this strategy will disrupt the cable industry.

But as marvelous as that all sounds, building up a major alternative to the traditional cable TV subscription is going to take a great deal of time, even for Apple. In the nearer future, when the Apple TV ships in the next week or two, the hassle-free convenience of being able to share your personal media with a tap of a button should be extremely compelling for gadget lovers.

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The Six-Foot-Tall Sixty-Second History of the Microwave Oven

My childhood was remarkably low-tech for an American kid growing up in the 1980s. I didn’t have cable TV or a computer until I went to college (1997), and didn’t play video games outside of an arcade until we got a NES in 1990. So I always thought microwave ovens came into existence in 1988, when my family got one. In fact, they’d already been in commercial production for more than 40 years.

Stacy Conradt at Mental Floss gives an appropriately accelerated history of what she calls “the Not-so-microwave“:

The first oven intended for commercial sale in 1947 was almost six feet tall, tipped the scale at 750 pounds and cost $5,000 in 1947 dollars. The second version, produced in 1954, was better but still needed work: it gobbled electricity and cost $2,000– $3,000, at a time when the average cost of a new car was about $1,700… Regular households didn’t care much about microwaves until 1967, when a relatively low-energy model costing just $500 came out.

You ever wonder how microwave ovens work? It’s just slightly more complicated than this, but basically microwaves (which are like radio waves, but with a frequency closer to the infrared spectrum) pass over food, creating a weak alternating electromagnetic field. Water molecules — which are basically in everything we eat — also have a weak electromagnetic charge, and they all realign themselves to match the polarity of the microwave radiation — kind of like passing a household magnet over a pile of iron filings. When the water molecules move, the temperature raises (because molecular motion is all temperature is). Get those molecules moving fast enough and long enough, and baby, you’ve got a stew going.*

*I know, it’s the second time I’ve used this Arrested Development reference in as many weeks. It just feels right.

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Sigma SD1 Crams 46 Million Pixels onto Crop-Frame Chip

Sigma’s new flagship SD1 SLR stands out from the flood of camera announcements at the Photokina show. Why? It is a monster, a crop-sensor camera with 46 megapixels crammed onto its imaging chip.

The trick here is that the sensor uses Sigma’s Foveon tech. This stacks red, green and blue-sensitive pixels on top of each other, allowing accurate color-capture at each pixel-site. Compare this with conventional sensors which pull color information from adjoining pixels and averaging it to work out the actual colors. Sigma’s method should give better color accuracy and sharper images.

Because of this stacking, though, Sigma’s pixel-counts are effectively one third of the claimed figure if you count actual dots on the photos. In the past, this has made Sigma’s specs look rather pathetic, with the claimed 15MP of its SD15 coming closer to 5MP. With this new 46MP behemoth Sigma is saying a big “screw you” to everyone else. Even 15MP sensor is great these days.

Elsewhere, the specs are fairly pedestrian. There are just 11 autofocus points and the 3-inch LCD has only 460,000 dots compared the the 900,000 found in any other flagship camera (including compacts). This is a pre-release, so many of the numbers are not yet available. Just what will the maximum ISO be, for example, or the price?

I’m pretty excited about getting my hands on one, though. If this thing has the ISO part licked, then those could be some sweet, sweet images it pumps out.

SD1 product page [Sigma. Warning: Flash]

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Future of Reading’s Present Filled With Smart Concept Videos

With the success of the Kindle, Nook, Sony readers, and tablets like the iPad, it seems like electronic books have finally arrived. But I think we’re actually still stuck in between two developmental phases on the way to the future.

For a long time, work on interactive books was about building either theory or prototypes. People talked about what multimedia reading might or could or should look like, and they built what were mostly one-off or low-volume projects using CD-ROMs, software applications, or the web.

Now, though, the theory and the prototypes have blended: even when designers and programmers don’t have the resources to put their ideas into production, they have the visual tools (and we have the device literacy) to make concept videos that explain clearly what we think/hope the future of reading will look like.

Here are three examples. The first (which you may have already seen) is from Microsoft, demonstrating its aborted Courier tablet project:

The second, which I think is very smartly done, is from the design consultancy firm IDEO. It details three concepts: “Nelson,” a reading application that incorporates commentary on and context for the primary text; “Coupland,” a reader with a built-in social- and sharing-network; and “Alice,” an interactive/participatory reading/gaming app where readers can “unlock” elements of a story by manipulating the device or traveling to geotagged places.

This third concept video, from Canadian new-media-publishing firm PadWorx, is for an interactive electronic version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula scheduled to ship this fall:

The breadth of approaches reflects the difference in backgrounds. There are relatively few people currently working in this space with a long history of working on interactive fiction. E-books — even future-concept e-books — assembled by traditional publishers or booksellers tend to look like a traditional publisher’s or bookseller’s idea of what a book ought to look like. Microsoft casts a wide net, but it’s fundamentally a computer software company; IDEO has futurists who work in design and advertising; PadWorx’s e-book is assembled by makers with a background in film, animation, and video game design, and it shows.

For another view of an actual (not projected/conceptual) application — one perhaps driven slightly more by a mobile app designer’s experience — look again at Stephen Fry’s wonderful, autobiographical myFry app:

I don’t think anyone knows exactly what the future of reading will look like. But I think we may finally have a handle on how we might try to see and explain it before it finally arrives.

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Volkswagen Plants Audio Ad in Print Newspaper

Readers of The Times of India heard an audio advertisement when they unfolded the print edition of the newspaper this morning. (You read that right.)

Volkswagen paid the publication to fit an audio chip inside the pages (above) that plays in an endless loop until you close the paper, according to tech blog Digital Inspiration. For power, the chip appears to incorporate a photodiode, a photo detector that converts light into current or voltage. That’s pretty clever.

Not a believer? Check out the video below showing the audio ad in action.

It’s clearly a publicity stunt on VW’s part, and it seems kind of creepy, but most readers are reacting positively to the ad on Twitter. And we’re sure The Times is enjoying the extra cash from the eccentric ad, like any print publication would these days.

“One of those rare days when ppl in #mumbai will buy times of india to see (also hear) the Volkswagen advertisement and not for news,” tweeted Moulin Parikh.

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