A friend of mine spotted a familiar name under the musical submissions. You probably know Raph Koster as the designer of Star Wars: Galaxies, the ill-fated MMO. But folks at The Sixtyone know him for his selections under “folk and instrumental”. You can listen to them here. Unfortunately, they’re pretty good, so I can’t ridicule them.
Well, this is a nice end-run around Apple. In a nutshell: develop in Flash CS5, cross-compile to iPhone as a standalone app. Public beta later this year.
How is this different from Adobe Flash Player 10 coming to iPhone? Will iPhone users be able to view web content built with Flash technology in the iPhone browser?
The new support for iPhone applications in the Flash Platform tooling will not allow iPhone users to browse web content built with Flash technology on iPhone, but it may allow developers to repackage existing web content as applications for iPhone if they choose to do so.
Flash Player uses a just-in-time compiler and virtual machine within a browser plug-in to play back content on websites. Those technologies are not allowed on the iPhone at this time, so a Flash Player for iPhone is not being made available today.
Flash Professional CS5 will enable developers to build applications for iPhone that are installed as native applications. Users will be able to access the apps after downloading them from Apple’s App Store and installing them on iPhone or iPod touch.
This s a huge game-changer. Expect the App Store to get overwhelmed with Flash apps within days of this becoming available as every good Flash app is ported over. It’s another solid step on Adobe’s part towards making Flash a common rendering and development platform across multiple devices, too — Flash 10.1 is already scheduled to land on basically every other smartphone, and honestly, users don’t care whether it’s runtime interpreted or not.
I think this is the first time I have ever seen someone claim that science fiction used to be mainstream and isn’t anymore!
John Mullan, Naughtie’s fellow judge for this year’s prize and professor of English at University College London, said that he “was not aware of science fiction,” arguing that science fiction has become a “self-enclosed world”.
“When I was 18 it was a genre as accepted as other genres,” he said, but now “it is in a special room in book shops, bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other.”
I have search alerts set up on a variety of sites for “theory of fun.” Today this little gem popped up: Rolighetsteorin. It translates as “theory of fun for safety” according to Google, and it appears to be a Volkswagen campaign in Sweden that is trying to use fun for social improvement.
This page is dedicated to the idea that something as simple as happiness is the absolute easiest way to get people to change. That it does not need to be more difficult than to make things a bit more fun to have to change for the better.Which does not matter as long as there is improvement.For yourself, the environment or whatever you want.
An example of what they mean: getting dramatically more people to take the stairs instead of the escalator (which of course, provides more cardiovascular benefit).
It is fun to see the expressions on people’s faces as they puzzle out why the stairs (or the garbage can that makes a whistling cartoon “falling from a great height” sound when you toss trash in it) are there. The stats seem to bear out that there is an effect.
I would posit that the trash can would have diminishing returns compared to the stairs, because the stairs have expressive potential and are more of a toy; the trash can will get old since there is only one input and one output.
Dr. Tracy Alloway of Scotland’s University of Stirling, says her study shows using Facebook stretches our “working memory” our short-term or recent memory, while Twitter, YouTube and text messages tend to weaken it.
Alloway studies working memory and has developed a training program to increase the performance of children – ages 11 to 14 – who are slow learners. She found:
Keeping up-to-date with Facebook improved the children’s IQ scores
Playing video games – especially those that require planning and strategy – and Sudoku also were beneficial
Using Twitter, YouTube and text messaging does not engage enough of the brain to be helpful, and actually reduce attention span.
At this point, it is completely unsurprising to see yet another validation of the ways in which games and puzzles can help the brain. It was interesting to see, however, that Twitter and the like may simply be more akin to the random reinforcement dopamine jolts of addiction.
