Forget about traditional touchscreen displays, laser keyboards, and gesture-based controls. None of those have the same wacky sci-fi appeal as “Skinput,” the new self-touch input method Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft are tag teaming . Skinput is essentially a touchscreen interface for your flesh, but don’t worry, it doesn’t require any surgery or limb replacements.
For the full story, go to Maximum PC
Just as you have one heart, and one brain, your Windows installation comes with but one desktop. Sure, you can change the look of this digital meeting space by applying new wallpapers, or adding sidebars and widgets, or letting Windows 7 do all that automatic stuff that it does every ten minutes or so. But that’s not really changing the desktop per se–at the end of the day, you’re still blessed (or cursed) with the same ol’ functionality that’s been a staple of the Windows platform since its inception. That’s about to change.
For the full story, go to Maximum PC
LG has announced the Mini GD880, a phone it says is a ‘response’ to unwieldy large touchscreen handsets on the market. The phone appears to be mostly about its design, with LG extolling the virtues of the ’smallest and slimmest’ 3.2-inch touchscreen phone on the market. The touch display also extends to the edges of the phone, which LG says gives it “a finish that is as smooth as ice”. Socially conscious There’s Wi-Fi, A-GPS, a 5MP camera with face detection and push email too under the skin to add some decent phone features to the game. There’s also 7.2Mbps HSDPA and social networking tools, such as Social Network Connect, which allows linking of your online buddies to their contacts on the phone (similar to that seen on the LG Intouch Max Android handset)
The full story can be found on Tech Radar
For anyone wanting to learn the art and craft of 3D modelling and animation, there are few better starting points than Cheeta D. Developed exclusively for Mac OS X, it features a friendly if prosaic user interface, which conceals some powerful tools. The toolset enables you to model, texture, pose, animate and render your models, from characters to environments. It also has decent import capabilities if you use other 3D packages, with 3DS, LWO and OBJ among the industry standard formats it supports.
The full story can be found on Tech Radar
“Gosh, I sure wish I could make Firefox look more like Google Chrome,” you ask yourself. I’m not going to question your choice of browsers–however you decide to surf the Web is up to you. Nor am I going to point you in the direction of some kind of Google Chrome skin for Firefox. It’s not like Chrome and Firefox are that radically different in regards to the look of their buttons and such. Differences exist, but nothing so groundbreaking as to warrant a customized skin for your Firefox browser
For the full story, go to Maximum PC
Among the many exotic brands we found at the National Audio Show last September, was a name that has not been seen on these shores since the nineties – Onix. Onix started in Brighton way back in the late seventies and went on to become a respected name in audio electronics, with amplifiers like the OA21 making an impression, thanks to solid sound and a particularly clean design in a half-width case. The company disappeared towards the end of the last century, but according to the current owners, lived on in the far east and America, where it expanded its activities into loudspeakers. And it’s these speakers that are now available in the UK, alongside a range of electronics. Manufacture is by Shanling, which is why the two companies share Real Hi-Fi as their UK distributor
The full story can be found on Tech Radar
Back in 1996, James Cameron announced that he would be creating a film called Avatar , a science-fiction epic that would feature photo-realistic, computer-generated characters. He had a treatment for the film, which already defined many things, including the Na’vi – a primitive alien race standing ten feet tall with shining blue skin, living in harmony with their jungle-covered planet Pandora. Soon after, though, Avatar had to be shelved as the technology of the time could not satisfy the creative desires of the director. Fast-forward to October 2009: Dan Lemmon, FX supervisor and Andy Jones, animation director at Weta Digital have about two weeks left of visual effects production for Avatar . The near-900 strong crew spanned across six locations are practically working around the clock to achieve what was deemed impossible a decade earlier
The full story can be found on Tech Radar
Well, there you have it–someone’s gone and made a desktop client for interacting with Facebook. It sounds a little lame at first glance. Facebook, after all, works quite well across a number of desktop and portable devices.
For the full story, go to Maximum PC
AeroWorks Free is a Windows 7 taskbar customization utility that allows you skin Windows 7 taskbar without playing with system files. AeroWorks free allows you customize Windows 7 and Vista taskbar in a few clicks.
From the French designers at YBA, but made (like so many other components these days) in China, the YBA YC201 may or may not have anything definably Gallic about it, but is certainly rather natty. We’re very much taken with its use of the display to indicate the function of the nine buttons on the front: unpowered, it tells you absolutely nothing, but once fired up is very easy to use. Round one to YBA. The rest of the appearance is quite impressive for the price, the case being made mostly of aluminium, neatly shaped and fitted together and angular without having the skin piercing sharp edges of one or two brands we could mention. The remote control is a definite point in YBA’s favour, a solid-metal affair that feels and looks particularly impressive
The full story can be found on Tech Radar
