Thursday, May 08, 2014

drag2share: Adobe Voice: A Free iPad App For Pitching Brilliant Ideas to the World

Source: http://gizmodo.com/adobe-voice-a-free-ipad-app-for-pitching-brilliant-ide-1572443425

Adobe Voice: A Free iPad App For Pitching Brilliant Ideas to the World

Everyone with a cool new idea or vision wants a concise and beautiful video to illustrate their story and broadcast it to the world. But oh, right—you suck at all things visual and just learned how to make something move in After Effects. Adobe's new iPad app, Voice, is there to hold your hand in the making of presentation videos.

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drag2share - drag and drop RSS news items on your email contacts to share (click SEE DEMO)

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drag2share: Experimental Color-Changing Fabric Could Turn You Into a Chameleon

Source: http://gizmodo.com/experimental-color-changing-fabric-could-turn-you-into-1573373997

Experimental Color-Changing Fabric Could Turn You Into a Chameleon

Animals do it , so why shouldn't we? This experimental textile project by Judit Eszter Karpati allows a fabric to change its color in a snap, based on its surroundings, thanks to some Arduino brains.

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drag2share - drag and drop RSS news items on your email contacts to share (click SEE DEMO)

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drag2share: Arizona will get non-stop clean energy from hot air drafts

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/05/07/solar-wind-energy-tower/

Solar Wind Energy Tower

Many green energy sources only generate power in a narrow range of conditions. Solar panels won't work when it's dark, for instance, and wind turbines are useless when everything is still. If Solar Wind Energy Tower has its way, though, we'll soon get clean electricity around the clock. It recently received permission to build a tower in San Luis, Arizona that produces power through hot air downdrafts; water injected at the top of the tower cools the desert winds, dragging them toward turbines at the bottom. Since it's almost always hot in the area, the plant should run all day and night for much of the year. An ideal summer day could have it churning out a healthy 1,250 megawatts per hour.

The downdraft tower should be ready for action in 2018, and Solar Wind Energy Tower hopes to license the technology to others. As you might imagine, the need for a hot climate is going to narrow the customer list -- you won't see this system in more temperate regions. However, it could be a boon to both the southern US as well as Africa, the Middle East and other places where heat is far more abundant than eco-friendly energy.

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Via: Phys.org

Source: Solar Wind Energy Tower, Accesswire (MarketWatch)

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drag2share - drag and drop RSS news items on your email contacts to share (click SEE DEMO)

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drag2share: Adobe Voice lets amateurs make videos like a pro (sort of)

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/05/08/adobe-voice/

Whether you're doing a book report or trying to show someone how to boil an egg: video can make it a heck of a lot easier for you to get your point across. Adobe's new iPad app, Voice, hopes to make the often time-consuming experience of creating your own such videos a lot faster and easier. The app guides you through making a sharable vid, from the conception of your idea to the finished product. We've had a chance to try it out for the past week. We found that the app makes it easy to create some pretty professional looking stuff without having any special skills or a lot of time, but there's just one thing missing.

To kick things off with Voice, you'll need to pick a topic and a story type. Once you do, the app will launch a project for your video -- complete with instructional cards that give you an idea of how to tell your tale. The app is broken into several types of stories, which you may not realize are formulaic, but they are. For instance, a "Hero's Journey" will start with a Setup Card, followed by a Call to Adventure, Challenge, Climax and finally, a Resolution. Each card provides a bit of detail on what you should be saying (and showing) on each card. It seems a bit elementary at first, but it's surprising how that little bit of direction can help you stay on track and create a video someone is actually going to be able to follow and want to watch.

Simple is the name of the game with Voice. The app's instructions are really easy to follow, as is adding desired elements to your story. Tapping on a card opens it up for editing. For each part of your story you can add a still photo, text or an icon from the app's built-in library. Voice doesn't support video elements (yet), which keeps things simple, but is a huge downer for someone who wants to include, you know, some actual moving pictures in their project. That said, the built-in photos and the icons are really great looking -- we considered them an asset rather than something we had to settle for. All of the (over 100,000!) images you can access from within the app are available under a Creative Commons license, so you're free to add them as you please. Even better, Adobe keeps track of everything you use, and includes proper attribution in the credits at the end of your video.

Rather than recording audio for the full video at once, Voice does it one card at at a time. Once you're done, Adobe enhances your voiceover to make it sound like it was recorded in a studio rather than on your iPad. It also adds a soundtrack to your monologue from its library. Track options are organized by the type of emotion they're intended to evoke -- i.e. playful, relaxed -- and are mixed in like the score to a good movie, so you barely notice them. Each video also gets the benefit of one of 32 different themes. Built by graphic artists, the themes take a page from Adobe's professional motion graphics program After Effects, and handle things like timing and transitions for your vid. The end result is a polished, professional-looking job (seriously) suitable for your business, or just making all the others kids in class look like rank amateurs.

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Source: iTunes

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drag2share - drag and drop RSS news items on your email contacts to share (click SEE DEMO)

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drag2share: LG gives a taste of the upcoming G3 with its first QuadHD phone

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/05/08/lg-just-released-its-first-quadhd-phone-but-its-not-the-g3/

KDDI has just launched the first QuadHD (QHD) phone solely for the Japanese market, the Isai FL model built by LG. That gives us a preview of LG's G3's 5.5-inch 2,560 x 1,440 display and its record 538ppi resolution. As it happens, LG just announced that the panel has now been certified, and re-confirmed that it'll be installed in it's "forthcoming flagship smartphone," ie the G3. KDDI's model may may give us an idea of what LG's eagerly-awaited G2 successor will be like spec-wise, too. The Isai FL has the narrow bezels we saw in leaked images of the G3, but sports a different design lacking the LG's rear buttons and rumored metal back. It also has some of LG's Knock functions and will come in three colors with a 13-megapixel camera, 3,000mAh battery, 2GB of RAM and a quad-core Snapdragon 2.5GHz CPU. That lines up with some of the G3's rumored specs, but we won't have to wait long to know them -- it's set to arrive on May 27th.

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Via: Engadget Japan

Source: KDDI

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drag2share - drag and drop RSS news items on your email contacts to share (click SEE DEMO)

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