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MacLin : A technologic revolution

A blog of someone addicted to technology

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Tag: Software

An earthquake is never something that is fun to live, it’s even more true for the people in Haïti right now. Every media is talking about it and even if it’s really a sad thing, I strongly believe it would be a good idea to move on… BUT, it certainly is a good thing to get our little internal voice to tell us that there is peoples with a worse day than the one we just had at work…. I wish the best to every people in Haïti and hope that everyone will stand for each other, instead of killing their neighbor as a desperate move for survival. A group is always stronger than an individual.

Now, lets move on to the main subject of this post. It was showed to me by a colleague today, he saw it on Cyberpresse.ca… that took it from CNN… that use the technology of Immersive Media.

Wikipedia have a description of the technology that is surely better than what I could summarize here, so why not simply quote them :

An immersive video is basically a video recording of a real world scene, where the view in every direction is recorded at the same time. During playback the viewer has control of the viewing direction, up down & sideways. Generally the only area that can’t be viewed is the view toward the camera support. The material is recorded as data which when played back through a software player allows the user control of the viewing direction and playback speed. The player control is typically via a mouse or other sensing device and the playback view is typically 4:3 window on a computer display or projection screen or other presentation device such as a head mounted display.

It’s an interesting technology, the video are interactive and let you see what you want while the video is still running !! Awesome !

Here is a video of what it looks like:

Seeing this today remembered me of a night passed at the SONIA lab with my friend J-F Im where he was trying to do stereoscopic vision with 2 development webcams … Awwwwh so good memories!

Yeah, I know… a strange title, but I could not find something better and it remembered me of François Pérusse. Like you surely already know, I have a Mac and its a very nice Macbook Pro. What is also very cool when you buy a Mac, its the OS and the tools that come with it. Mac OSX is very polished, I enjoy using it everyday and Leopard have bring one of my favorite feature from a Linux that I was really missing when I switched… the virtual desktop ! OSX call it space but its the same thing, I was used to organised my desktop by “type”. For example, all web related stuff goes on Desktop #1, music stuff on Desktop #2, chat windows on the #3 and so on. Anyway, on Tiger I had to use “Desktop Manager” to get a similar feature but it had some glitch.

The OS is really nice, but what make using a Mac a pleasant experience is enforced by the set of tools that comes with it. Apple give iLife with their Mac so the customer can have a very easy to use complete media platform. With iLife you can create your personnal website easily (even if I don’t use it, its easy to understand), create your own DVD with all the menu and stuff, manage your pictures and compose your own music. Yes, that’s right ! You can compose your own music using GarageBand.

I was currious to know how this software work so I played with it a little bit. Well, I’m really not a fan of techno music… but well the beat was easy to get and I still managed to create a 4 min song.

TechnoTestGB

If you are interested in knowing a bit more about iLife and to know how to use GarageBand, Apple have a lot of tutorial on their website.

Well, well well… every Mac users should know Quicksilver, if not … then you MUST check this.
Quicksilver is an apps that make you launch any application by simply tapping the firsts letters of its name. It’s very usefull, and fast any hardcore computer users will become addicted! I will not describe all the possibility of Quicksilver there’s a lot! but look at this overview from the official project’s website.

But unfortunately this apps is only for OSX… True, but when an apps is as useful as Quicksilver, we can always expect to see some opensource project emerging, trying to fulfils the needs on other platforms. On Linux there’s a project that is very similar (but still lack some finest) and is called Katapult. There’s a feature I really like in Katapult that I did not found in Quicksilver and it is the integrated calculator.


Katapult and Quicksilver can also find a contact in your address book or a specific file name wich you can launch the application associated with it directly.

For the unfortunate that use the OS of Redmond there is Skylight.

Today I would like to introduce a firefox addon that I tough is usefull. It’s called Interclue. “But what is Interclue doing ?” you may ask, Interclue is showing you what’s hiding behind a link. It’s very nice, look at this screenshot!


I simply pointed my cursor at the “Tableau de bord” link and hit crtl. It’s cool!
I found this addon when I was reading my Linux news on linux.com
Let me know if you like or hate it.