Find: 5 Minutes on The Verge: Shaun Inman

His comments on virtual vs physical interface are insightful. 

5 Minutes on The Verge: Shaun Inman

The Verge - All Posts

The web aficionados among you may know Shaun Inman from his web design site experiments, the Mint analytics package, Fever feed reading app, or more recently, iOS games like The Last Rocket. He took some time to talk to The Verge about the difficulty of implementing touch-based controls, why Super Mario Bros. still works so well, and his favorite pixel art designers. You can find him online at shauninman.com and on Twitter at @shauninman.

Competition: The world codes for NASA in International Space Apps Challenge

The world codes for NASA in International Space Apps Challenge

An international code-a-thon is set to take place in April on seven continents. And in space. From April 21-23, the 48-hour International Space Apps Challenge (ISAC) will take place in tech hubs and other spaces from San Francisco to Sao Paolo, Jakarta to Antarctica—and aboard the International Space Station. Crew members of the McMurdo Station in Antarctica and the ISS will participate, depending on the days’ work demands. Those who cannot attend at one of the code-a-thon locations are able to register independently to participate online.

#more 

ISAC is sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in conjunction with the Second Muse think tank, and in cooperation with other space agencies. During the event, "citizens from around the world will work together to solve current challenges relevant to both space exploration and social need... using minimal resources and maximum brainpower to create outside-the-box solutions in response to interesting problems," according to the organizers.

Participants will form teams and tackle a set of pre-determined challenges that include creating an interface for NASA's planetary data, developing an HTLM5 tablet app for citizen scientists using earth science data from NASA's Earth Observations site, and an open data challenge that will use information from the Kepler space observatory.

One of the intriguing elements of the challenge is the goal to "(e)ngage citizens in countries with little or no investments in space exploration to contribute to space exploration through open source, open data, and code development." This is one of the reasons the challenge is being hosted by, among others, Nairobi, Kenya's iHub. Kenyans are not renowned for their space program but they are well known for their coding chops.

“We recognize that there are skilled and talented developers, makers and creators all around the world and we are excited to see what they...

Tool: Google and Historypin launch online gallery to celebrate The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee

Interesting platform for visualizing history in situ. AR please?

Google and Historypin launch online gallery to celebrate The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee

Google

This year marks the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, celebrating Her Majesty’s 60 years on the throne. To commemorate this special occasion, we’re teaming up with Historypin to launch an interactive online gallery filled with memories of her time as Queen.

The Pinning The Queen’s History project will be made up of photographic images, videos and audio clips pinned directly onto a Google Map on the dedicated Historypin site. This will let you see historical images in modern context within Google Maps.

Throughout her six decades on the throne, The Queen has undertaken hundreds of visits around the United Kingdom and 261 official overseas visits to 116 different countries. Historypin is inviting people from around the world to submit photos, videos and other memories of The Queen during these visits.

Using Google Maps and Street View, the Historypin platform enables you to pinpoint the exact location of where the imagery was captured. They’ll be overlaid onto Street View, so you can compare glimpses of the Queen’s 60-year reign with how they look today.

The collection has been boosted by the provision of images from The Queen’s overseas visits taken by press photographers, and by photographs of items from the Buckingham Palace’s Royal Archives. Items from the Royal Archives include the sitar presented to The Queen during her visit to India in 1997, an earthenware vase presented to the Queen by the Prime Minister of Japan and a map showing the air routes around South Australia during the 1954 Commonwealth Tour.

The interactive gallery is an opportunity for anyone to contribute to and celebrate The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee on one global platform. We’re honoured that Google Maps can form the foundation of this official gallery.

Submit your memories of The Queen at www.historypin.com/DiamondJubilee/.

Posted by Ed Parsons, Geospatial Technologist, London

(Cross-posted from the Lat Long Blog)

Tool: Meet the web platform again for the first time

Meet the web platform again for the first time

Google Code Blog

By Alex Komoroske, Product Manager

Cross-posted with the Chromium Blog

A few weeks ago one of my developer friends was gushing about the capabilities of his favorite native platform. After every point I felt obliged to point out that the web platform either already had or was actively developing precisely the same capabilities—and then some. He was incredulous. "Prove it," he said.

So I pulled together a few of my favorite examples from the cutting edge of the web platform and recorded three screencasts to help my friend—and others—meet the web platform again for the first time.

The first video, Building on Foundations, goes over how the web platform has been fixing various historical shortcomings and building upon its core strengths, like complicated graphical effects, composability, and advanced text layout.

The next video...

Find: 1-up for web games

Nice leads to web graphics tech. 

1-up for web games

Google Code Blog

By David Glazer, Engineering Director, Google+

Hundreds of millions of users are already having fun playing games on the web. With GDC going on this week (#googlegdc), we wanted to give you an update on our efforts to improve the web ecosystem for game developers.

New technology capabilities

With HTML5, WebGL, and WebRTC, the browser has evolved into a feature-rich gaming platform. We are working closely with all browser vendors to further improve the web’s capabilities with new HTML5 APIs such as Gamepad, Mouse Lock, and Fullscreen.

Native Client (NaCl), a technology that enables console quality games in the browser, is also gaining traction. Starting today, the BlitzTech Gaming engine and the Havok Physics Engine have announced NaCl support, complementing a rich ecosystem of game middleware. Some of the latest games that take advantage of NaCl’s capabilities are Zombie Track Meat, Eets Munchies, Go Home Dinosaurs, Dark Legends, Air Mech, and Ubisoft’s From Dust. You can see an early preview of them at our GDC booth.

Improved distribution and monetization

Using social information in game play allows users to connect in more meaningful ways and developers to build even more compelling games. Google+ games continues to grow and attract exciting new games, including the exclusive launch of the epic fantasy title Kingdom Age last week. To help social game developers reach more users globally, all Google+ games will soon be available in the Chrome Web Store, providing an audience of hundreds of millions of users.

In addition, our In-App Payments solution recently added support for more currencies and optimized the payment flow to enable higher conversions.

Visit us at GDC and on the web

To get started working with us, you can now access a new site, developers.google.com/games, that pulls together all our technologies to help you build, distribute, promote, and monetize your games. And for those of you attending GDC this week, stop by our developer day and our booth. We are looking forward to continuing our collaboration with the gaming community and bringing the best games to hundreds of millions of Internet gamers.

David Glazer, Engineering Director for Google+ .

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Find: Forking the code: how GitHub is changing software development

About the impact of github. 

Forking the code: how GitHub is changing software development

The Verge - All Posts

The web-based software hosting service GitHub is everywhere lately, hosting over 2 million source code repositories being visited by 1.3 million users. Wired has a great look at the origins of the company — and the service itself — starting with the very beginnings of the Linus Torvalds-created Git version control software in 2005. What GitHub has excelled in doing is providing access and opportunity to programmers from around the world, giving them the chance to tinker with code that they may not have otherwise had the chance to touch, and then share their changes with a broad community of participants. It's a marked shift from the way software development had often been approached, with only a select few given permission to commit...

Data: Campaign Finance Data in Real Time

Campaign Finance Data in Real Time

NYT > Open

Political campaigns can change every day. The Campaign Finance API now does a better job of keeping pace.

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