links for 2008-09-30

  • Tibetan debates involve two parties: a defender (dam bca' ba), who answers, and a questioner (rigs lam pa). The roles of defender and questioner imply very different commitments, as Daniel Perdue explains: “The defender puts forth assertions for which he is held accountable. The challenger raises qualms to the defender’s
  • You can photograph or scan designs you've drawn by hand using a pen and paper, and make them physical objects and send them to you in the mail.
Published
Categorized as Awareness

links for 2008-09-29

Published
Categorized as Awareness

Droid Draw Android User Interface Builder

Droid Draw (available at www.droiddraw.org) is a great tool for rapid prototyping of Google Android user interfaces. While the XML schema that underlies the Android resource description is not *that* complicated, it is good to see that fairly robust drag and drop UI tools are coming along so well.

The Droid Draw site also offers a number of handy reference pages. Keep up the great work folks!

Posting HD video on Vimeo

I’ve had a Sony HC1 HDV camera for about two years now, and I love it, but unfortunately I haven’t quite had the horsepower to edit in high-definition until recently. The other half of the equation is that it hasn’t been until recently that there was a decent way to present HD video online in a friendly manner, other than posting a huge Quicktime video file.

Fortunately, Vimeo, Blip.tv and other video hosting sites the higher quality capabilities of the recent Flash video codec. YouTube also supports a higher-quality progressive stream these days, but still limits the resolution to less than 1280×720 aka 720p. We even began supporting HD on Cruxy, but that was only for downloadable content, not streamed.

Watch my HD video of whales off Cape Cod on Vimeo.com

On a related subject, one of the limitations we faced with streaming HD at Cruxy was that the throughput of Amazon’s S3 service, on which Cruxy.com is built, was not enough to provide a good experience for viewers. We’d need to add something like Akamai or Limelight on the front-end to ensure minimal buffering. The recent news that Amazon is launching a CDN service makes me quite excited about the possibilities of serving HD video progressively streamed directly from S3.

For now if you want to post HD video online, check out Vimeo’s HD Video FAQ, as I think its the best solution for now.

Also, make sure to check out the HD Video on channel on Vimeo for some truly beautiful and amazing online motion pictures.

Four Years of Videoblogging

You may have heard, I recently got married, and as part of that spent an inordinate amount of time dealing with photo and video archives. I’m not much of a “filmmaker”, but Micaela and I have had fun sharing some of our personal adventures with our family, friends and the world.

What I appreciate the most was the fact that we hadn’t set out to document so much of our lives, we just did it, in true blogging style. What we ended up with was a wonderful retrospective of some of the amazing days that led us to our wedding day.

And now for your enjoyment…