Some Random Dude

Multitouch is so passe, Face control is where it’s at.

Natural User Interfaces are developing at a furious pace. It seems like the Kinect has really put a fire under this space.

One of the more interesting (and potentially embarrassing) examples of this I’ve seen recently is using a webcam and some custom face tracking software to control music software via OSC. There are a few videos below.

A lot of early momentum around alternative input mechanisms seems to happen in music software. Controlling a DAW with a mouse and keyboard is pretty limiting compared to the tactile nature of musical instruments, and it’s difficult to give a good “performance” with a mouse. A lot of the early hacks for the Wii controller happened in this space, the Kinect was the same, now face control. Will be interesting to see what if anything useful falls out of this for business application.

FaceOSC JAM2 and Ableton from Jonathan Hammond on Vimeo.

faceOSC & touchOSC testing with ableton live from Kostia Rapoport on Vimeo.

FaceOSC from Kyle McDonald on Vimeo.

Uwe continues to do great work on the community version of VersionInsight

Uwe Schuster just keeps on adding new features to VersionInsight.

If you’re using Subversion he’s posted a long list of changes/fixes/new features here. He’s well underway on adding Mercurial and Git support as well and LiveBlame is looking very cool also.

If you haven’t updated the version of VersionInsight that comes with XE to the Community version yet, he’s even got you covered with instructions. Nice one Uwe!

I am presenting at ADUG Sydney in July, but come anyway as there will be pizza.

I’ll be presenting at the July ADUG Sydney meeting. I’ll be giving a practical introduction to the generic collection classes in Delphi, covering the different collections (TList, TQueue, TDictionary, etc) and also some common capabilities across the classes (such as sorting, searching, comparators, enumerators, etc). Even if you haven’t yet got your head around generics in Delphi, my aim is that you can walk out knowing when and how to use these classes.

It’s also the 10th anniversary of the founding of the ADUG Sydney chapter, so come along for either reason and have some pizza.

Review: Seven Languages in Seven Weeks by Bruce Tate

I mentioned my interest in this book awhile back when it was in beta, but over the last few weeks I’ve been working through Seven Languages in Seven Weeks by Bruce Tate. the languages covered are Ruby, Io, Prologue, Scala, Erlang, Clojure and Haskell, and while he doesn’t aim to make you productive in those languages, he does aim to give you a sense of what each one is aiming to do, and the relative strengths and weaknesses.

Read On…