Muto

This is another amazing video I came across….”a wall-painted animation”.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Fucking amazing…I can’t imagine the amount of work that went into this short film.

Again & Again

Here’s a really creative music video done on a Mac:

I love stuff like this.

Via the big noob.

ps. check out the PC version as well

iPhone Music Making App: Band

There is a new app on Installer is called Band from Moo Cow Music that lets you annoy everyone around you by playing instruments and samples on the iPhone’s touchscreen (also works on the Touch). It’s pretty slick with a number of different instruments, samples and settings to play with.

Here’s just a couple of the instrument screens:

You can record, mix and edit your notes/samples as well as save/load them. It’s a pretty slick little app. I just wish I could play something decent myself. I can only imagine what someone like Derek or Paul could do with this.

I made a quick and dirty little video of it in action… apologies for the poor quality but I think it gets the idea across:

There is a longer, better video of someone playing it on the MooCowMusic page.

It’s a pretty polished application for a beta although I did have a couple of issues with multi-touch not always responding as expected and a couple of crashes. This can only get better so check it out if you like to mess around with these kinds of things.

MacBook - Thin Enough

The parodies keep on coming…

Via @Veronica

Apple to give Canadians credit for older iPods

The Montreal Gazette is reporting that as part of a class action lawsuit regarding poor battery performance, Apple will be giving Canadian owners of 1st, 2nd and 3rd generation iPods a $45 credit to the Apple Store.

Details of how this will be disbursed haven’t been released yet but keep an eye on this page for details.

Start looking for those receipts now.

Family Guy Enters the Matrix

Too awesome not to post:

via Gizmodo

Theme your iGoogle

While catching up on my RSS feeds via Google Reader, I saw that Google has greatly expanded the theme options for their personalized homepage called iGoogle. I really like iGoogle for a couple of reasons:

1. it’s cross browser/platform so it works fine on my work PC running Firefox or (shudder) IE or any of my Apples (iPhone/Mac/etc).
2. it lets me keep track of a bunch of key feeds, email, weather, etc all in one page while also having a Google search box
3. I can easily scroll through all my ‘must read’ feeds in single box

It’s been theme-able for awhile now but I was never too fond of the themes they had. They now have a huge directory of themes, some guest artist themes and a developer guide on how to make your own. They are pretty simple to put together since they are just CSS and any images you’d like to incorporate.

Currently, I’m fond of this theme but will most likely make my own very soon.

Batman: Gotham Knight

This looks pretty cool in the same vein as the Animatrix:

Straight to dvd….seems like it would be a cool thing to see in the theatre.

Nokia N95 available on Rogers

Beginning tomorrow, Rogers will begin offering the Nokia N95 8gb smartphone to Canadians.

This is interesting to me for a couple of reasons. First of all, it’s the first time in North America that this model phone is offered - previously only available unlocked directly from Nokia. As I mentioned previously in my post about the iPhone coming to Canada, Rogers isn’t known (to me at least) for being the first on the block to offer new mobile tech so this is a positive step in the right direction for them.

If I didn’t already have an iPhone, the N95 is probably the phone I’d be using right now. It has a really nice 5 megapixel camera (with flash!) and can also shoot video which can be streamed via Qik.com. GPS is integrated as is Wifi and features a very hackable S60 operating system.

The only caveats I’ve heard of with the device is the short battery life and some clunky software. I’m not sure how it would perform using it the way I use my iPhone so I tend to discount battery issues until I get my hands on one - I get 2-3 days per charge with my iPhone with wifi and bluetooth enabled all the time but I’m not streaming video or powering a flash.

The press release also mentions the unlimited browsing with the Vision mobile plan (and a 3 year contract). I wonder if this means that software like Qik are included? My guess is that only using the built in browser is supported and third party apps aren’t included. I guess we’ll see once people start pushing the limits of the data plan with an ‘official’ phone and not an unlocked one being used on the network.

Things are definitely getting interesting in the Canadian mobile market.

Thanks to BlueFur for the reminder.

Some new iPhone apps to check out

Even though the iPhone SDK has been out for awhile now, there are still lots of people cranking out some cool apps for jailbroken iPhones. It’ll be interesting to see what happens in June when things get a lot more official from Apple with the availability of the SDK-developed apps. But until then, here are a couple of ones that I’ve been playing around with lately.

While you could FTP these into your iPhone, the easiest way to get these apps is via the Installer app. If you have a jailbroken iPhone, you probably already have it.

Customize 2.0
Very recently updated and released, Customize is one of my favorite apps. It lets you, um, customize a lot of aspects of the iPhone. Everything from the color of the buttons to the text of “slide to unlock” can be changed via this app. I did have a problem getting it running on my 1.1.3 version iPhone (it would crash on loading) but there is a patch on Installer (under Tweaks for 1.1.3) called SUID Lib Fix that made it work. There is now a theme preview option built in to Customize that lets you view screenshots and individual images for the various themes and filesets before you install them. There are over 800 themes to browse and tons of individual images, sounds and sets to tweak your iPhone with.

Snapture
There has been a couple of different apps that extend the iPhone’s camera but Snapture is my favorite (and it’s freeware). Packed with features, some highlights include a digital zoom slider, color or B&W photos, up to 3 pictures can be taken in a row in multishot mode - perfect for those self portraits where you can’t see the screen and one of my favorite features is that the whole screen becomes a shutter button instead of having to try to hold the iPhone in one hand while you’ve got a finger on the Home button - an accident waiting to happen.

It’s a little buggy but a new version just came out today so it continues to get better.

Twinkle

A location aware Twitter client. It features a slick presentation not unlike the web version of PocketTweats but also locates you and enables you to see who else is using Twinkle near you. Kind cool and kinda creepy….but could be useful to use at a conference like SXSW. You can also add a photo (which doesn’t show in the actual Twitter timeline - just to other users of Twinkle).

It’s also a pretty nice Twitter client but is still subject to the API issues that Twitter is prone to have.