Daniel Goddemeyer and Dominikus Baur grew interested in cell reception while on the New York subway:
In recent years, the MTA has started to equip select stations with WiFi and cell phone transmitters, but due to the remaining lack of connectivity in the tunnels, passengers rely on stray signals from surface transmitters to send or receive messages in between stations.
So they traveled the lines, collected data, and mapped out their results.
I think Google may make Android proprietary in 2017.
Update 02/03/16 5:35 p.m: Slack has reportedly already started rolling out voice calls to its web-based Chrome app and the platform’s dedicated desktop application, according to a new report from TechCrunch.
The service’s new video and audio messaging feature seems to work very similarly to other platforms, with one Slack-specific twist: reactions, giving users the ability to respond directly to whoever is talking with emojis. The feature needs to be enabled by a user with administrative privileges.
–
One of the top productivity tools — or distractions, depending on how you look at it — will soon receive a few significant new features, according to a new report from TechCrunch.
Slack’s 2015 roadmap, presented at a conference in San Francisco today, revealed that the company plans to compete directly with other chat services like Skype, as well as Google’s Hangouts platform, by adding voice and video chat functionality later this year.
Along with these updates, Slack also plans to add a basic text editor, a more intuitive search system, and a variety of other minor updates and bug fixes.
Slack is widely regarded as the top enterprise chat software on the market right now (as well as an excellent tool for sending co-workers amusing gifs), but voice and video chat has long been a feature missing from the fast-growing platform.
Coupled with its excellent, simple text chat system, adding video and voice message capabilities moves Slack more in line with what other chat applications are capable of.
Since Slack’s February 2014 launch, the service has quickly amassed 2.3 million users.
Slack is available for free on desktop, iOS and Android.
Worth bringing forward: Ralph Segal’s viewpoint on the role of the Director of Planning in the City’s hierarchy. (For Ralph’s bio, go here.)
Prior to (Planning director) Brian Jackson’s stint, there was a Director of Development Services position responsible for managing the day-to-day processing of permits (while seeking greater efficiencies in these operations) and liaising with the Director of Planning and his staff (primarily Development Planners) when, under the Director of Planning’s exclusive purview, Vancouver’s unique Discretionary Zoning system’s qualitative design considerations on development applications came into play (which was frequent).
The Director of Development Services’s oversight of permit processing did not include reviewing the content of these qualitative design considerations. Escalating complaints from the development community some years ago that the process had become too demanding and lengthy, what with additional energy and other requirements tagged on, led, at the time of Brian Jackson’s hiring in 2012, to amalgamation of these two positions into a single General Manager of Planning & Development in the belief that this move could address these complaints.
Experience over the last 4+ years has shown that this arrangement generated its own problems, w.r.t. the city’s long-term healthy growth, all of which were exacerbated by the top-down management style of the since fired City Manager. A head-long pursuit, driven through her office, of too many ill-advised ultra-high density spot rezonings that often over-rode concerns raised internally by Planning staff, has eviscerated long-held proven Vancouver principles of urban design (this was discussed in my Feb.12, 2016 Price Tags post on CACs). Not coincidently, it has been during this same period that Vancouver lost a disturbing number of its quality experienced staff.
As Architect Joost Bakker points out in the Vancouver Sun article, this contingent needs to be built back up, along with a recapturing of the principles of urban design that had served Vancouver so well over the previous two decades and remain in place within the City’s Discretionary Zoning. Under a new Director of Planning these principles can be once again applied inventively and collaboratively by a resuscitated professional staff that will be given back the latitude to do their job with the vision and creativity required in today’s challenging environment of mistrust and cynicism over needed densification. And led by a Director freed up from the heavy administrative duties of permit processing overview. Along with the appointment of a new City Manager skilled in the art of facilitation rather than micro-management. A new dawn!
“And now for something completely different” as Monty Python used to say. How about an “Interactive Home Monitoring Owl”?! Browsing YouTube’s recommendations recently, I stumbled across one of those Amazing Gadgets You Won’t Believe videos, and one of the featured products was the Ulo wireless security camera, by designer Vivien Muller.
Most security cameras tend to look rather bland, and are mainly designed to blend into their environment rather than stand out. Think of products like the Nest for instance, which although sleek and attractive, doesn’t really stand out visually.
The Ulo on the other hand not only looks great, but judging by the product video, looks like a real hoot to use (pardon the pun). It’s basically shaped like an owl and his a two way mirror that looks like a beak, hiding the night vision camera and motion sensors beneath. The main features of note however are the large LCD screens masquerading as the owl’s eyes, which it uses to communicate its status. For example, when the batteries need to be recharged, Ulo looks sleepy. It also blinks whenever a picture is taken using the smartphone app, and its eyes follow anything that moves. If anyone watches the live stream, Ulo will also squint cheekily.
It’s all incredibly fun, and makes a nice change to the usual raft of boring beige boxes around the house. Aside from the novel looks, Ulo has some fairly decent but standard specifications. For example, a live video can be viewed from the Android and iOS app (or via a web page), plus there is an alert mode that will email an image when movement is detected. Ulo’s “eyes” can also be customised using the app – colour, pupil size, and so on.
The device comes with a rechargeable battery that’s good for around one week, although it can also be left plugged in round the clock. Ulo will also come with an IFTTT [check out our quick guide] so it can be linked with other devices.
The design is obviously part of Ulo’s appeal, and something that makes it stand out from the competition, but it does offer quite a rich set of features in addition to being weatherproof.
You really have to watch the video to see Ulo in all its glory…I’m sorely tempted to order one…
Ulo has currently raised more than 1.6 million Euros on Kickstarter, and can be pre-ordered now on the Mu Design store for 169 Euros with delivery slated for early 2017.
In December, Slack announced a $80 million fund to invest in software projects that complement its technology. As an early adopter of the…
Companies like Netflix and Uber are API-driven enterprises—they run on APIs and use the power of their API platforms to deliver superior customer experiences—and they’ve disrupted entire industries in the process. API-driven enterprises can experiment quickly to continuously deliver and improve rich customer experiences, and possess the flexibility to innovate on business models and grow partner networks quickly. “Traditional” enterprises are aggressively embracing API-centric approach to power their digital transformation and grow their digital businesses.
The State of APIs 2016 report examines the trends in digital transformation, the impact of APIs, common use cases driving digital transformation in different industries, and the best practices of API-driven enterprises. This report is based on the hundreds of billions of 2015 API calls we saw in the Apigee Cloud from hundreds of customers across Apigee’s global network of 24 data centers.
The increased pace of digital transformation in enterprises is evidenced by a tremendous increase in API traffic, which has grown 2.8x year-over-year. Enterprises are pursuing a variety of digital transformation use cases that fall into three main areas:
Superior customer experience In 2015, customer experience initiatives aimed at engaging customers through online channels accounted for approximately 40% of all digital initiatives.
Ecosystem expansion Initiatives to expand capabilities through partner channels and ecosystems accounted for 55% of all 2015 digital transformation initiatives.
Operational efficiency Just under 10% of digital transformation initiatives focused on boosting productivity.
Different industries are in different stages of digital maturity. Information services and technology industries are the most digitally mature, given that their core assets are digital. Retail and media verticals are next in terms of digital maturity.
We found two-thirds of enterprises have a public API program, which they use to connect with partners and developers. Enterprises with public API programs saw their API traffic almost triple year over year.
Enterprises are using API management platforms to manage a variety of developer teams within and outside of the enterprise to drive rapid app development, and to secure, scale, analyze, and manage their APIs.
Digital transformation is in early innings, with two-thirds of enterprises conducting discrete digital projects. As more enterprises roll out new business models and digital initiatives, we see a growing number of APIs and API traffic volume that needs to be secured, managed, scaled, and analyzed.
As microservices and containers become mainstream, we foresee a dramatic increase in the use of APIs. We predict a further ten-fold increase in API traffic as IoT use cases mature and APIs become the way in which physical objects connect and communicate with each other.
With this oncoming API tidal wave, it’s even more critical for enterprises to employ an API management platforms to accelerate their digital transformations.
Download The State of APIs 2016 report.
Thoughts? Comments? Questions? Join the conversation (or start one) in the Apigee Community.
Stratechery is not a political blog, and this is not a political post. Rather, my focus is the business and strategy of technology, something that is inextricably linked with the effect technological change has and will have on society broadly — and that includes politics.
To that end I read with interest Hans Noel’s op-ed in The New York Times on Tuesday. Noel is, along with Marty Cohen, David Karol and John Zaller, the author of the 2008 book The Party Decides, one of the most influential books in U.S. political science, and Noel opened his piece by summarizing the book’s central thesis:
We argued that the leaders of party coalitions have great influence over the selection of a presidential nominee. Before [we wrote The Party Decides], the conventional wisdom was that such broad and diverse coalitions of politicians, activists and interest groups within parties were largely shut out of the nominating process by primaries and caucuses in the 1970s. This led to a free-for-all among narrowly factional candidates. In 1976, Jimmy Carter emerged from a crowded field to win the nomination despite having no connections to most leaders in the national party.
We argued that since that 1976 contest, party leaders had been exerting influence by coordinating on their choice during the “invisible primary” — the period before any voting when the leaders observed, met with and vetted candidates — then supporting that candidate throughout the process. When party leaders work together, they nearly always win, we said…
This year’s election has not followed our script. Mr. Trump is the clear front-runner, but is loathed by the party establishment.
To Noel’s credit, the reason for writing the op-ed is to self-critically examine what he and his co-authors may have gotten wrong; he has three potential theses (beyond noting that the Republican establishment may yet rally, and that Democrats have largely fallen into line):
I think Noel’s scope is too narrow: politics is just the latest industry to be transformed by the Internet.
A few weeks ago Clay Shirky wrote a tweetstorm that is worth reading in full; for this post, though, I wanted to highlight the parts describing how the Internet has, election-by-election, fundamentally reshaped presidential campaigns:
Social media is breaking the political ‘Overton Window’ — the ability of elites to determine the outside edges of acceptable conversation (link). These limits were enforced by party discipline, and mass media whose economics meant political centrism was the best way to make money (link). This was BC: Before Cable. One or two newspapers per town, three TV stations; all centrist, white, pro-business, respectful of authority (link). Cable changed things, allowing outsiders to campaign more easily. In ’92, Ross Perot, 3rd party candidate, campaigned through infomercials (link).
After Cable but Before Web lasted only a dozen years. Cable added a new stream of media access. The web added a torrent (link). This started with Howard Dean (the OG) in ’03. Poverty was the mother of invention; Dean didn’t have enough $ to buy ads, even on cable (link) but his team had Meetup & blogs… (link). After webifying Perot’s media tactics, Dean pioneered online fundraising. Unfortunately for him, his Get Out The Vote operation didn’t (link). That took Obama. Obama was less of an outsider than Dean (though still regarded as unelectable in ’07) but used most of Dean’s playbook (link). And then there was vote-getting. Facebook and MyBarackObama let the Obama campaign run their own vote-getting machine out of Chicago (link).
The new scale Facebook introduces into politics is this: all registered American voters, ~150M people, are now a medium-sized group (link). Reaching & persuading even a fraction of the electorate used to be so daunting that only two national orgs could do it. Now dozens can (link). This set up the current catastrophe for the parties. They no longer control any essential resource, and can no longer censor wedge issues (link)
There are a few key concepts at the foundation of this analysis:
Long-time readers should recognize the tell-tale signs of Aggregation Theory.
Facebook and newspapers is an excellent example of how Aggregation Theory plays out:
The end result of this process is that newspapers have been modularized and commoditized into effective Facebook-filler, competing on an equal basis with everything from new media startups like BuzzFeed to personal blog posts to pictures of your cousin’s new baby. It’s hard for publishers to break through with content, and publisher-centric advertising is dying: better for ad buyers to get as close to the customer as possible and buy space on the service that has aggregated users on one side and leveraged that into commoditizing and modularizing suppliers on the other.
There certainly is room for all the ads: thanks to the Internet reality of zero distribution costs and zero transaction costs, an aggregator can scale nearly perfectly to effectively every user on Earth, as we’ve seen with Google, Facebook, Amazon, and increasingly Netflix and Uber.
For a moment, though, step back to the world as it was: the one where newspapers (and TV stations, etc.) were gatekeepers thanks to their ownership of production and distribution. In this world any viable political campaign had to play nicely with those who ran the press in the hopes of gaining positive earned media, endorsements, etc. Just as important, though, was the need to buy advertising, as that was the only way to reach voters at scale. And advertising required lots of money, which meant donors. And then, once the actual election rolled around, a campaign needed an effective GOTV effort, which took not only money but also the sort of manpower that could only be rustled up by organizations like labor unions, churches, etc.
It is all these disparate pieces: partisan media members, advertisers, donors, large associations, plus consultants and specialists to manage them that, along with traditional politicians, made up the “party” in The Party Decides. Noel and company asked in Chapter 1:
Why tie parties so closely to party leadership as such? Why not view parties as larger coalitions that include not only top leaders but activists, fund-raisers, interest groups, campaign technicians, and others? Certainly the larger set of actors has great influence on party behavior. We therefore propose to theorize parties, and to study them in practice, as coalitions of the larger set of actors. Politicians will be important but not necessarily dominant; interest groups, activists, and other policy demanders will be permitted large roles in party decisions. Our theory will focus on why diverse political actors might attempt to form parties and what kinds of candidates they might seek to nominate.
What is critical to understand when it comes to this more broad-based definition of a “party” is that its goals are not necessarily aligned with a majority of voters. The authors explain in Chapter 2 (emphasis mine):
The most important party business is the nomination and election of office seekers who will serve the interests of the party’s intense policy demanders. The italicized phrase marks the key difference between our theory and most other contemporary theorizing about parties. In our theory, parties — that is, the groups that constitute parties — do not care about winning for the sake of winning office. They care about the policy gains. And they make those gains not simply by the election of someone nominally affiliated with their party. They make them by the election of someone committed to the maximum feasible achievement of group goals…
It is natural to think of parties in a two-party system as majoritarian. Ours, however, are not. They want to win elections, but they do not necessarily wish to represent a majority of voters. As a by-product of their wish to govern, parties must offer a degree — perhaps a large degree — of responsiveness to popular majorities, but responsiveness to voters is not why parties exist. They exist to achieve the intense policy demands of their constituent groups. One might criticize parties for lack of deference to majority will, but their groups would not much care. Intense policy demanders nearly always believe their demands are just and that it is their duty to work for these demands whether or not most voters agree with them.
To summarize: parties are not just politicians, but coalitions of actors who care intensely about certain policy outcomes. These actors work together to get politicians elected who will serve their interests; voter interests are a means, not an ends. And, according to Noel and company, such parties succeed because they control all of the apparatus necessary to win elections.
This brings us back to today’s world, and admittedly, the leap from a description of Facebook and Aggregation Theory to politics is not an obvious one: I’m not proposing that Donald Trump or anyone else is an aggregator. Indeed, given their power over what users see Facebook could, if it chose, be the most potent political force in the world. Until, of course, said meddling was uncovered, at which point the service, having so significantly betrayed trust, would lose a substantial number of users and thus its lucrative and privileged place in advertising, leading to a plunge in market value. In short, there are no incentives for Facebook to explicitly favor any type of content beyond that which drives deeper engagement; all evidence suggests that is exactly what the service does.
Said reticence, though, creates a curious dynamic in politics in particular: there is no one dominant force when it comes to the dispersal of political information, and that includes the parties described in the previous section. Remember, in a Facebook world, information suppliers are modularized and commoditized as most people get their news from their feed. This has two implications:
This is a big problem for the parties as described in The Party Decides. Remember, in Noel and company’s description party actors care more about their policy preferences than they do voter preferences, but in an aggregated world it is voters aka users who decide which issues get traction and which don’t. And, by extension, the most successful politicians in an aggregated world are not those who serve the party but rather those who tell voters what they most want to hear.
In my initial description of Aggregation Theory I noted:
This has fundamentally changed the plane of competition: no longer do distributors compete based upon exclusive supplier relationships, with consumers/users an afterthought. Instead, suppliers can be aggregated at scale leaving consumers/users as a first order priority. By extension, this means that the most important factor determining success is the user experience: the best distributors/aggregators/market-makers win by providing the best experience, which earns them the most consumers/users, which attracts the most suppliers, which enhances the user experience in a virtuous cycle.
The term “user experience” obviously refers to a product; in the case of politics it is, apparently, at least in the case of some substantial number of Republican voters, “telling it like it is”, aka what voters, not parties, believe.1
And so, without any of the apparatus traditionally provided by parties, much of it obsoleted by the Internet, and thanks to the ability to connect directly with voters (because of aggregation), Donald Trump is marching on in direct defiance of the Republican Party’s decision.2
Voters (and users) decide.
It seems tablets may not be the future of mainstream news.
Torstar Corp., the parent company of the Toronto Star, recorded a net loss of almost $235 million in the fourth quarter of 2015, largely due to write-downs of its assets as the company shifts from a print to a digital-focused publication.
In an effort to offset its continued losses, the company has invested heavily in its StarTouch tablet edition, a new digital-only tablet publication the media company launched last year. While Torstar said it plans to continue investing in digital during a recent investor’s call, the publication’s digital initiatives have reportedly seen slower than expected growth.
“We’re in the midst of a meaningful transition at Torstar,” said Torstar President and Chief Executive Officer David Holland during a recent analyst conference call. “We did not expect this transition to be easy.”
During the call, StarTouch also revealed stats directly related to StarTouch reader metrics. The Toronto Star’s tablet edition reaches 65,000 tablets weekly and only 26,000 tablets daily, with 50,000 daily app sessions. In total the app has been downloaded more than 200,000 times. Furthermore, the average reader uses the app three times a week and spends 22 minutes using StarTouch.
Torstar invested $14 million in its tablet app in 2015 after licensing the technology from French-language daily publication La Presse. The Star reportedly expects to spend an additional 10 million in 2016 in an effort to continue expanding its tablet audience.
In mid January, the company laid off 10 employees from its StarTouch edition.
Torstar isn’t the first mainstream news organization to peg its future on tablets. Postmedia, the parent company that owns the National Post, Toronto Sun, and most major newspapers in Canada, recently scrapped its short-lived evening tablet editions of the Calgary Herald, Ottawa Citizen and Montreal Gazette after the digital-only publications failed to gain the traction it hoped they would.
With tablet sales in Canada, as well as North America in general, experiencing a stark decline, the Toronto Star’s continued focus on the company’s struggling tablet edition has been questioned by many Canadian media industry observers.
Related reading: Layoffs hit Toronto Star’s tablet news division after poor reader growth
Typo spotters are the bane of any author’s existence.
I’m sure you’ve received at least a few messages highlighting typos, grammar mistakes, or nitpicking at minor details within your material.
This can be exhausting to the author.
Imagine spending hours researching, developing, and designing material.
You publish the material and the first response is:
“You made a typo on page 9”
Consider the psychology behind this behavior. People do this for one of three reasons:
1. They want to help. This group is easy to spot. They begin their message with flattery, highlighting how much they like the content, and they thank you for your work. They get your buy in to them first. Then they highlight one thing in a static message (not in an email you can’t change) they noticed you might want to fix if you have the time. We all know people like this. These people are on your side and great people to work with.
2. They care a LOT about nit. This is the group raised to care a lot about specific elements of your message. Their topic-involvement leads them to challenge minor factors, grammar or spelling mistakes. This group is random, hard to predict, and usually very involved in a minor element of the activity.
Shortly after every event we have former event managers giving event tips, former caterers giving tips on catering, web developers suggesting event apps, and former speakers suggesting better speakers. Each sees the topic from their own experience. This group wants to feel respected for their experience. This is a competence factor.
3. They want a sense of superiority. This is the most common group. They are not favourably predisposed to your messages. They either dislike the content, dislike the sender, or are looking to increase their self-esteem at your expense.
This third group won’t debate with you on the core issues of the message, but score tiny victories by pointing out minor mistakes. Don’t engage the final group – especially if they end their message with snark (i.e. “You made a typo on page 9, just sayin’”). This group is highly resistant to any messages from you. Their needs are to feel superior, unchallenged, and increase their self-esteem at your expense.
This behavior often stems from the message challenging the recipient to change their ways. Instead of assessing the problem, they ignore it. Instead they react against the message and its sender.
Focus on the first two groups. Remove the errors and niggles where possible. But don’t change or sand the edges of your messages to appeal to the nitpickers.
Charles Gauthier of the DVBIA tweeted this today:
Twitter: Charles Gauthier @DowntownCharlesStrong interest from #DowntownVancouver BIA building owners to have @BikeSharing stations on their property. #multimodal
Alert readers may have clued in to the fact that I was out of the city during February. Among other places visited, I was in Buenos Aires for a week, a city I’ve never been before.
And, once again, I was amazed and frustrated and ticked off at how complicated it was to figure out how to use the transit system, the same feeling I’ve had in Toronto, San Francisco, Rome, and numerous other cities.
It’s beyond me why cities that get large numbers of new arrivals and tourists, not to mention the existing huge populations they service, allow transit messes to develop that turn taking the bus and subway into a maze.
New York and Paris are the best. You go to the subway station. You get a pass for a week or a month or three days or whatever and you can use it on everything. You might even get a map.
In Buenos Aires, a considerable part of my mental bandwidth during the week went into figuring out how to use both. The subway, okay, was easy enough. You get a paper ticket for a certain number of rides or a plastic SUBTE card and you’re off. (And an incredible bargain — about 50 cents Cdn per ride.)
For the buses, which I ended up preferring because a) you’re above-ground and b) they go to more places in the city, a whole ‘nother story. I was told in the guidebooks that buses would take real money, but that wasn’t true for most I was on. Instead, you have to buy a plastic SUBE card from a kiosca (corner-store type operation) for $3 Cdn, then get it loaded with value. We managed to find, after much hunting, a kiosca that would do both and thought we were good.
But, when we went to re-load, it turned out that we couldn’t find a kiosca anywhere that would re-load some value — even the place where we got the original card and extra value claimed they couldn’t provide us with that any more. Not sure whether it was just that hour or just that day or what.
This is not some “developing country” thingie. I’ve had the same experience in San Francisco, where a Clipper card for the BART subway system (which you can only buy at certain drugstores and select metro stops), doesn’t allow you to transfer to the bus system. You pay again (albeit with a small discount). And you have to buy your bus tickets in a different place from BART passes.
In Toronto, I’ve spent more hours hunting for the right place to buy what I needed to take the bus/streetcar, without having to hike a few miles to the nearest Metro stop.
In Rome, we simply gave up and rode the buses and trams for free for several days while we tried to figure out where the heck we should buy transit tickets.
I’m sure some dear readers will respond, saying “Oh, it’s really easy, you should have just done X or Y.” But the point is, it should all be completely obvious and everywhere how to use the transit system in cities that rely on them. (And in Buenos Aires, you really need it. The streets are hopelessly jammed. It took 40 minutes in a taxi to get from the centre to the relatively nearby district of Palermo in non-rush-hour traffic.)
And it should be obvious for people who aren’t fluent Spanish or Italian speakers. There should be some kind of international symbol that indicates “transit tickets that work for the whole system HERE.” (Visualizations gratefully accepted.)
Your stories of transit frustration — or compliments for the best systems ever — welcome here.
Rita Ndagire Kizito,
The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL),
Mar 04, 2016
This is a "reflection on the process of designing learning activities that employ blogging in an experimental training intervention provides a unique context in which to try and infuse connectivist principles while outlining the challenges that surface." How does connectivism inform the work in this context? "The linkages between African-based technology adoption models to connectivism present very fundamental issues about design, the models that can be used, and what one should be aware of during the design and delivery processes."
[Link] [Comment]
The fatty lifestyle is gaining in popularity
Torontonian Gary Davidson tells dandyhorse a bit about why he likes fat bikes
Photos by Grant MacEachern
What's your favourite place to ride your fatty in Toronto?
Gary riding in Crother's Woods.
You can see more photos of Gary's fat bike on Flickr.
Drone-flying has been an elusive hobby for those with little faith in their flying ability.
The idea of fishing a thousand-dollar-plus flying machine out of trees and gutters is enough to turn the most hardy beginners off drones, but DJI’s newly released Phantom 4 could change that.
The $1400 USD addition to the DJI line is the most expensive Phantom model yet, but it comes with a serious upgrade: it can autonomously avoid obstacles.
The drone features five cameras, two forward facing, two on the underside along with the 4K central camera. Together the images are compiled in the DJI’s software to produce a 3D model of the surrounding environment, allowing the drone to maneuver around obstacles.
The DJI Phantom 4 represents a new milestone in the era of consumer drones.
While autonomous obstacle avoidance technology has already been a beta feature of specialized professional drones and limited concept releases, the DJI Phantom 4 represents the first ever consumer-ready iteration of such software, bringing complex maneuvers and filming techniques within reach of the beginner drone pilot.
The drone is capable of avoiding buildings, trees, other drones, aircraft and even humans. Test footage of the drones show it making graceful arcs around buildings, crowds and pine trees. The autonomous feature allows amateur flyers to take ambitiously close footage without risking damage to the $1400 USD vehicle, bringing down a major barrier for new entrants.
“With the Phantom 4, we are entering an era where even beginners can fly with confidence,” said DJI CEO Frank Wang. The feature can also be disabled for more experienced pilots.
Autonomous object avoidance isn’t the only beginner-friendly feature added to the latest Phantom: ‘TapFly’ allows the drone users to set a maximum distance and simply tap the screen to reorientate the drone, meaning that users no longer have to tackle the dual stick controller to get a smooth video capture.
The drone also added ‘ActiveTrack’ , a feature that can 3D map a moving object or person and automatically adjust to keep it (or them) in frame. The follow mode allows the drone to track at just 4-5 feet from the subject.
The Phantom 4 also features a larger battery, with over 28 minutes of fly time as well as an updated 4K camera with wide angle lens and 12-megapixel still shots.
DJI will be teaming up with Apple to sell the latest drone. DJI CEO Frank Wang is a self-professed fan of Apple and Steve Jobs, incorporating the brands minimalistic design into the DJI models long before the partnership.
The new pairing will boost the brand into the offline space. DJI opened their first flagship store in Shenzhen last November, though an overwhelming majority of the company’s sales are still online.
Note: You may need a VPN to watch this video within China
I've described myself as a cuckoo. I was dropped into the nest of opensource folks 10 years ago, and ended up making it my family. I'm that fellow who took a different path in making a technology career. I think that describes a lot of us in the Drupal community though. My background is in Theatre and Visual Arts. However, I have a certification in non-profit management and my Master's focused on technology and governance. This is the VERY reason you should re-elect me to the Drupal Association Board.
If you want the shaggy dog story of how I found my way to Drupal, this is how it happened. (I think the read is worth the time.) When I completed my degree at Bishops University in Quebec Canada, I had a pretty marketable skill.
I supplemented my income as a bookstore manager with lighting work. I did pretty well at it, but quickly realised that the hours were hectic and the work was exhausting. I enrolled at the University of Ottawa and completed a certification in Arts Administration and I focused on Nonprofit Organizational Management.
One of the main requirements at the end of the program was to work in an Arts Organization for several months. I found work at an experimental dance company in Ottawa, Canada called Le Groupe de La Place Royale and quickly dug into helping produce marketing materials for the annual fund raiser called "The Edge". The year I worked "The Edge", the team had set up a wonderful experiment between dance companies across cities to allow real time collaboration over high speed video link. I want to point out that this work was being done in 1995 - it wasn't the norm. It was mind blowing.
I had been accepted at Virginia Tech to complete an MFA with a focus on Marketing. When I arrived at the school, I explained what had happened in Ottawa and how it changed my perspective. I explained I wanted to work using bleeding edge technology to create multi-cast immersive works that would allow for real time interaction between performers and audiences who were distributed. In retrospect, I know where my love for distributed teams really came from. I produced three pieces of work over a two year period and promptly started my professional career in the Department of Continuing Education teaching the use of Internet Technologies for artists and nonprofits.
So a quick recap of my Education:
I flourished early on with a non-profit called the Western States Arts Federation. This is a nonprofit arts organization that has focused on building custom PHP MySQL applications for other nonprofits, NGOs, and government entities. I was hired as the Senior Director of Technology and I also ran the grants program there for a time. I was the architect of systems like CultureGrants Online, ZAPP, CaFE, ArtistsRegister, and ArtJob. I managed a distributed team who developed the applications. I worked with the Board of Directors. I learned of Board dynamics and how a Board worked. I did this from 1999 - 2007.
In 2006 I found Drupal while exploring how to build Custom PHP MySQL applications more efficiently and became friends (and a student) of the Bryght guys and gals and with Raincity Studios. In 2007, I made the move to Drupal 100% when I joined pingVision. In the days after pingVision, I co-founded a small boutique Drupal Shop called Vintage Digital. My role has been as the business manager, business developer, and project manager - this small company still exists and is a microcosm of excellence. All of this segued into the most crazy, fun, and intense time of my life with Examiner.com where I was the shepherd of an amazing team of developers. We did good work. I worked for a short time with Trellon as CTO. After that, I was the acting COO for Five Rings Web. I spent two and half years as VP of Project management with Aten Design Group. Currently, my main focus is as Engineering Lead for Pfizer's Health Care Provider Portal Platform. So, I've worked as an independent contractor, as leadership in agencies, a founder of a Drupal shop, in Media, and in the Corporate world.
A quick recap of my Technology work history:
This sets up two pieces of the puzzle. I have the education for nonprofit management - with exposure to governance. I have the experience in technology. There is a third leg to this stool -- my experiences as a volunteer. I was the VP of the PTA for my kid's school. I was on that Board for a couple of years. For the last four years, I have sat on the Board of Directors for the 501(c)3 that governs Crown Pointe Academy. I was part of the policy committee for the school and was central in rewriting several of the policies for the non-profit. I have also been the elected board At Large Board member with the Drupal Association for the last two years.
One more recap:
I'm committed to Drupal, I have board experience in multiple capacities, I worked directly with the Drupal Association, and I have governance experience. You add to that the education and the technology background, it paints a picture.
Let me know if you have questions regarding my experiences - I'd be happy to answer them. I really hope you'll look at my overall experiences and my commitment and come to a conclusion. Saunders is somebody I should vote for March 7th - March 18th.
Please help me by sharing this across your social networks. I NEED YOUR HELP!
If you would like me to remind you to vote come election day, please signup here: http://eepurl.com/bQ7P5T
The previous post shows the beautiful angel gateway in Bisbee Arizona.
And here is my vote for a great local gateway. Where is your favourite?
Please meet Ellie and Faunt, on watch just east of Commercial Drive. All dressed for Easter 2015.
Piepler: ‘the building knows the truth’ #nytnewwork with unfettered discussion better gambles
— Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) March 1, 2016
That’s another version of Plepler’s advice to execs to distinguish between decisions that are pass/fail vs requiring A+ effort #nytnewwork
— Tim O'Reilly (@timoreilly) March 1, 2016
Lamentably, simply being aware of cultural biases is not enough to counter them #nytnewwork need rules change like blind auditions in music
— Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) March 1, 2016
McChystal: Al Queda was first terrorist org to be shaped by mobile net #nytnewwork it happened to them, just like with us
— Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) March 1, 2016
Samsung’s latest flagship handsets, the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge, are all set to take on a barrage of new flagship handsets from other Android OEMs and most importantly, on the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus. To make sure that Samsung is better able to compete with them, the company even tweaked its lineup this time around to better differentiate between the S7 and S7 edge.
Continue reading →
David Goodman of HQ Commercial, who specializes in the multi-family market, credits the record-high prices to a fire hose of investment funds from China switching from residential to commercial real estate.
“Relatively small in number yet with billions of dollars at their disposal, investor groups from China are leaving an indelible mark on local real estate,” Goodman said. “The vast new dollar flow pouring into Greater Vancouver is disrupting the local development and investor community. Locals either lose out or feverishly raise their bids to compete with the new kids on the block.”
OmniOutliner 4.5 is up on Omni’s site, and should be in the Mac App Store within days.
With this release — see the release notes — I helped work on, of all things, printing bugs and features. This is the first time in my entire career where I worked on printing support that was more than just the most basic possible thing.
And that sounds weird for the year 2016, I realize. But here’s the thing: working on printing support is far from glamorous. You wouldn’t call it fun. But the people who need these features really do need them, and it’s a matter of respect for OmniOutliner users that we do a great job even with printing.
But I sure am glad to get it finished and shipping. And I’m proud of the work we did — more proud than I expected to be. It’s solid, and I think the people who print from OmniOutliner will be very pleased.
Now we’re on to other new features, including editing Markdown documents with OmniOutliner.
Geoff Plant, recovering politician (Provincial Attorney-General), writes in the Globe and Mail about fundamentals. Change, expectations, and the status quo.
In particular, he writes that housing must change from low to higher density everywhere — the way forward. I think he sees, as do I, that the 1950’s are gone. Single family homes for everyone, with a white picket fence, lawn and two Buicks in every driveway, are gone forever in Vancouver. That expectation (source of so much hand-wringing) must die away.
“Change cannot be avoided, but we need equal parts vision and fortitude to imagine and then implement the new city.
The way forward is clear. The neighbourhoods of single family houses in the heart of residential Vancouver are not sustainable, except as virtually gated communities for the very rich. The city simply has to grow up by growing upwards. There are no single-family houses in the heart of Hong Kong, London, Paris, Singapore or New York. People live and raise their families in apartments and townhouses. They do it now in Yaletown. They will have to do it in Dunbar, Kitsilano, Mount Pleasant, Point Grey and Fraserview.
There is no government program or law that will return us to a day of affordable single-family homes in Vancouver. Surtaxing non-resident land owners and subsidizing so-called affordable housing projects are all well and good, but they are just Band-Aids. If we want to live in this city, we will have to change the way we live, in smaller spaces, closer together. Our city council must increase the supply of housing by intensifying. Carefully, sensitively and respectfully, but firmly and relentlessly. And faster.”
Geoff Plant was British Columbia’s attorney-general from 2001 to 2005. He practises law with Gall Legge Grant & Munroe in Vancouver. His Twitter account describes himself as “lawyer, recovering politician, learner”.
GIFs are everywhere. Sites and services like Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook breathed new life into GIFs and created demand for things like Giphy, a GIF search engine. But a good search engine isn't always enough. Sometimes I want to make my own GIFs. For that, I use GIF Brewery 3 from Hello, Resolven Apps.
GIF Brewery 3 includes a significant update to the app's rendering engine. The app is now 64-bit, which allows it to handle substantially more frames per GIF than in the past. Be careful about going too wild though, because now you can create much larger files that take longer to render that may be too big to post some places. A big render can really get the fans on your Mac spinning too.
GIF Brewery 2.3.5 versus 3.0.
The changes to GIF Brewery are not all under the hood. GIF Brewery has been redesigned with an updated interface that looks more at home on El Capitan. Instead of a main window supported by multiple inspectors, everything in GIF Brewery now happens in one window. Clicking the buttons in the toolbar expands the window to reveal panels with various settings you can use to tweak your GIF. However, when the GIF Brewery window does not fill the screen and you close a panel, the window does not shrink back to its original size, which feels wrong to me. Instead, the content of the central part of the window expands to fill the panel's space. Here, let me show you:
GIF Brewery's panels and resizing.
That last GIF demonstrates one of GIF Brewery's other new features – the ability to make screen recordings and render them as GIFs. In addition, GIF Brewery can record GIFs using your FaceTime camera or an iOS device attached to your Mac. The ability to record GIFs of an iOS device is an especially nice way for developers to create marketing materials and writers to demonstrate hard-to-describe features and visuals.
iOS GIF.
There are two main tools for building GIFs with GIF Brewery. The first is the clip viewer in the main window. By dragging the start and end handles, you can select the portion of a longer video file, from which you want to generate a GIF. You can also use GIF Brewery's new frame management system. Clicking on the frame management button in the toolbar opens a panel on the left side of the GIF Brewery window with each of the frames of the video clip you are editing. You can copy some or all of those frames as 'Saved' frames and then reorder or delete individual frames, and render a GIF from just the saved frames.
These two tools can also be used together. Ticking the 'Calculate Frame Count & Delay' checkbox in the properties panel causes the number of images in the frame panel to update dynamically as you adjust the length of a clip. Once I got the hang of starting with the video drag handles, and then refining a clip in the frame panel, which was not initially clear to me from the interface or help documentation, I found that this is the most precise way to create a GIF. Fortunately, the developer is working on updating existing tutorials for GIF Brewery 3.
Frame Management, Overlays, and Properties.
In the prior version of GIF Brewery, the only way to preview your GIF was to click the 'Create GIF' button and wait for the GIF to render. That trial and error process wasn't ideal, especially with bigger GIFs that could take a while to render. GIF Brewery 3 adds a Loop Preview feature that loads the frames of your GIF and plays them back to give you an idea of what the final GIF will look like.
Loop Preview.
As with the prior versions, GIF Brewery 3 includes a properties panel that lets you tweak all sorts of settings, including the number of frames, frame delay, color space, and other settings. I'm not sure it would be possible given the number of variables involved, but a few presets that could be applied with one click of a button would be nice because some of the settings can be a little confusing for the uninitiated. GIF Brewery 3 also preserves the prior version's fine-grained control over images and text that can be overlaid on your clip, and adds even more filters that can be applied to each frame. I did run across one bug when adding a long, centered text overlay. If I went back to edit the text with something shorter, the text would no longer be centered, instead appearing at the far left edge of the GIF.
I use GIF Brewery most often in two scenarios. First, I use it to save GIFs my friends post on Twitter for my own use. Twitter converts GIFs into MP4 video files. By right-clicking on a clip, I can save it to my Downloads folder, import it into GIF Brewery, and quickly reconvert it to a GIF for my own use. Second, I create occasional screen recordings for articles like this one, which is far easier with GIF Brewery now than when Federico was using GIF Brewery 2.3 with Reflector. GIF Brewery also works well with longer files like movies to create GIFs like the one at the top of this article. If you want or need to go beyond the GIFs created by others, I recommend trying GIF Brewery 3. Despite a few rough edges, GIF Brewery's new features and rendering engine improvements make it my favorite GIF utility.
GIF Brewery 3 is available on the Mac App Store and is free until March 12, 2016. From March 13 - 19, 2015, GIF Brewery will be $0.99, after which it will cost $4.99.
