Pedro Assunção » design

New blog layout

Pedro Assunção — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 20:04:45 +0000

It was bound to happen; I get easily bored with website layouts and i saw that cluttered old design going away for some time now.

This new theme, a much more clean version, is an adaptation of Fiver, by Stinkyinkshop. I think it works really well, wouldn’t you say?

The iPad2 – or rethinking my android tablet purchase

Pedro Assunção — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 21:54:41 +0000

So here’s the deal: I had planned to purchase a honeycomb-based tablet as my sabbatical leave of absence going away present to myself. I was carefully considering all the pros and cons of both the Motorola Xoom and the new 10″ Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Between the two of them discovered the latter has a better general body finish, as well as slightly better front camera. Besides, Samsung has had the first tab out there for some time now, which means they have some more experience in regards to what works and what doesn’t, as building tablets goes.

The problem is that I just tried an ipad2 for the first time. And, besides feeling super snappy and slick, it’s so shinny . I might have fallen for this thing already.

The price is more appealing as well: 549 euro for the 32GB wifi version. I can’t imagine either the galaxy or the xoom matching this anytime soon. Not before the ipad3 comes out anyway

UPDATE: Alright, i sold my soul to the devil: Ordered an iPad2, arriving at the end of the month

Stuff from movies: Transparent multi touch screen

Pedro Assunção — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 22:20:22 +0000

Now this is what i call the future coming to us: Stuff previously only seen in movies coming to the real world. LG has demo’ed a transparent multi touch display. Can i have one?

Will there ever be a segway device that looks cool?

Pedro Assunção — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 06:39:35 +0000

There’s a new segway-like vehicle: It’s called SoloWheel and it’s basically a simpler version of the former. It does look like much harder to “drive” than the segway, though, so i seriously doubt this will pick up any momentum, if you catch my drift

Here’s the link to the engadget article and the essential videos. The first is basically an ad, and the second is an interaction of a normal person with the device for the first time:

A statement, a question, and a cool car

Pedro Assunção — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 19:23:19 +0000

Let’s start with the question: Who the hell can live happily in negative temperatures? Maybe i’m biased, given my warmer origins but – man – there’s no way i could be happy living in a dark, cold place. It’s no wonder people who work in dark places (miners, underground train drivers, etc) tend to be more depressed than people that live in warm climates. I mean, take South America for instance; even though they are not amongst the world’s richest populations, they are all extremely positive and happy people.

Which brings us to the statement: If we were meant to live in the cold, we would not have been losing body hair along the centuries like we have. And yes, that’s my 2 cents of “guessing” science to back up the previous question

Finally, i have to say i found this car really intriguing. If i didn’t love my Citroen AX so much i might be tempted to buy one of these Daihatsu Materia:

Idea for a better customer satisfaction/feedback service

Pedro Assunção — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 16:34:04 +0000

Recently i had to fill one of those client/customer satisfaction surveys. Endless pages of “how well do you grade feature X” questions that frustrate you beyond the point of killing yourself and your colleagues.

And that got me thinking: how about a simple form that asks “Are you happy? Yes/No”? If you answer “yes”, case closed. And some people are just plainly happy with the service/product/job so this is definitely a time saver. If you answer “no”, you are presented with a text field where you can start typing what you are not happy about and, as you do, it queries for responses from other people to suggest you with stuff that might be a problem to you. If you find one that applies to what you are trying to complain about, you choose it and another text field presents itself to complain about something else. If you don’t find one previous reply, yours is added. Repeat until done.

How’s that for simplicity?

And while we’re are it, why not make it an online survey service and make tons of cash?

Who’s your friend? Now start coding!

Summing up Apple’s keynote

Pedro Assunção — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 16:00:21 +0000

Apple had an event yesterday. And i saw that it was goooood. Seriously now, i was pleasantly surprised by – well – the surprises that were shown by Steve and co. Here’s a brief sum of coolness:

iLife 11

This update to the iLife family of products is one of the best ever, in my opinion.

iPhoto got yet more social features into it, like the ability to display your Facebook photo albums, as well as comments from your friends on those photos, and the fact that you can zoom to a particular part of the world map and, with one click, see the pictures inside that area. Other interesting features include a full screen mode, that takes away everything that is peripherical when organizing your pictures. They also introduced new slideshow templates and the books feature is very, very enhanced, showing a bookcase with all the photo book projects you have created and giving you complete control on the generation of the book.

iMovie also was added a lot of nice new features. The most notable include the long waited ability to edit audio directly in the timeline, like adjusting the sound level (even for just parts of a clip) and do fade ins and fade outs. Another great feature is the trailers part. It can now help you take your favorite footage and create movie-trailer-like movies, effortlessly. I can see myself using almost all these features in my podcast

GarageBand got some love as well: Between the ability to match the groove, or beat, of a track to another one, hence turning out-of-sync tracks into fully synced ones (which looks like magic), and a feature that reminds me of Guitar Hero called “How did i play”, GarageBand gets an incredible boost in terms of helpful features for artists and aspiring musicians.

No word on the rest of the products, but i can imagine some updates as well, though probably minor.

FaceTime for Mac

Yep, it’s here and fully available. You can now make video calls between iPhones and Macs (or macs and macs as well). Pretty awesome, though i wonder what will happen to iChat, and why wasn’t that integrated…

Mac AppStore

Will be available in 90 days time (yes, also for Snow Leopard) and will rock. These guys are going to make a ton of money on this thing. And for the end user, well, it means no longer manually installing updates for your favorite apps or using the (somehow) disparate software update mechanism in OSX.

MacBook Air

In one word: “Freakinawesome”
No more spinning drives (yes, that means no optical drive as well: goodbye DVDs), which pretty much makes them lighter and smaller. 2 versions are available, one 13 inch and one 11 inch. The prices go from $999 to $1599, depending on the version and options you want.

OSX 10.7 Lion

They showed off some new features, though the most notable ones are:

A new dashboard: Where you can see all your installed apps from the Mac AppStore, like you do one your iPhone (yes, sliding panels and everything), and group them as well;
Full screen apps. Meaning, real fullscreen goodness for your applications. They basically want to make Lion a bridge between traditional OSX and the iOS, where every app is basically fullscreen;
Something called mission control, where you can see an overview of every app that is running on your Mac, be it fullscreen or windowed. Think Exposé, but better arranged.

What about you? What are your thoughts on Apple’s new features?

Apple quietly renovates the MacMini

Pedro Assunção — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 09:40:18 +0000

And i must say it looks beautiful!

It features twice the graphics speed, HDMI connector (finally!), a thin unibody aluminum case, and a built in power supply (which means no more big power transformer in along the power cable).

I love it and i definitely want one connected to my TV in my living room

Check it out at Apple’s website.

Zen garden

Pedro Assunção — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 19:52:47 +0000

My mother just offered me a mini zen garden. How cool is that?

No related posts.

Altruistic USB plug

Pedro Assunção — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 13:44:59 +0000

I have to say i love the concept: A USB plug that becomes a USB slot itself, when connected. Check it out, here.

InfiniteUSB