Freyburg

I have a new article on Mac | Life, this time about GPS on the iPhone and how it can be unreliable in a variety of circumstances.

Nepal is one of the poorest and least connected nations in the world, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t many Nepalese geeks looking to stake a claim on the web and better themselves and their families. Boing Boing went to Nepal’s biggest tech fair and documented the goings-on in a fascinating photo essay.

It would appear that Apple is in fact looking to expand the iPhone OS past the iPod and iPad. To what purpose? Well, Steve Jobs did refer to the iPad as a “magical platform”, and maybe there’s more to that statement than just the iPad’s seemingly limited abilities. Maybe Apple is working on ways to convert their entire line of laptops to some hybrid of the iPhone OS, giving even professionals a new way to express themselves.

Or maybe not. After all, the iPhone OS is (at least at present) somewhat limited, and an application like Final Cut Pro would need a radical revamp in order to work in an “iPhone OS-ish” setting. But I’ve always said Steve Jobs is a lot smarter than I am, so we’ll have to see what Apple has in mind with this latest mysterious move.

Haven’t given you an update on my professional work in a while, so here’s a sampler of what Freyburg Media has been up to:

It’s like the coolest camping trip ever.

Bluebrain | Year One from Couple 3 Films on Vimeo.

Filmmaker Noah Hutton is working on a documentary chronicling the quest to reverse engineer the human brain and then create a simulation of that brain. The potential for AI, medicine, and philosophy is essentially limitless if these eggheads pull it off, and there’s a good chance they will. Once the project is successfully completed, the film will also be finished. But the trailer above is as enticing as the possibilities of silicon-based intelligence. (grabbed from Boing Boing).

Of all the things I’ve taken away from the sometimes frustrating and occassionaly mystifying iPad keynote this week, it’s the massive potential to create a new form of “print” media. Of course, it isn’t really print, but “digi-” or “e-” anything sounds stupid, and as the iPad gains acceptance the electronic nature of publications will fade into the background.

But what may emerge from this strange new platform is a new form of magazine that updates dynamically, contains video, audio, game demos or links to further detail…really, anything you can put on the internet, but in a different, strangely familiar form. As someone who writes and creates video for a living (as well as cranking out a podcast every week), this is an exciting new development. A completely new form of media might be on the cusp of emergence…and despite how nonplussed many (including myself) are about the current iPad, I think that might be the nascent device’s lasting legacy.

Vancouver Sun tech reporter Gillian Shaw interviewed myself and several other technology enthusiasts on the day of the Apple iPad announcement, and you can check out my thoughts online on her blog (as well as in yesterday’s dead tree version of the Vancouver Sun.) Techvibes.com also reposted “The iPad cometh“. Neat!

After years of waiting, rumours and nonsense, the Apple iPad is finally upon us. Am I impressed? Am I blown away? Kinda.

Clearly it makes sense to move media from the somewhat clunky interface of keyboard and screen to a touchpad, and Apple is the company to move the computer industry kicking and screaming into a new paradigm. And what the iPad does, it does very, very well, from we surfing to reading books and newspapers. And yet….there’s something missing. Maybe it’s the fact that there’s no camera, no multi-tasking and the fact that the iPad seems geared more to content consumption than content creation.

As someone who creates content for a living, that leaves me high and dry. I can’t use the iPad for quick and dirty vlogging or podcasting and I definitely won’t be editing video on it anytime soon. I have a Macbook Pro and an iPhone, and between the two of them I get everything I need without a third device.

But on the other hand it’s a new platform, so as a content creator that makes me happy. In theory, the iPad form factor makes it an ideal platform for video and for print, both fields I happen to work in. It even opens up the possibility of new forms of magazine, hybrids of video, audio, game content and print articles, distributable by small publishers consisting of a writer, developer and designer. In a way it could be the rebirth of the zine.

In fact, the potential of the iPad is almost limitless. But right now, that’s just what it is…potential. And that’s why i won’t be getting one just yet.

TEDMED is the newest offshoot of TED, the conference/video channel that brings big ideas to the Internet in digestible videos. Biotech and medicine have reached the point where an entirely new site dedicated to just medicine is now viable. The site is pretty sparse at the moment, but I’m sure it’ll be well populated with great videos inside of a month. Also, the opening graphics for the videos, which consist of CG flybys through the nervous system, are pretty damned cool.

Here’s an interesting video about growing regenerated organs: