My friend @iamhabitat on twitter just pointed out that Siri is not listed as one of the features on Apple Canada’s iPhone 4S page.
Does this imply that the feature will not be available in Canada? How disappointing would that be?!
I had assumed that it would. I guess we’ll find out when iOS5 comes out tomorrow.
Update: Yes, Yes it does. But it doesn’t seem to know how to map in Canada (at least not yet).
…so far,
The HTML5 animations on the website.
Interesting to note that they’ve switched form jQuery to Script.aculo.us to handle the magic.
Correction: They may have been using script.aculo.us for some time now (ie. always).
With less than 48hrs to the next iPhone announcement, I thought I’d weigh in on the iPhone 5 teardrop prediction with some first-hand experience.
I have a TV remote that’s roughly teardrop shaped and every single time without fail I hold it upside-down.
In this blogger’s opinion, there will be no teardrop iPhone.
QR codes have been making a bit of noise in the local web/social media/design nerd for the past few months. Thanks in large part to Winnipeg’s sociallyist blogger Erica Glasier.
For months now, my geek sensibilities have been nagging me about these futuristic looking pixel blocks. I’ve had some trouble narrowing down exactly what it is. It’s not the poor implementation that is so rampant (pro tip: they do not need to be black-on-white or isolated from your design); it’s not the fact that the average person is too lazy to figure out what a QR code is and how to use it. These are minor roadblocks for a technology that is actually fairly useful.
This morning on my bus ride in to work, it finally dawned on me.
QR codes are an out-dated placeholder technology. A technology designed for devices which are not powerful enough to do proper image recognition (quickly and reliably). In reality, we have already surpassed this technological limitation.
Take a look at this Aursuma. It’s essentially able to turn any print media into a rich-media presentation via an iPhone app (without the use of a machine-readable marker):
I cannot see any reason similar image recognition technology couldn’t be used for the simpler applications we currently user QR codes for.
Am I missing something?
It looks like the privacy hippies were finally right about something, your mobile phone really is a pocket sized tracking device.
Turns out that as of iOS 4.0, iPhones have been tracking your physical movements and logging it along with the phone’s backups.
A small team of researchers have discovered these logs in iTune’s backup files, they’ve released a handy little app that collects all the data from your user folder and plots it on a map. iPhoneTracker.app and further information available here.
Here is the visualization of everywhere I’ve been since Sept 28, 2010:
You can see lots of activity in and around Winnipeg (including trips up to the Gimli and Victoria Beach), a flight to Toronto and subsequent travel around southern Ontario and a road trip to Minneapolis. It’s fascinating.
I’m not sure if this is a terrifying privacy hole or a neat little hidden feature. I’m leaning towards neat feature, since the data is stored locally on your computer and can be encrypted automatically by iTunes.
At this point in time a method for disabling the “feature” does not exist. I expect Apple will be responding in short order.