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Googles Announcement at Taronga Zoo Sydney
Jan 25th
I read last week from Gizmodo’s article that Google was holding an event at Taronga Zoo in Sydney. I thought this was strange because Australia never things from Google or Apple or anyone else based in America. Also it was held at the zoo?
Well today they announced that they are launching a new Google maps service relating to street maps. A Google Street view trike.
From Google Blog
“Our Street View Trike made its first outing in Australia today, taking a spin around Sydney’s beautiful Taronga Zoo. We’re really excited to have the Trike in Australia for the first time, because it will let us collect imagery of some of Australia’s most spectacular natural and man-made places that are off the beaten track – or, at least, set back from the public roads along which our Street View cars normally travel.”
The Street View Trike is a 110kg modified bicycle that can access many places a car cannot (such as bike trails, national parks and beaches) and includes a mounted Street View camera and specially-decorated unit and GPS system.”
If you would like to see a place imaged by the trike, Google is asking you to suggest places here
I hope they won’t be re-imaging my area with the street cars any time soon or I will have to get out there on my bike again.
Yeah they are actually me
Thanks to my sources
Adobe Flash Sustainable?
Jan 22nd
Adobe Flash has become apart of our daily web browsing as much as HTML has. But is it as important? Not really.
Flash has had the potential to become something quite great but the most useful thing it has achieved is being the standard for web video and some good online applications. Almost all web video is played through a video player running on flash. Probably it’s second biggest use is ads. Almost all the moving ads on the web today is built on flash even, website’s have been created using just flash.
“So with all the potential that flash has why isn’t it gaining web greatness?” Because its slow, even on modern Intel core 2 duo processors, after having a few videos open at the same time the computer can start to lag. Also normally when a website has been built using flash it takes forever to load and it just doesn’t feel as clean to use as the alternative.
“So why not something else?” Well their isn’t really any other options. Sure you can embed a Quicktime or a Windows Media video but it just doesn’t have the flexibility or features you can implement with creating your own flash video player. “Silverlight?” I don’t have enough experience with Silverlight to comment on it.
It’s not all bad. Flash applications mainly video players have been worked on and worked on most notable Youtube and Viddler’s video players. They both load quick and most of the time run great and have great features like annotations and time line comments. But they both suffer from the same problem and it’s how resource hungry they are. Just decoding flash is just not optimised well enough and his all lays on adobe. Also flash video isn’t a small file. Can be quite large.
“So the future is gloomy?” Actually no, and this is the whole reason I am writing this post, HTML 5, the new revision of HTML. A couple of it’s new features are audio and video. Youtube is demoing it here and I found it quite great. My CPU didn’t spike and for a beta product it was quite nice to use, I could use the video slider and it didn’t skip around (Youtube has fixed this to some extent but it still exists in it’s flash player).
“Great HTML 5 it is then.” ummm no, well not yet. HTML 5 is still quite new and the players still need to be built and popularity needs to be gained. The player that Youtube was demoing had no more features than a Quicktime embed.
Hopefully soon all the major video hosts will follow Youtube’s lead and start using HTML 5 because it sure seems much better than flash. I don’t think flash will die well not in the fore seeable future, their still are many online applications that use flash and you can’t forget flash games but adobe really need to optimise it.
Chuck Season 3 a success… For now
Jan 14th
A show that easily became one of my favorite shows of 2008/2009 was Chuck. I was given season 1 and caught season 2 mid way through. After season had finished and then learnt that the 3rd season was grim. Which I didn’t find all that surprising because the show is corny and quite PG at times but unhappy. I stopped checking on the show till comic-con when I discovered that the chuck cast had a panel and also discovered that the show was coming back for a 3rd season and also that the show had been saved by fans of the show.
So after a really long wait I found out via twitter the first episode of chuck was airing and then last night I found out that Ep 2 and 3 had aired. So now with all three episodes under my belt the only surprise I took away from the show is someone was actually killed with a gun and blood was involved. In the past the shows had explosions and guns shot as far as I can remember no one has ever been shot only hit. So the show is stepping away from it’s corny PG. I tried to find out what the episodes were rated but I couldn’t find them.
So how is the 3rd season of chuck? Better than ever. The seasons seemed to have a lot of changes but didn’t change at all which I guess the same with most shows. What did every one else think of it? Well from what I could understand from the LA Times article it went well.
Well I like the 3rd season every one else liked the 3rd season lets hope the ratings stay good and hope to see a fourth season soon (seeing this season is only nineteen episodes) instead of in a year.
What did you think of season 3 leave a comment below. If you enjoyed this article please tweet it out. Thanks for reading.
