We work on the Internet. As such, we are constantly consuming information. Believe me, there is a lot of it out there. Sometimes we even forget things unless we write them down. Our blog covers everything from web standards to the muppets, php to comic books, music and everything else that we find interesting. Leave us a note when you drop by.
A couple of days ago Instagram released a new video app called Hyperlapse. It is pretty awesome to play around with and it works as advertised. Film up to 45 minutes of video and then use the basic speed selection at the end of shooting to pick your hyper-speed. That is all.
The video is then either shared to Instagram (15 second maximum length), Facebook or Vimeo. It is also saved to your device's camera roll so you can pull it into an editting program and work on it further. The video above took 45 minutes to shoot, 5 minutes to scrub through speeds and render at 12x. Then about 45 minutes to find a decent, open source, song and assemble it in iMovie. Rendering there took about 2 minutes with an upload to Vimeo after that. Total time is in the 120 minute range. Super fast to do.
This reminds me of a project we had around 2002 or so that required us to film the, then new, bike trails that the City of Winnipeg had built. At the time, we had a 486 and a early Pentium and a Pentium II computer, hard drives in the 500 to 5000 MBs range and a compact video recorder. We rigged up a platform on a bike and rode the trails with the camera running. After a few test runs, we realized that physically riding the trails was going to take longer that the camera's battery/tape length combo would allow, so we rented a moped.
The filming of the trails was the fast part. After that we had to record the video to our hard drives in chunks because of the lack of storage. In fact, I think we ended up buying a case of ZIP disks (remember those?). We then re-assembled the video into a longer video as we finished each of them. After we had the entire trail video in one complete file, we proceeded to compress the number of frames within the video to achieve a hyper-speed trail tour. This took days and over two weeks to get all the video processed for 5 trails.
Here is a clip we produced for the Assiniboine Park trail. Keep in mind the final video was set for 320x240 and we kept it under 10MBs because it had to be delivered over the internet on dial-up!
This was one of those projects that we loved building, but it got hung up in an election and then red-tape, so it never went live. If we can find the videos in our archives we will post a couple for comparison.
This morning, we produced more video in under 2 hours than we did in 2 days back in 2002. We love technology.
The PHP Development Team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.6.0. Follow the link to see a list of new features, backward incompatible changes, and improvements.
New Design Group has come up with a periodic table that promises to help web designers and developers manage a "stress-free relationship" with their clients.
Following a recent British Columbia Court of Appeal case, R. v. Godbout, Michael Geist looks at a particularly important principle and how "the decision suggests that Canadians can lose their constitutional rights against illegal search and seizure on the basis of contractual terms to which they are not even a party."
Uber is arming teams of independent contractors with burner phones and credit cards as part of its sophisticated effort to undermine Lyft and other competitors.
A list of cheat sheets for designers and developers. A bit spare at the moment, but its a work in progress. Bookmarked to see if and how it grows in the future.
Loved this write up and if Apple made this, I would buy it in a heartbeat. I have so many notes in little notebooks all over the place that I very seldom ever return too.
A terrific 15 minute video on the rise of automation that is happening right now. Watch it and start thinking about what you will do with all your free time.
"After January 12, 2016, only the most recent version of Internet Explorer available for a supported operating system will receive technical support and security updates. For example, customers using Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 9, or Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 7 SP1 should migrate to Internet Explorer 11 to continue receiving security updates and technical support."
"Typography is your design’s voice and the most powerful tool you have to communicate with your readers. Learn how to wield type with care and wit: how to evaluate typefaces, consider technical constraints, create flexible typographic systems, and put together your own collection of favorite faces."
