Google released the source code of the Apollo 11 mission - together with an emulator.

On the first sight this may seem as yet another nerdish project, but it’s much more than that.

If you belong to the rare specie of Assembler programmers, you will have the unique chance to follow the thoughts of the people who coded a program that controlled a computer which flew a space-ship from Earth to the moon and back. Moreover, you have the possibility to see how the Lunar Module was programmed.

But for the rest of us, although we do not understand anything of that code, it’s an important artifact of history of mankind. Frankly, how many of those artifacts are we able to read? Hieroglyphs? Are they an important artifact of human history? Definitely.

Finally, there is an emulator to run the programmes on any computer. Somebody even made it possible to run that software on a handheld! 40 years ago, people racked their brains how to have an efficient computer that does not consume too much space and energy and today we could do the same with a mobile. I love IT.

Here’s the video…

“The main goal of the Integra project is to create a new piece of software for composing and performing music with live electronics. The environment will be tested in real life thanks to substantial new commissions and an effort to modernise existing repertoire that currently uses obsolete technology. Furthermore, the project is an exciting opportunity to bring together research centres and new music ensembles from across Europe.”  - Integralive.org

We’re very excited to be involved in UI/UX design and Graphic design for this new music software development project. There is a news post here about our involvement. Have a look at the whole site for more information on the groundbreaking work that Integra are doing.

Flaxus is a software developed by i2off.org and r3nder.net under the TOPLAP manifesto, to perform visual performance in real time.

The graphic piece is generated by code at the same moment of its execution, thus, the artistic experience comes closer to a performance event such as music or dancing.

Read more here.

See online demo here.

So you want to stream to your music into your living room, but can’t afford a media-center? If you own a Nintendo Wii, here is the solution: DOT.TUNES is a server application which allows you to stream your music to any place connected to the internet. It works on every browser with Adobe Flash support, so you can connect via your pda, mobile phone, psp, wii etc.

If you are too stingy to buy a lincense for DOT.TUNES there is a free alternative aswell, called WiiAudio, which is in it’s beta stage right now. Happy listening!

Multi-touch sensing enables a user to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations.

Multi-Touch Interaction Research



An experiment aimed at providing the experience of the Minority Report interface. But without gloves.

Naturalinteraction



See more examples in Pixelsumo.

This is amazing interface stuff from the MIT Media Lab, which has always been at the forefront of interaction design. I would certainly go back to school if they had one of this, plus a variation of the brilliant Messa Di Voce installation / performance that Golan Levin and Zach Lieberman did in 2003.

UrlKit is an open-source Flex library for browser URL control via deep linking developed by Joe Berkovitz and Todd Rein.

The bad news are Safari known issues, as usual.

Related Posts:

• Flash and Ajax History Support in Safari?
• Ajax and bookmarking, refreshing and going back
• Flash: Back Button and Deep Links Topic

Anyone involved in online software development should read this, published by 37Signals. Comes across a bit cocky, but does help clarify what is important, a question we all find really hard to answer nowadays. Where does design fit into this? That might be ever trickier to answer…

Adobe Flash 9 Public Alpha provides access to the new ActionScript 3.0 language and the ability to publish to the newly-released Flash Player 9.

• Adobe Flash 9 Public Alpha
• Flash Player 9
• Action Script 3.0 Language Reference

Two different ways of organize objects on your desktop:

BumpTop Prototype:

BumpTop Prototype by Anand Agarawala and Ravin Balakrishnan. Keepin’ it Real: Pushing the Desktop Metaphor with Physics, Piles and the Pen. (See video demonstration here)

Update, this link seems to be down. Here’s the video on YouTube.

SphereXP:

The SphereXP is a 3D desktop replacement for Microsoft Windows. Taking the known concept of three-dimensional desktops to its own level.(See video demonstration here)

XK72 has released a new version of my favourite piece of software Charles.

To check the new features and download click here (The one I’m most excited about is the autoupdate feature!).

I had some trouble with the Autoconfiguration in Firefox 1.5 and realised that I had to uninstall the Charles Autoconfiguration Extension in Firefox, restart Firefox and install the latest version of the Extension. Now it works like a charm.

He is also writing a documentation Wiki on Charles and has opened a Blog.

Charles v2.2 has now been released and can be download from here.

This release is mainly improvements and bug fixes:

• Improved Firefox proxy configuration
• XML viewer improvements
• Line numbers displayed in ASCII viewer
• more…