福士(Volkswagen)的品牌有著廣氾和普及化的代表性。每個人的品味和生活方式雖不同，見解和觀點也不一樣，但人都可藉著分享互相連結，就像福士象徵"The People's Car"。每個人都可以擁有，每個人都可以因而受惠。希望能與你分享@點點滴滴....
2011年6月29日星期三
Practical-Looking Concept Electric Bike Actually Exists
Yes, this is another concept bicycle project, but this time there's a difference. The designer, Vojtěch Sojka, has actually made a working prototype, and it looks pretty sweet.
Working at the University of Technology in Brno, Czech Republic, Sojka developed the electric bike with Czech bike company Superior. From a distance, it looks like a cross between the Specialized Stumpjumper and a BMX. Step a little closer and you see the usual additions beloved of concept-bike designers.
The brakes are disk brakes, the handlebars and stem are annoyingly melded into one hard-to-replace unit and the battery is hidden away inside the seat tube. But there are also some rather practical design decisions.
While the fork gets some internal suspension, the rear relies on fat tires for rider-comfort. Unless you have some pressing reason for long-travel suspension, fat tires and sprung saddles are probably the best (and most maintenance-free) way to go. Next up is the position of the electric motor. It's inside the bottom bracket, keeping the weight in the center of the bike. Finally, the Shimano Alfine hub on the rear wheel keeps the lines clean and the gearing simple.
The most interesting part of the bike, though, is the omission of seat-stays. This was done to make it easy to fit the carbon belt drive. As carbon belts can't be broken and relinked by chains, you usually need an opening section in the seat stay to fit the things. Sojka's design obviates that need. It also means the entire weight over the rear wheel is borne by the chainstay/bottom bracket joint, which worries me.
Why not use removable, bolt-on seat-stays like you find on many old Dutch Bikes?
Still, Sojka's bike is one of the better concepts we have seen, and gains extra marks for actually existing in a real, rideable state. I'd totally take it for a spin.
City Electric Bicycle by Vojtěch Sojka [Bicycle Design]
See Also:
- Even The Laziest Rider Could Use this Electric Commuter Bike …
- Zaaf's Concept Bike As Fragile As the Granny That Would Ride it …
- Rael Concept Bike With Rear-View Camera
- Cannondale Concept Cross-Breeds Bike and Shopping-Cart
- City Concept Commuter Bike for Non-Cyclists
- Scary-Looking Concept Bike is All Corners
Pedal-Powered School Bus Cuts Kids’ Calories
Mush. Mush! Let the kids do the work for a change
In Berlin, Germany, you can regularly see toddlers being loaded into trolleys, four or more to a cart, and dragged by long-suffering teachers from school to — well, to where I don't know, as I would always try to avoid the brats. But these kiddie convoys would go a lot easier if the Germans would import this pedal-powered school bus from their neighbors up in the Netherlands.
Made by De Cafe Racer, this child-powered school bus is just the thing to save teachers' backs, help the the environment and wear out hyperactive rugrats. It even comes in school-bus yellow, although if they even have school buses in the Netherlands I doubt they are yellow.
Even empty, the bike bus shows its potential for as a fat-reducing ADD cure
Sadly, it looks like those poor Berlin teachers will be stuck dragging their pupils from place to place for a while yet. The child-powered school bus is a rental vehicle, to be hired by the day for fun rather than work. Still, maybe something like this would go down well in the States or the UK. Apparently, Britain is the fattest nation in Europe, and we all know about obesity in the U.S.
Child-powered school bus [De Cafe Racer via Bicycle Design]
See Also:
終於來了！Angry Birds 正式登陸 Windows Phone 7！
覺得 Windows Phone 7 太少遊戲玩嗎？稍安無躁！因為 Rovio 的 Angry Birds 終於登陸 Windows Phone 7 了！WP7 的用家現在可以在 Marketplace 上以 US$2.99（ 約 TW$86／HK$23 ）將 Angry Birds 的完整版帶回家，另有提供數個關卡的免費試玩版呢！還未有體驗過 Angry Birds 的您，快上去試玩一下吧！轉跳後有 Angry Birds 在 WP7 上運作的示範影片。
繼續閱讀全文 終於來了！Angry Birds 正式登陸 Windows Phone 7！
Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 4G up for pre-order from Verizon, finally
Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 4G up for pre-order from Verizon, finally originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Jun 2011 10:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink
Android Central | 
Verizon | Email this | CommentsGoogle+ Social Network Goes Beta with Original Mac Designer On Board
AppleInsider is reporting that the user interface design for Google's new social networking project turns out to be a prominent original member of the Apple Macintosh design team, Andy Hertzfeld. The search giant launched Google+ on Tuesday in an effort to curtail the rise of Facebook, and thus far most of the early feedback has been for the user interface, courtesy of design leader Hertzfeld and his team.
Hertzfeld is legendary among die-hard Apple fans, having joined the company in 1979 as a self-described "Software Wizard" who was "instrumental" to the design of the original Macintosh graphic user interface. While Hertzfeld left the company in 1984, he continues to run the Mac history website Folklore.org, having founded a number of other companies prior to landing at Google in 2005.
Codenamed "Emerald Sea," the Google+ project assigned Hertzfeld as the design leader, who soon found himself "constrained" at times with the company's traditionally spartan designs, according to Wired.
From early reports, it seems as if Hertzfeld may have won out, overriding Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page's dislike for "swooshy" designs and animations with the Google+ interface -- in particular the Circles grouping feature which "contains animation and other choices reminiscent of Apple's design ideals."
"With colorful animations, drag-and-drop magic and whimsical interface touches, Circles looks more like a classic Apple program than the typically bland Google app," claims Wired reporter Steven Levy, author of a recent book on Google entitled In The Plex.
Google+ launched on Tuesday with a "limited field trial" period by invitation only alongside an Android client app, and is promising an iOS version is "coming soon."
Follow this article's author, J.R. Bookwalter on Twitter
(Image courtesy of AppleInsider)
The iPhone Effect: how Apple’s phone changed everything
Here's a look at some stats on how things have changed over that period, both for Apple and for other companies operating in the same space.
Shifting stock fortunes:
- Apple's stock price at the close of June 29, 2007, the day of the iPhone launch: $122.04 a share. Tuesday: $335.26 with a market cap of $310 billion.
- Research in Motion's stock price on June 29, 2007: $66.66. Tuesday: $28.24 per share with $14.7 billion market cap.
- Nokia's stock price on June 29, 2007: $23.63. Tuesday: $6.11 with $22.7 billion market cap.
- HTC's stock price on June 27, 2007: 361.01 (Taiwan), Tuesday: 1040.
- Q2 of 2007: Symbian 65.6 percent, Windows Mobile 11.5 percent, RIM 8.9 percent, according to Gartner.
- Q1 of 2011: Android 36 percent, Symbian 27.4 percent, iOS 16.8 percent, RIM 12.9 percent.
Apple revenues shift toward the iPhone:
- In Q1 this year, iPhone revenues hit $12.3 billion, 49.8 percent of Apple's revenues, ahead of Macs at $4.9 billion and iPod at $1.6 billion.
- In Q2 of 2007, Mac revenue was $2.3 billion, 43 percent of the company's revenue, while iPods brought in $1.7 billion, or 32 percent of revenue.
- As of March, Apple said it has sold 108 million iPhones, 60 million iPod touches and 19 million iPads.
- Google introduces the Android operating system on Oct. 21, 2008.
- HP announces acquisition of Palm on April 28, 2010.
- Nokia announces partnership with Microsoft to run Windows Phone 7 on upcoming smartphones on Feb. 11, 2011.
- Motorola spins off Motorola Mobility Holdings on Jan. 4, 2011.
Affect on carrier competition and data use:
- In 2006, Verizon Wireless had 7.7 million new subscriber additions compared to AT&T's 7.1 million. After the iPhone launched, AT&T outpaced Verizon in net subscribers adds for the next three years, according to FCC figures. By 2009, AT&T had 8.1 million new adds while Verizon had 5.9 million.
- AT&T's earnings before interest, taxes, debt and amortization went from 34.4 percent in Q4 2006 to 40.7 percent by Q4 2009, outperforming all the other major carriers.
- AT&T's postpaid integrated 3G devices have grown steadily since the launch of the iPhone. It went from 8.5 million in Q4 2008 to 29.7 million by Q2 2010.
- Data revenue in 2006 for all carriers was just 7.5 percent of total revenue. By 2009, it was up to 26.8 percent.
The rise of smartphones:
- Smartphone adoption in Q1 of 2008 was 10 percent according to Nielsen. Nielsen predicts that smartphones will outnumber feature phones by the end of this year.
- Worldwide smartphone sales will hit 468 million this year and reach 1.1 billion by 2015, according to Gartner.
Smartphones open the door for tablets:
- Apple has sold about 19.5 million iPad through the first quarter of this year.
- Gartner estimates there will be 294 million tablets in 2015.
- Apple's App Store now boasts 425,000 apps, with 14 billion app downloads and $2.5 billion paid to developers to date.
- The Android Market has 200,000 apps and has had 4.5 billion downloads as of May.
- IDC now expects 182.7 billion mobile app downloads by 2015 across all platforms.
- Canalys estimates mobile app revenue will hit $14.1 billion next year and rise to $36.7 billion by 2015.
Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req'd):
- A Media Tablet Forecast, 2011 – 2015
- 5 Connected Consumer Companies That Ruled 2010
- 5 Companies That Ruled Mobile in 2010
MConcierge rolls out Guest Relationship Management solution for hospitality sector
Customer Relationship Management is an old business. There are tons of CRM solutions, both generic and industry specific. Mobile development shop MConcierge has recently announced a new solution for CRM in the hospitality industry that they're calling GRM: Guest Relationship Management. According to MConcierge, the point of GRM is to provide a top quality experience for guests that goes beyond just an average hotel stay. "Guests aren't simply buying a room but an experience. By building more unique preferences the hotel brand can better customize the stay," says Anthony Zebrowski-Rubin, CEO of MConcierge. "By building a profile of a guest based on onsite transactions, on and offsite interests, hotel preferences, and real time social profiled preferences contextualized to the type of property, the guest profile arms the hotel with information to action real positive communication with the guests."
For the hotels, GRM incorporates online social profiling, a mobile loyalty program, and direct-to-consumer marketing. For the guests, GRM allows them to use the app to interact with the hotel — requesting wake up calls, asking concierge for recommendations, etc.
Here's how GRM is supposed to work:
- Stage 1: A guest books with the hospitality brand. MConcierge's software collects all "open graph" data from social media websites such as Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and Tripit. The data is fed into the GRM platform which groups, clusters and populates the data directly into the guest's profile.
- Stage 2: The guest downloads the hospitality brand's free mobile application onto their smartphone. The application rewards the guest for every activity performed using the mobile application with loyalty points for immediate on‐premise redemption.
- Stage 3: GRM communicates with the guest by personalized pre‐stay, on‐premise and post‐stay special offers. This reward program helps to increase client loyalty using customized customer campaigns while reducing room acquisition cost through a direct‐to‐client-booking engine.
It'll be interesting to see if GRM improves the hotel experience for people. Maybe I've just been staying in the wrong hotels all this time. Actually, I'm sure that's it.
Ommwriter for iPad joins the distraction-free writing fray
Ommwriter was born as a "distraction-free" text editor for the Mac ($4.99 in the Mac App Store). Its unique features -- background image, ethereal music and key-press sound effects -- are also on the iPad app, along with a few others. The app's uniqueness is also polarizing. Many people either love it or can't stand it. The short of my review is this: if you like Ommwriter for the Mac, with its New Age music and bony trees, you'll love it on your iPad. If you don't, the iPad app will grate on your very last nerve. Here are the specifics.
UI
Ommwriter for iPad offers a wintry scene at launch. Barren trees stand in a snowy field as snowflakes fall from a grey sky. A musical arrangement of wind chimes, synthesizers and other electronic bits and bobs can be heard, while a cursor blinks in the upper left-hand corner.
This is your new document.
With a Bluetooth keyboard or Apple's iPad Keyboard Dock attached, you're ready to begin typing. Those without a hardware keyboard can use the software keyboard, but it's not what you might expect. It, too, has been "Ommwriter-ified." Tap the "0" at the bottom of the page (that number is a running word count) to summon it forth.
Ommwriter's software keyboard exists in a semi-transparent rectangle with rounded edges and rests on the lower half of the screen (note that the keyboard is only available in the landscape orientation). As you type, three things happen. First, each letter is placed at the cursor, as you'd expect. Each key press also leaves a ghost image on the keyboard itself. A small splotch of dark grey appears at your finger's landing point before fading away over two or three seconds.
Finally, the keyboard itself jiggles with each tap, as if it were made of Jell-O. This behavior is in keeping with the app's overall aesthetic, but I found it distracting.
That's it for the app's looks. Now onto the function.
Use
Typing is easy enough, but there are some rough spots. First and foremost is the lack of auto-correct. It's safe to assume that many users will use the software keyboard, as they want the full Ommwriter experience. I typically make the most errors with an on-screen keyboard. In fact, Ommwriter increased the time required to get something written. This is less of a problem with a hardware keyboard (note that key-press sounds are unavailable with a hardware keyboard).
Also, the key-press "ghosting" animation makes the keyboard look muddy once you're typing quickly.
When you're done, you can save your document by tapping the wrench icon on the keyboard's lower left-hand corner to open the preferences window. Tap the second icon from the right (it looks like a sheet of paper) to save it to a list of documents. From there, you can open any document, rename it, duplicate it or share it via email (the default output is .txt; PDF is also available). Finally, you can delete any document from the list.
Preferences
Ommwriter for iPad offers decent options for its look and feel. Again, tap the wrench icon to produce the preferences screen. You'll find seven settings: type style, type size, background image, "music," key-press sound effect (including silence), save (as described above) and brightness.
You've got four font styles to choose from, from serifs to script to all lower-case (urgh). There are four font size options, with the largest being nice and legible. There are seven background images available, and all but two are very heavy on dreary greys.
There are seven sound effects options, or eight if you include silence. Three are new-agey type music that's heavy on the synths and chimes. Other options include chirping crickets, a noisy office (rustling papers, footsteps walking about, muffled voices, etc.) and finally... breathing plus a vacuum cleaner.
I've no idea what to make of the last audio track. It starts with the sound of halting breathing, and after a few seconds the unmistakable sound of a vacuum cleaner is heard. It runs for a while and then stops. Next, a heart beat beings, followed by what I can only describe as creature-feature mad scientist laboratory sounds. The breathing is constant throughout. It definitely sets a tone.
As I said at the beginning, fans of Ommwriter for Mac will adore the iPad app. It's less of a distraction-free writing environment and more of a mood-generating text editor. There are many people who like to "set the stage" if you will for a writing endeavor. Ommwriter for iPad succeeds at creating a mood. Others concentrate more effectively with a monotonous noise running in the background; something to filter out nearby real-world distractions, like noisy kids or barking dogs. If that's you, give Ommwriter for iPad a try.
Those of you who like quiet and a no-frills text editor should look elsewhere.
Ommwriter for iPad joins the distraction-free writing fray originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 29 Jun 2011 06:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
HP tempts webOS early adopters to buy a TouchPad with $50 rebate
HP tempts webOS early adopters to buy a TouchPad with $50 rebate originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Jun 2011 05:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
PermalinkElectronista | HP Palm Blog | Email this | CommentsFring for iPad 2 With Four-Way Video Calls
With friends this good looking, you might want to video chat all day long
Fring, the cross-platform mobile VoIP app, has issued an update that brings native four-way video-calling to the iPad, before Skype has even released an iPad app of any kind.
The app, which is also available for Android and even in Nokia's OVI store, offers video and audio chat over both Wi-Fi and 3G (unlike FaceTime, which is currently Wi-Fi — and iOS — only).
Considering that Apple's own iChat multi-way video calls at first required a honking great Mac Pro to initiate and control the session, running this on an iPad shows how far we have come in just a few years. Sure, you probably don't take your iPad skiing, or blow kisses to three of your friends at once like you see in the promo photo above, but there are times when four-way chat could come in useful.
The obvious use is podcasting, but as Fring offers no desktop software it's unlikely to usurp Skype anytime soon. In fact, this might be Fring's major problem. Most of my Skype calls (and I imagine the majority of all video calls) are to family and friends far away. Most of these don't have smartphones yet, let alone tablets, so Skype remains the default for now.
Still, if you can actually manage to round up more than one friend who are both geeky enough to have Fring, and are also as good looking as the people in these promo shots, then good luck to you. You are clearly awesome.
NEW! Fun Group Video Chat for iPad: Full Size! [Fring]
Fring for iOS [iTunes]
See Also:
2011年6月28日星期二
3 iPhone optical character recognition apps compared
The three apps I've tested here are Prizmo, Perfect OCR: document scanner with high quality OCR and Image To Text – OCR. Only Image To Text is free; Prizmo is $9.99; and Perfect OCR is $3.99. I based my evaluation of each on three criteria: results, interface and speed. The text I used to test the apps was Apple's "Here's to the crazy ones" quote.
Results
With plain, printed text, set in Helvetica on basic white paper, the best results came from Image To Text. It produced no errors in the generated digital text, while Prizmo and Perfect OCR (especially Perfect OCR) did produce mistakes. This is probably because Image To Text performs the OCR process on its server, rather than on-device like the other two apps, which means it can take advantage of much more powerful processing resources. You can see the results in the gallery at the end of this post.
On the second test, using a more cursive font, Corsiva Hebrew, Perfect OCR didn't produce any results, since it couldn't recognise any text in the image. Again, Image to Text got the best results. None of the apps generated results anywhere close to the original text, but Prizmo didn't produce any recognizable words at all, whereas ITT did.
The final test I carried out was on handwritten text. OCR isn't meant for handwritten text, but I thought I'd see what happened. None of the three apps recognized text in the image, so you'll have to look at handwriting recognition software if that's your thing.
Category winner: Image To Text.
Speed
If you have hundreds or even thousands of documents to reproduce, the speed at which your app can generate text is important. Perfect OCR was the slowest overall, since it requires you to capture three images of the text. It also took a while to process the images. Image To Text, as I mentioned previously, performs the hard work remotely, so it works a bit slower while it communicates with the server. Prizmo was the fastest of all the apps, but its speed still doesn't match computer-based software.
Category winner: Prizmo.
Interface
While not as important as speed or results, if you use an app often, its interface makes a difference.
The worst app was Image To Text. The interface is simple, but maybe too simple. You can either take a picture or use one from your library, but once you've chosen or taken the picture, you can only email results or send them to Evernote. The app is basically just a slim front-end for the real action, which takes place on the remote server. You can't crop the image you take, or edit it in any way, so often the results include text you didn't want.
Pefect OCR has a better interface, with a few editing tools, and the app stores a history of the text generated. You can crop, rotate and recolour a taken image. This means you can try to improve your results. There are also more options for sharing the text, such as copying it, and emailing it in different formats. The interface isn't always pretty, but it offers some flexible functionality.
By far the best interface belongs to Prizmo. It looks professional, has a lot of features, but isn't complicated to use. When taking a photo, you can choose from a list of possible sources, and your choice dictates how Prizmo optimizes the results. There's a grid overlaid on the camera view, and there's even a speech recognition feature which allows you to tell your phone to take a photo to prevent shutter shake. Once you have a photo, you can rotate and crop it, move it around to compensate for perspective, and even pick a point on the image to use as the measure of what constitutes the background color for the text. After the results have been generated, you can share them to Dropbox, Evernote, CloudApp and more. You can also use Google Translate to translate it to another language.
Category Winner: Prizmo.
Overall
If you don't mind sending your text off to a server to get results, and only being able to use email or Evernote for sharing, then I'd recommend Image To Text. However, if you need extra features like editing, a history feature and better sharing, then Prizmo is your best bet, even with the $10 price tag.
Perfect OCR Cropping
Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req'd):
- Mobile Q1: All Eyes on Tablets, T-Mobile and AT&T
- A Media Tablet Forecast, 2011 – 2015
- A Global Mobile Handset Platform Forecast, 2011 – 2015
