I don‘t know about you, but I have found that I use Keychain a huge amount. I use it to store passwords (obviously), notes (using the secure notes feature), and serial numbers (again secure notes). In Tiger, Apple have really made the whole application a lot more user friendly with separate panes in the window for different keychains, and for keychain item categories. The latter of these is the real usability bonus, allowing you to see just notes, just internet password, just application passwords and so on. Now all of this functionality might have been there in the Panther version but it certainly wasn’t well laid out.

Finally it's worth pointing out that with the Quicksilver Keychain plugin, all of the keychain items are available instantly from within QS - very handy for when Safari forgets that it has a password stored!

All in all a nice improvement!

Hey Google, Map This!: "Inventive web developers are taking Google's online map service to a new level, layering in house sales and apartment rentals, real-time traffic stats and Flickr (tdf) photo tags. By Daniel Terdiman."

(Via Wired News.)

Golan Levin keynote at Cybersonica: "As promised, here's my notes on the talk Golan Levin gave during the Cybersonica festival.

Audiovision and Computation: Landmarks, Paradigms, Futures

The four pillars of digital art, the four core concerns of electronic media artists are:

• Transmediality (tangibility, audiovisuality environment),

• Processuality (generativity, algorithmic processes),

• Connectivity (communication, connection),

• Interactivity (creative flow, play, cybernetic feedback).

To understand ‘visual music’ (performing):

• a formula which combines both sound and image into a holistic union,

• or a striclty visual, temporal form, analogous to but separate from music.

Levin‘s work belongs mainly to the first ’formula' but he often uses both.

Audiovisual performance systems

In his 1927 book Color-Music: the Art of Light, Adrien Bernard Klein wrote ‘It is an odd fact that almost everyone who develops a color-organ is under the misapprehension that he, or she, is the first mortal to attempt to do so.’

Researchers, artists, scientists regularly claim they were the first to invent the Color Organ. Untrue as the story shows:

The earliest known device for performing visual music was built in 1734 by Louis-Bertrand Castel.The Ocular Harpsichord coupled the action of a harpsichord to the movement of transparent tapes. In 1844 D. D. Jameson‘s ’color organ‘ filtered light through liquids of various colors and reflected it off metal plates onto a wall. Frederic Kastner’s 1869 Pyrophone opened flaming gas jets into crystal tubes to create both sound and image. Levin went on giving many examples (see a list of them in the extract of his thesis proposal) and highlighted two instruments : Thomas Wilfred‘s Clavilux (1920’s, pictured here), and Oskar Fischinger's Lumigraph (1948). The Clavilux filtered light through several stages of multicolored glass disks, the instrument produced only images, no sound at all, Wilfred was commited to that. The Lumigraph interupted colored beams of light with a flexible fabric surface.

Introducing the computer. The computer:

• transcends the limitations of physics, mechanics, optics,

• overcomes the control/generality tradeoff of physical systems,

• takes advantage of the unique affordance of computation: iteration and simulation; conditional testing and constraints (the difference between a calculator and a computer is that the computer has the ability to ask ‘what if’), data storage.

Visual interfaces to sound on the computer - Common paradigms:

• score displays,

• control-panel displays,

• flow-based networks,

• reactive ‘widgets’ (spriters, romplers),

• navigable terrains (virtual land-mines),

• cellular automata (sonified life).

1. Score-based interfaces. They are extremely efficient but:

• they generally have a diagrammatic space instead of a painterly one,

• they rely on a coded visual language of mostly arbitrary graphical conventions. You need the key!

1. Control panel interfaces. They lack the gratifying tactility and the two-handedness of the 70's synthesis.

1. Widget interfaces (object metaphors) have material properties, physical properties (like ‘how high’) and contextual properties(such as ‘how near to an object’).

Reactive widgets: when taken individually have limited malleability, are quickly exhaustible (canned media), the malleability is achieved through sheer number (e.g. 10,000 widgets), future in granular resynthesis and wavelets.

1. Navigable space interfaces (terrain, architecture and map metaphors) where you navigate in a 3D world. E.g. Lab AU, and Playstation's Vib-ribbon (picture above).

1. Automata interfaces (rules systems). e.g. the work of Tom Betts.

1. Flowchart interfaces (networked metaphors).

Challenges and pitfalls

• Randomness: how can someone know that the system really responds?

• the taste of mathematical systems, instead of focussing on whether it is meaningful,

• cartesian and diagrammatic mappings,

• modal interactions instead of giving people feedback on where they are,

• ROM-based solutions.

Some exciting new directions:

• custom physical sensors,

• physical sound actuation,

• alternative imaging (physical pixels, lasers),

• new contexts (phone, PDA, putdoor, furniture),

• better user models (learning systems),

• software cannibalisation (game mods),

• etc.

The second part of Levin's talk was a presentation of his own work.

"

(Via we make money not art.)

Movie of “Wooden Mirror”

Stunningly beautiful and utterly fascinating. Really worth a look!

Why has it taken so long to create something so necessary that actually LOOKS HALF DECENT?????!!!!

Architectural Devices: Smoke Detector
""

A few intros to sites about Locative Media that I‘ve been collecting on the way; I must admit that as a subject it isn’t grabbing me the same way that some of the other fields in ubiquitous computing are but it's always useful to keep a rounded view!

1. Geograffiti: Waypoint Sharing Applications: “To demonstrate the concept of waypoint sharing we have been developing a number of waypoint sharing applications for the project we call Geograffiti.”

2. Locative - workshops: “Welcome to the Locative Network's shared workspace. Here workshop participants can quickly document collaborations.”

3. PLAN Pervasive and Locative Arts Network: “Wireless and locative technologies are enabling people to break away from traditional computer interfaces. Mobile devices are mediating new kinds of social interaction and responding to physical location and context.”

4. pixelACHE 2004 - Locative media workshop: “The Locative media workshop held during pixelACHE 2004 Festival is the first event in the series of 6 ‘Trans-Cultural Mapping’ workshops initiated by RIXC Centre for New Media (Riga, Latvia). Each workshop will have a specific focus on outskirts and interregional networking, in the context of an enlarged Europe. Addition goal is to discover specific, deep and relevant layers of the local cultures, involving specific local communities in the process.”

5. PLAN: On Locative Media's European Reception - MUSE: “I‘m pleased to bring you this, the first installment of my weekly column, exclusively written for the MUSE project, on ’what‘s hot in locative media’. The idea here is for me to provide MUSE's researchers with a brief summary of the state of the art in wireless, location-aware technology, referring the reader to events, projects and sites of interest that I have also catalogued for the site. The most recent event of interest is the PLAN (Pervasive and Locative Arts Network) event at the ICA (Institute for Contemporary Art) in London, England, which I was very fortunate to have been invited to attend.”

6. GPSter:Locative - Main.Where-Fi: “Where-Fi allows you to turn a landscape of Wi-Fi 802.11 access points into a public location awareness infrastructure. Any Wi-Fi access point, GSM tower or bluetooth beacon can be used to geolocate client applications through a collaborative database of beacon-to-location mappings. Clients can compare Access Point signals recieved to the database to determine their likely location, and clients with GPS devices can upload beacon-to-location mappings to the database.”

7. TCM Locative Reader: “Most data has a spatial context. Attached to interesting metadata, maps come alive, and become hackable, and hackers build tools to allow all of us to make our own maps; tell our own stories. Maps can be powerful instruments of propaganda.”

And stacks of links here:

mobilegaze.com

34 NORTH 118 WEST: “focusing on site specfiic experimental works utilizing digital media, computation, and internet resources”

Knock! Knock! Ubiquitous.: “Commercial Ubiquitous Computing”

[Design without Reach

Howstuffworks “How do they make marshmallows?”: "Marshmallows are incredibly cool — not only do they taste good, but by lighting them you can create a great source of light in a dark campsite!

Technically, marshmallows are a confection — a candy. They've been around in the form we know them since the mid-1800s."