Well it is summer time, and I thought I'd lead off my return to blogging with a post for technology and kids.  My kids have been busy doing all sorts of good outdoor fun this summer: swimming, golfing, water parks.  After a day out and about they like to come home and crash with some indoor fun. 

I found this site for my children that they absolutely love and I wanted to share it with you all.  The site is Kerpoof and it brings together two of my favourite things:  technology and creativity.  Kerpoof allows children to create a number of things:

• pictures where they start with a background and drag & drop characters and props to create a scene.  The tool is intuitive enough to adjust items you drag into the scene in terms of size to give a sense of perspective & depth
• drawings where kids can freehand draw
• movies where they can use an interesting timeline tool to have objects, characters, and speech appear & move as time passes.  It is a great introduction for kids on how animation is done.  It uses a similar paradigm to other movie creation tools and serves as a good introduction for kids
• cards and stories that again allow them to leverage a variety of creative tools

What I found most interesting about Kerpoof, aside from the tools, is the social network aspect.  Children, once setup with an account (that is free), earn virtual coins that they can then use to buy other things, like different style pens for example.  The art work is made available for other users to see and other kids can rank your work, which also earns you points. 

I've watched my oldest and youngest, 10 and 6, both spend time on this site and thoroughly enjoy it.  They email me pieces of their work through the day and it is amazing to see the level of sophistication that can be achieved after "playing" with Kerpoof for a while.

If you are looking for a good destiniation to send your kids to on the web, be sure to check out Kerpoof. 

Hello dear readers. At long last, I have finally returned to blogging. Life was incredibly busy with a number of personal life events and so tech blogging took a temporary hiatus.

Does that mean I was away from my usual use of technology? Not a chance! As I sit here this morning blogging in a Starbucks from my 3G iPhone, I have a dozen topics that I will slowly ease into this week.

It is great to be back! I look forward to reconnecting with you again in the coming days and weeks.

Ciao!
mip

For years we've heard about the next great iPod Killer.  A music player so revolutionary, it would surely break Apple's dominance.  Yeah right.  What did we get? Wanna-be-device after wanna-be-device.  Why do companies insist on labeling their products as "such-&-such-killers".  It is just dumb.  It introduces unnecessary pressure on the device, which rarely amounts to anything more than a later comer to the party.  It gave us poor devices like the Microsoft Zune which were destined to be iPod-killers but really became bottom-drawer-fillers.

Hence, I had to roll my eyes, now that LG has announced their iPhone killer.  Ummm...didn't they already try that with the Prada phone...which tanked miserably as an alternative to the iPhone.  Well they are at it again now with the Voyager, which looks to be a rip-off of the iPhone.  It looks pretty, sure, but will it perform well?  Will it be anything more than a "me-too" device?  LG has already made a misstep.  They have said this device will be the iphone-killer.  What happens if it isn't?  Wouldn't they have been better off just releasing this phone and letting it stand on its own?

No date or price has been set yet.  I would be willing to bet that by the time this phone hits the market, Apple will already be preparing the next generation iPhone.  What is encouraging about this story, however, is that you can see that Apple really has redefined the market - everybody is trying to imitate them.  What else is new?

So for the past while I've been enjoying the use of the iPod Touch.  There have been numerous reviews of this device and so I'm not going to do an exhaustive review of every little feature here.  Suffice it to say that the iPod Touch lives up to the hype.  Often with new technology, the hype around a new product grows so large that when the device is finally released it has no chance of living up to the hype surrounding it.  The iPod Touch (and first the iPhone) had a lot of hype.  I'm happy to say though that it all works as advertised.  Dive into the video review I've got below; there I'll step through some of some of the smaller, not often mentioned aspects of this device.  It is the little things, the small attention to detail that Apple gives it products, that really enhance the ongoing use of a product.

Hi everyone!  I'm so glad to see a lively discussion taking place at the 2 posts I created regarding the DSC-T200 digital camera from Sony (you can see them here and here). So here is a my follow on post with a video demonstration of this great little camera.  You can see th video below and then I've got some further details and photos samples after you click through the rest of this post!

So you've seen above some of the features of the camera.  As I said in the video, the display is gorgeous both in how it looks and its size.  The touch capabilities are very responsive and provide for a good end user experience.  So how are the pictures?  Great.  I've added to the right a shot of me that my wife took while I was making homemade wine this past weekend.  People were saying that they'd heard the pictures were grainy.  Not so.  You can see from the photo to the right that the picture is clear, the colour is great and the smile shutter works (she'd clicked the photo and the camera waited till I actually looked up and smiled).   I printed the picture at right as well as a 4x6 and a 5x7 and the quality was perfect. 

As I stated in the video, I'm incredibly happy with this camera.  The picture quality is very good, the camera is easy to use, compact and easy to take around and there are some useful innovations built in.

I know I don't typically write about things until I've had a chance to test them out, let alone reviewing video games.  But as I sat here this evening reading various tech things, an interesting article came across my screen that has made me giddy.  Seems like in the spring of 2008 I'll be able to wield my Wii Remote as nothing less than a lightsaber!

LucasArts today revealed that Star Wars™: The Force Unleashed™ will come to the Wii™ home videogame system from Nintendo next spring, offering owners the unique chance to live out their Jedi fantasies by wielding the Wii Remote™ as a lightsaber while using the Nunchuk™ controller to torment foes with their Force™ powers.

Oh baby.  What person who grew up with Star Wars hasn't imagined the day when they could hear the hum of a lightsaber that they were controlling.  This type of game is what the Wii was made for!  Done right, this should be an awesome game to play!

Do you recall a rant I wrote up back in February, 2007?  I was unhappy with the idea of a tax being impose on iPod, with that collected money going to the recording industry to compensate them for stolen music.  I was ticked off with this idea for a number of reasons, one being that it would effectively "fine" me for a crime that I didn't commit (i.e., I don't steal music...I buy it!).  More importantly, I thought that such a levy would basically give people who did steal music the argument that "hey, I didn't steal anything....I've already compensated you (recording industry) through the tax I paid on my iPod".  When I wrote about that, people emailed me for a week telling me I was off my rocker.

Well, seems that the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA), who has been fighting for this levy, has suddenly changed their mind and are looking to NOT have this in place.

The Canadian Recording Industry Association this week quietly filed documents in the Federal Court of Appeal that will likely shock many in the industry.  CRIA, which spent more than 15 years lobbying for the creation of the private copying levy, is now fighting to eliminate the application of the levy on the Apple iPod since it believes that the Copyright Board of Canada's recent decision to allow a proposed tariff on iPods to proceed "broadens the scope of the private copying exception to avoid making illegal file sharers liable for infringement."

The CRIA has come to the realization that they could actually be making the situation worse by imposing such a stupid needless tax.  You don't  fight piracy by making people pay for the stuff they are stealing.  If you've paid for it in advance, you aren't stealing it!  Further, you upset people who aren't stealing music.  That is what I said 7 months ago and I'm glad to see the CRIA has caught up to the program here.  Boy I love being right.

In truth, I think that the industry should embrace what Steve Jobs at Apple is doing.  Through an awesome online store, outstanding iPods and new buying mechanisms like WiFi purchases on the iPod Touch and the iPhone, and creative partnering like WiFi music buying in Starbucks, he's making it way more fun to buy music legally than to go and steal it!

Google added to their online office suite that capability to create presentations.  Previously they had the online word processor and spreadsheet.  Now they've launched a competitor to Microsoft's Powerpoint.  I've been using the presentation tool in the last 2 days to create a presentation I'm giving this afternoon.  Yes, that is brave thing to do, but I wanted to stress test the tool in a real world setting.  If you are asking yourself the question "what advantage does this online suite of tools bring?" watch the video below, then join me after the jump for a little discussion on this.

The potential value in this type of office productivity suite is huge (I think) but there are two major obstacles that need to be overcome.

1) Inertia:  people are already invested in MS Office in a huge way.  That will take time to overcome.  Not just time, from the sense of people needing to come to grips with the new paradigm of how an online office suite would work, but also time in terms of having enough of a critical mass for it to make sense.  If I'm the only one using Google's online office in my company, then it becomes harder for me to easily share work with my colleagues. 

2) It's Online:  the great strength of this suite of tools is that they are online and allow for all the benefits talked about in the video above. This strength though is also the online tools' weakness.  What about when I want to work on a document and I'm not online?  Perhaps I'm on a flight?  I think Google has full intention to overcome this.  I can see that through the use of their Google Gears.  For example, the Google RSS reader (http://reader.google.com) is a good online reader.  With Google Gears installed, I can make that online content available offline.  That is what has to happen to the office suite Google has launched.  There needs to be a way for me to work on documents offline, and then have those changes reflected automatically when I'm online again.

Will these two barriers be overcome?  I think so.  Will it happen fast enough that Microsoft won't try and move their Office suite to the web first?  That part I'm not so sure off.

To explore Google Docs for yourself, just click here.

Of course by now you know that Apple introduced a refresh to its iPod line and in that announcement, the also introduced the iPod Touch.  I can hardly wait for this device to arrive!  I didn't want to write anything about the iPod Touch until I'd actually received it, because I like to be able to give firsthand info about the tech I write about, and not just regurgitate the news.  And rest assured, I will do a detailed post on the iPod Touch when I receive it at the end of September / start of October. 

But I thought I'd would post a thought about one application I am really looking forward to using on my iPod Touch, an application that hasn't appeared anywhere in the demos or other press releases.  I'm looking forward to being able to use Typepad, the tool I use for posting my blog.  I read with interest the details this morning as I was working on some posts-in-progress.

I have a small Typepad app on my HTC smartphone that I've used from time-to-time, but I find it to be a very bare-bones, lackluster application that misses key functionality for me. The Typepad interface for the iPhone looks gorgeous, but more than that, it looks very functional.  It allows me to manage my blog and not just put out posts.  I like that a lot.  I have found that the Typepad application I use on my HTC is more like a simple text editor, while the one for the iPhone give a much richer end-user experience to make posting blog items as natural as when sitting down at your computer.  Of course, to use this on an iPod Touch, you'd need to be leveraging the WiFi rather than being to type up a post and then simply push it out.  But the reality for me is that I'm always around WiFi enabled locations, from my home, to coffee shops to being up at the cottage, so I don't see this as being an issue. I think being able to simply turn my iPod Touch on its side, have the screen automatically go into landscape mode and begin typing posts will be an absolute joy!

And so, of course there will be many many things for me to like about the new iPod Touch, but knowing I can blog easily from it is the icing on the cake for me.  The sad part is....the end of September seems so far away. 

Stay tuned for more!

I was thrilled to receive my DSC-T200 2 days ago!  You'll recall that I wrote about it a short while ago and that I'd pre-ordered it before it even officially went on sale!  Well, after 2 days of playing with this camera, I must say, I am very pleased.  There are several things I really like about the T200.  First, I like the size.  It is so compact!  It is also very light.  I carried it in my shirt pocket yesterday and hardly noticed it was there. 

Secondly, I love the display screen.  It is huge!  At 3.5" it takes up the entire back of the unit.  That of course does have one thing that will take getting use to - where to grab/hold the camera.  It is an odd feeling when taking a picture to only hold the camera by the outer frame since if I hold it as I normally held my old camera, I am really holding it by the screen!   But the large LCD screen is great for viewing pictures.  It is also a touch screen and I find it to be a very natural set of controls.  Of course, with any such "touch" device, carrying a small cloth to wipe the screen is a must. 

The face detection and smile shutter work exactly as advertised.  I love those two features.  What is nice about the smile shutter is that once you select the subject by tapping the face, the camera will not take a picture until that person smiles.  As soon as they smile...CLICK...the camera shoots the picture.  What is nice is that it will go on tracking the face and keep taking pictures each time they smile until you press the shutter button again.  This will be nice for birthdays as the kids unwrap gifts.  I'll just keep the camera trained on them and as soon as they smile as they unwrap that "I-absolutely-wanted-this-gift" - CLICK - the shot will be captured. 

I will give a more detailed review once I've used the camera a bit more and I'll post some sample shots.  I love that I can shot in 16:9 format - looks awesome on my widescreen Macbook Pro.   I'll probably include some video in the review since it'll be hard to have the DSC-T200 take pictures of itself!

This post comes from watching my daughter use a new piece of tech.  It is called the Fly Fusion and basically, it is a pen with smarts.  To understand how it works (because this is not a review of than pen - that will come later once I shoot some video) check out their Fly World site.  Watching my daughter use this pen as she wrote on paper, but was capturing it into her computer, it got me thinking.

After all these years that computers have promised the paperless environment (homes, offices, schools, etc), we still have paper, and lots of it.  The computer promised it, but never got there.  The Tablet PC promised it, but that never really took off.  Could it be that perhaps we've been chasing the wrong the dream and shouldn't be striving for a paperless world?  Could it be that we need to embrace the 5000 year old technology we call paper?  Perhaps the future is not in desktop, laptop or palmtop computing, but rather, perhaps it is pentop computing?

Watching my daughter us the Fly Fusion pen, tapping controls on the cover of her notebook, having a little voice emanate from the page making a suggestion on how to solve a math problem, watching her upload her notes to her computer - it all seemed to make...sense.  I was intrigued but stayed quiet to watch as she worked and realized that pentop computing makes sense because we all use paper.  Go to a meeting at work, everyone is using paper to capture their notes.  I'm taking an evening class right now and all of us are taking notes in little notebooks except one woman who is typing on a computer.  And she is somewhat distracting, the little click-click-click of the keys, the laptop screen perched in front of her.  It is a distraction.  When I use to take my Tablet PC into meetings in the workplace, it was a distraction for people. The nice thing about pentop computing is that it isn't a distraction because you are using a pen, writing on paper.  I like that. 

As I watched my daughter use the Fly Fusion pen to write in her new journal, I mused about how nice it would be to have a Fly Fusion pen for myself, but it is clearly a device made for kids.  So I set out to see what is out there for adults and professionals in the workplace.  Was I ever excited by what I found.

Enter the soon to be released Livescribe.   To appreciate it, watch the short videos.  Still aimed at student, albeit older students such as high school or university students, I think the Livescribe pen would work for me in the workplace.  It would give me the benefits that I use to have from my Tablet PC (digitized notes that I can search, a record of all my notes, audio tracks that compliment notes) without the distraction of the device itself.  The Livescribe is also easier to take around with you since it effectively is only a pen.  True you need to use their paper, in a similar fashion to the Fly Fusion pen, but paper is easy to lug around than a computer. 

The Livescribe isn't available for purchase yet, but  their website indicates that it should become available in Q4/2007, which is just around the corner.  At a cost of less than $200, in my mind, that is quite reasonable for a computing device.  I look forward to laying my hands on this pen and seeing how well it works.  More importantly, I'm very keen on seeing where pentop computing goes over the next few years.

This is a cross-posted item that has been originally launched over on my podcasting site mipcast.com.  The link to the podcast below is a standard mp3.  If you wanted the richer, interactive podcast in ACC formart, visit mipcast.com.

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Thanks for joining today’s exciting show.  If you listen to it by clicking the play button above, you’ll get changing show art and embedded links as well.  The same is true if you subscribe to it in iTunes.  So what exactly are we talking about today?

• The new Sony DSC-T200:  my search for our next digital camera
• Tafiti, a site launched by Microsoft to showcase Silverlight
• Google Earth and the ability to upload your photos, just one of many new interesting features
• Apple’s iLife Web Galleries

To listen to today's show, just click on the link below or subscribe to us in iTunes.  If you enjoyed today’s show be sure to Subscribe on the home page or check out our previous archives on the mipcast.

Download mipcast_august_25.mp3

It was the "unlock" heard around the world.  Cellphones are always being unlocked, and in most cases, it is a complete non-event.  But that isn't the case with the iPhone, a cellphone that was starting to look like perhaps it couldn't be unlocked (it took a while..as far as phone hacks go).  Today, Engadget posted details of a software "fix" that will unlock an iPhone so it will accept any SIM. 

I was of course, at hearing the news this afternoon, ecstatic.  I was already formulating a short trip down to the Apple Store in Buffalo so I could buy my iPhone, bring it back across the boarder, apply the software patch (available next week) and begin to enjoy the phone that has capture the imaginations of so many people.

Now, many hours since the afternoon's news, I sit at home thinking.  The initial euphoria has ebbed somewhat for me and I've begun to wonder about "what could go wrong" if I go this route.  The nagging thing for me is this:  Apple has an exclusive with AT&T and I think they won't take this hack sitting down.  If I were Jobs, I'd have my engineering team buy the software from iphonesimfree.com, figure out how they did it and then promptly break it with the next iTunes update.  That is my fear.  That I could buy this phone and be super happy, and then, each time I would sync it with my Macbook Pro, I'd be wondering "what if it doesn't work after this sync?" 

It isn't like you can go without syncing the iPhone.  That would defeat the purpose.  You have to sync to update contacts, calendar entries, music and videos.  And if each sync brings the possibility that the software fix could be broken, then that could leave people holding an expensive piece of plastic.  As much as I want an iPhone, I'm not willing to risk that.  I know, I know, I'm sure that if Apple breaks the fix, then the good folks at iphonesimfree.com will figure out how to fix it again and release the software.  But what if that takes a week?  Even if it took a day, can one reasonably go without a cellphone for a day? 

This is why I think that as awesome as the unlocking software seems to be, it isn't going to be a smooth ride for those trying to go that route.  I hope I'm wrong, but bet I won't be.  What this kind of patch might do, however, is accelerate Apple getting the iPhone legitimately into other markets. Here's hoping!

My tried, trusted and true Canon Powershot that I got 6 years ago has finally reached the end of the line for me.  The battery hardly hold a charge, the sliding cover has become so loose that at times when it is opened the camera doesn't turn on.  I love this camera.  It has been a good little 4 megapixel camera for me, capturing thousands of pictures of the past 6 years.

Alas, I have been hunting for a new camera and had several important objectives.  Obviously, it has to take good pictures, and I wanted a decent optical zoom.  I also wanted a camera with a large LCD display for viewing pics.  Laslty, I wanted something that would shoot in HD.  Well, minutes ago, I pre-ordered a newly released camera from Sony, the DSC-T200.  I can't wait for this to arrive.  It has some very impressive features.  Read on to find out what has me so excited about this sleek camera.

First off, the DSC-T200 has a nice 3.5" LCD screen.  To make it even better, it is a touchscreen.  More on this in a moment.  Secondly, it does high def.  Ok, so now to some of the neat features.  Getting back to the touchscreen.  You might be imagining that the touchscreen will allow you to select on-screen menus and what not with your finger.  True.  But it does more than that.  You are actually able to simply touch the screen area that you want to focus on, and the camera focuses on that area.  To see a demo of this, click here for a good interactive flash demo.  As recently as this past weekend, a picture I went to shoot with my previous camera was blurry.  Why, because as I quickly went to shoot it so not to lose the moment, the camera focused on the handrail of my deck, rather than on the people playing in the driveway.  I'm looking forward to the ability to focus via touch.

The camera also has face detection and smile detection.  You can read all about it here, but let me say, this is incredibly cool stuff and practical.  You can test is as well using the interactive flash demo too.  I like the ability to select a face and have the camera not take a picture until that person smiles.  This will be fantastic for shooting pictures of my kids.  My youngest often needs to be cajoled into smiling for the camera.  With the DSC-T200, you know the picture won't be snapped until a smile appears.  Totally awesome. 

Outside of the above "techy" features, the camera sports a good lens with a 5X optical zoom and a 25X digital zoom.  Sony has used a Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar lens, which is an outstanding lens. This model is an 8.1 megapixel camera similar CCD as the T100, which has been reviewed a producing great looking pictures.

All in all, this looks to be a very exciting camera.  I'll be counting down the days till I receive mine.  I'll do a follow up post once I receive the unit.

This is a cross-posted item from the newly launched mipcast, a site dedicated to my podcasts.  I will continue to cross-post here for a time, but, the podcasts here will be in mp3 format.  Over on mipcast, they are in ACC format, which allows me to build some "smarts" into the podcast as well.  The newly launched site also lets me do some real world testing of publishing a podcast/site using solely iWeb and Garageband.

You can listen to it/view it online at www.mipcast.com, you can subscribe and download it as well.

So without further delay, here are the details of today's podcast.
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Welcome to the newly re-launched mip cast, here on it’s own channel.   Join me in today’s show where I talk about:

• where is this new show going?
• the new iWork 08 from Apple
• the new iLife 08 from Apple
• Google online storage

To listen to this podcast, click on the link below, or go to www.mipcast.com and click on the Subscribe button.

Download mipcast_august_18_1.mp3