A team of engineers at SSTL and the Surrey Space Centre in Guildford want to see if the sophisticated capabilities in today’s mobile phones can function in the most challenging environment of all: space.

Why are they doing this you might be asking? Shaun Kenyon, the project manager at SSTL, said, “They come now with processors that can go up to 1GHz, and they have loads of flash memory. First of all, we want to see if the phone works up there, and if it does, we want to see if the phone can control a satellite.”

Although the specific phone model to be used hasn’t been announced yet, SSTL wants to use the phone to control a 30cm-long satellite and take pictures of the Earth in the mission later this year. If this works, it could potentially save tons of money and weight for future similar projects in space.

The team chose Android because of its open source software, which means they can tweak it if need be.

“We’re not taking it apart; we’re not gutting it; we’re not taking out the printed circuit boards and re-soldering them into our satellite – we’re flying it as is,” Kenyon explained. ”And, in fact, we’re going to have another camera on the satellite so we can take a picture of the phone because we want to operate the screen and have some good images of that as well.”

All I know is I can’t wait to see pictures of this Android smartphone in space! What device do you think they’ll choose? Let us know in the comments.

British engineers planning to send an Android phone into space

View full post on Android News, Rumours, and Updates

rel="attachment wp-att-24755" href="http://www.appcraver.com/simply-postcards/simply-postcards-iphone/"> style=' float: left; padding: 4px; margin: 0 7px 2px 0;' class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-24755" title="simply postcards iphone" src="http://www.appcraver.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/simply-postcards-iphone-300x200.png" alt="" width="300" height="200" />If you travel frequently or are an avid iPhone photographer, title="simply postcards iphone app" href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/simply-postcards/id397153849?mt=8&partnerId=30&siteID=saW0nB/fQ6o" target="_blank">Simply Postcards is an app worth checking out. The idea is simple – using photos you take with your iPhone camera or stored in your photo library, use Simply Postcards to create a real, tangible, custom postcard that can be mailed to anyone, anywhere. The cost of a postcard starts at $1.00 and is paid for with a credit card or PayPal account, which users set up through their Simply Postcards account. (…)
Read the rest of href="http://www.appcraver.com/simply-postcards/">Create and Send Real Postcards with Simply Postcards

Hello and welcome back to another video tutorial on Android App Inventor just incase you missed last weeks here it is Volume 1: Setup.

In our last video we got used to the interface setup the GUI and loaded it up on a emulator. This time we will setup the code necessary to login to twitter and send a tweet with the chosen text. Instead of text ill let the video speak for itself.

Next week: Adding images to buttons, user ideas?

Thanks for watching do you have a comment or question mabey even a suggestions for next week? please drop a comment and tell us whats on your mind.

View full post on AndroidSPIN | Your No.1 source for Everything Android.

Image: Warner Brothers

While Batman, Iron Man and Spider-Man might be impressive and powerful at the box office, they aren’t so good for today’s youth say psychologists. During last week’s Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association (Psy-Con?) mental health professionals said that, while yesterday’s heroes fought crime and made better role models, today’s superheroes are too violent and send the wrong messages and images to young, impressionable boys.

“There is a big difference in the movie superhero of today and the comic book superhero of yesterday,” said psychologist Sharon Lamb, EdD, distinguished professor of mental health at University of Massachusetts-Boston. “Today’s superhero is too much like an action hero who participates in non-stop violence; he’s aggressive, sarcastic and rarely speaks to the virtue of doing good for humanity. When not in superhero costume, these men, like Iron Man, exploit women, flaunt bling and convey their manhood with high-powered guns. ”

By contrast, Lamb says, superheroes of days gone by allowed boys to learn from them because they had vulnerabilities when the capes were off. Lamb came to these conclusions by interviewing nearly 700 boys between the ages of 4 and 18. She and her team concluded that marketers convince these boys they can either be players or slackers – in her words, a “narrow view of masculinity”. One of Lamb’s colleagues says boys are better adjusted when they resist internalizing macho images.

You can read more about Lamb’s study here or read her book on the subject. But we’re curious: what do you think? Are today’s superheroes worse than those from the past? Is being exposed to macho stereotypes a bad thing for your son? Do we need to return to the days of Adam West and George Reeves? Let us know in the comments!

View full post on GeekDad

The nascent Web Open Font Format (WOFF) is getting a boost this week thanks to some new initiatives being kicked off by the W3C, the web’s governing body.

The W3C recently created a working group to build a WOFF into a web standard, and that group will be holding its first face-to-face meeting at the TypeCon 2010 conference taking place this week in Los Angeles.

Representatives from the major browser vendors, several font foundries and web services providers will be in attendance. Also, a dozen or so select individuals will be participating in a series of presentations and panel discussions about WOFF throughout the conference. All the design industry folks in attendance will get a peek at the future of high-quality typography on the web. There are scores of topics on the program, but this year, WOFF is getting top billing.

Things are looking up for web fonts in general. Monday, Webkit announced a partnership with Adobe to include the company’s fonts as part of its licensing service. Last month, Google launched a new tool (tied to its Font API) that makes it dead easy to include any of its open source fonts in website designs.

The Web Fonts working group was formed earlier this year at the W3C, and the group has already released the first working draft of the specification that will eventually lead to WOFF becoming a recommended web standard.

WOFF works just like OpenType and TrueType — you use the @font-face CSS property to drop the fonts in — but the font data is compressed, so the files download faster, and you can include more fonts in your designs without worrying as much about payload bloat.

The W3C adds this bit: “The WOFF format is not expected to replace other formats such as TrueType/OpenType/Open Font Format or SVG fonts, but provides an alternative solution for use cases where these formats may be less performant, or where licensing considerations make their use less acceptable.”

Support for WOFF is already strong — Google, Mozilla, Apple, Opera and Microsoft browsers either ship with or are building support, and the fast-moving foundries are releasing WOFF fonts — so why is the W3C’s involvement a big deal when the open source format is enjoying such success?

Standardization by the W3C is the best path to true interoperability. It will keep all the parties on the same page when it comes to things like accessibility, cross-browser compatibility, internationalization and search engine indexing. How much metadata to include and how it is handled are also big issues. Plus, fonts have taken an astonishingly long time to arrive on the web because of red tape around licensing, and a collaborative process for developing licensing infrastructures will go a long way toward convincing some of the more conservative type designers to make web-friendly versions of their creations.

The standard will take years to complete (the process is very slow — we’re guessing 2012 or so), and until then, we’ll see designers, developers and innovative service providers like Typekit and Google continue to feed the interest in fancy web fonts. Those not on the bleeding edge may be stuck in the boring world of “web safe” fonts for a while, but at least the future is bright.

TypeCon 2010 runs from August 17 through 20.

Photo by Leo Reynolds/Flickr/CC

See Also:

• Typekit Teams Up With Adobe to Offer More Web Fonts
• Dealing With the Dreaded ‘Flash of Unstyled Text’
• Test Drive Your Type With Google Font Preview

View full post on Webmonkey

One of the features in Froyo that is dead useful is the Chrome to Phone extension, allowing you to send pretty much any kind of info while you are browsing to your Froyo based Android handset.  Up until now, the functionality has been limited to Google’s Chrome brower, but according to the unofficial Google blog, there is now an extension for Firefox that has the same functionality.

It is called send-to-phone, and installs within a few seconds into your Firefox browser.  It adds an option to your right-click context menu to send the selected info to your Android handset.

Now, this is only available to those lucky enough to be using Froyo on their phones, but with more handsets getting Froyo pushed to them, it won’t be long before you may be able to test this out for yourself.  Let us know how it works for you in the comments!

NOTE: Send to Phone Extension Adds “Chrome to Phone” Functionality originally appeared on AndroidGuys.

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• July 30, 2010 — Confirmed: Galaxy S to get Froyo in September (4)
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• July 29, 2010 — Galaxy S Does Froyo and Micro-USB to HDMI (3)

View full post on AndroidGuys

Do your kids like comics?

Ok, that’s a silly question. Do your kids like to draw comics? Maybe they’re already experts at it, or maybe they need a little push in the right direction. Either way, I’ve got just the perfect book for you: the Adventures in Cartooning Activity Book.

This is actually a companion to Adventures in Cartooning, sort of a kids’ version of Understanding Comics. Like Scott McCloud’s seminal work, Adventures in Cartooning tells how comics work by way of a comic, this time with a knight, a horse, a dragon and a magic elf. It’s all done in a doodled style which is really cute and easy to read. The Activity Book notches up the interactivity. Instead of just reading about the knight’s adventures, your budding artist gets pages to fill in—drawing food for Edward the horse, filling in sound effects, learning how to use dust clouds and motion lines to show somebody running fast.

The story is pretty funny, too, with a cookie monster, a giant, robots and the knight’s solution for making the rain stop; the magic elf comes along to give pointers about how comics work. At the end there’s a review of cartooning tools, and then 14 pages of blank panels for geeklings to draw their own comics.

My six-year-old's rendition of Edward the horse.

I received a review copy of the Adventures in Cartooning Activity Book, and my six-year-old read it through twice while we were on the way to lunch. She couldn’t wait to get back home so she could grab her pencil and start doodling—I didn’t even get to read it myself until later. She hasn’t finished filling in all the pages yet (and has yet to draw her own comic at the back), but she loved both the story and being able to complete the drawings herself.

Adventures in Cartooning is published by First Second Books. The three creators — James Sturm, Andrew Arnold, and Alexis Frederick-Frost — hail from the Center for Cartoon Studies, a school in Vermont where you can study (and make) comics! I may need to look into that … after my kids go to college.

You can read an excerpt from Adventures in Cartooning to get a feel for the style of illustration and sense of humor. I loved the book, and I’m hoping my daughter gets a chance to meet James Sturm when we hit Comic-Con next week.

Adventures in Cartooning retails for for $12.99, and the Activity Book is $7.99.

Wired: Draw comics to complete a silly cartoon story, and then use what you’ve learned to create your own mini comic book.

Tired: My only complaint is that it’s over too quickly — but hopefully by then your kids will be filling notebooks with their own cartoons.

Disclosure: I received a free review copy of the Activity Book.

View full post on GeekDad

Even though I would never pay for or accept a stolen phone and do not agree with Gizmodo’s actions, I think the police action for busting down the editors door and breaking into his house was even more appalling. Really? It is not like this was a drug dealing murderer or rapist and he did not deserve this type of treatment. I know we are all passionate about our smartphones, but it was JUST A PHONE folks and no one is going to die because of it. Similar to the stolen iPhone situation, Nokia has a prototype that was placed into a writer’s hands without authorization too and they want their prototype back.

I did not write a post linking to this “review” before (here it is if you want to check it out) because I don’t think it is a fair evaluation of the device with the software still several months from completion. I hope that Nokia gets the device back and that people take an honest look at the N8 and future devices without basing decisions on the early prototype “reviews”.

View full post on Nokia Experts