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Jan 3 / kkrizka

Articles of The Week

Pictures of Falcon 9 Assembly

Falcon 9 is the reusable rocket that is being developed by SpaceX to carry payloads to space. It will be used to carry SpaceX’s Dragon capsule that will be used to supply the International Space Station.

Swype It, Don’t Type It

The Future of Things blog has an interesting article about a letter input technology for touch screen devices, called Swype, being developed by the T9 creator, Cliff Kushler. The idea is that instead of pressing keys on an onscreen keyboard, you just slide the finger from key to key to decrease time (estimate is 50 word per minute). Furthermore, the software also “guesses” what the next letter should be and if you slide close by it, then the letter is fixed. This is supposed to improve the accuracy of users with fat fingers.

The whole idea of sliding to the next letter reminds me of Dasher, a key input system that was designed for touchscreen interfaces and was part of the GNOME Accessibility Project a while back. It would be interesting to see it being revisited now that touchscreens are more common, with devices like the iPhone and BlackBerry Storm.

Stanford’s iPhone Application Programming Class Slides

I’ve got an iPod Touch for Christmas and one thing I’m looking forward to doing is developing applications for it. I already have a few ideas and I only have to become familiar with iPhone’s (and iPod Touch’s) Cocoa API. So far, slides from Stanford’s CS193 (iPhone Programming) seem like the best resource for this and far out-stripe Apple’s documentation.

The Best Keyboards For Every Occasion

ExtremeTech has a long article on the best keyboards (and another on mice) for different use scenarios. I’m quite happy with the article, because it lists both the MX Revolution keyboard and mouse in the “general use” category. I’ve purchased the combo during Boxing Day and so far it’s been working well for me.

30GB Zunes Failing Everywhere, All At Once

Hehe, only Microsoft could pull this off. Anyways, there is already an official solution at the Zune website to this problem, but it would still be interesting to hear what exactly the problem was.

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