#Voicetweetup

Yesterday evening I went to #voicetweetup at the Jam Factory, I was going to liveblog the event, I was all prepared with my netbook fully charged, and then it failed to find the Jam Factory's Wi-Fi network. Forced to use traditional methods of pen and paper here are my notes:


7:30 Ask Rosemary about Florence... Arists commune?
Laptop broken, ChomeOS not tracking mouse movements, blargh.

7:35 Resorting to liveblogging with pen & paper.

7:58 iPad has been activated! Take lots of photos.

8:05 Talk about volcanoes, no airplanes. Presley was stuck on Chile for a long time. This may not have actually been a bad thing.

8:20 Apparently South Park made an episode about Facebook. I have to see this.

8:34 lol Pr0nz? 'Pornography in the 21st Century'. Now on the iPad.

8:53 Geni

And then people started going home.
The iPad was most interesting, here are the photos:

Directly related to the media course, this is the Guardian.co.uk website on it. It does support that nifty multi-touch zoom thing which people who make touchscreen devices always seem to get excited about. Wendy made a good point about the fact that you can zoom to a level where the banner ads are no longer included in the screen. I regularly do this anyway in chrome on my laptop, but the multi-touch thing feels far more natural than pressing Ctrl+scroll wheel. It's certainly a new way of interacting with a screen which was only hinted at by the Microsoft Surface.

Altair's chronicles. This is particularly interesting because since the announcement of the iPad I've seen many gaming blogs talk about the potential of the iPad as a gaming platform. The mobile Assasin's Creed adventure is actually an iPhone app but it's been scaled up in size to fit the bigger screen.

This is me, touching an iPad while performing the multi-touch action with my fingers.

The iBook app, most notable for it's inclusion of books from Project Gutenberg which are in the public domain. Here you can set the font and text size. It's certainly a technological leap forwards in terms of publishing. But not as much as a leap forwards as the Kindle, including a book app on a more expensive device doesn't count. Technological convergence has it's disadvantages (see: cameraphones).

And this, the 'virtual page turning' only really interesting because it tries so hard to pretend it's a real book.

And lastly the Kindle app, alongside my notes, I think it lets you doodle virtual notes on the iPad, but I forgot to try it at the time.

Also if I may make a declaration at this point that I actually think Apple products are generally bad, not because they're low-quality, on the contrary they always tend to be of incredibly high quality. But because they always dismiss functionality for aestethics and are aimed at people who are just slightly richer than I am, and that annoys me because I know I'll never be rich enough to afford one of the damned devices. A better device is one which:
1. Is as cheap as possible.
2. Is functional.
3. Runs Linux.

Also I'd like to add a later comment on the discussion of pornography. Firstly I'm actually quite happy that I can talk about this in a purely sensible way without descending into a fit of giggles. And secondly I'm going to invalidate that by mentioning the 'time to penis' which some people look for in video games. I went to GameCamp 2 last weekend and only stayed for an hour (I know, I should have stayed the entire day, next time I will), there was one discussion about creativity and I happily got down to listening to famous journalists argue how games can foster creative thinking in players. It was most informative, and something I can take from it is that people are far more igenious than we normally give them credit. And also that people are driven by very very basic desires. The evidence is there in the hundreds of mods, like the Sims one which removes blurring when characters take their clothes off, tbagging fallen opponents in Halo, the fakefactory naked models of Alyx Vance for Gmod, the various naked mods for Fallout 3, or the bizarre cases of sexual harassment in Playstation Home. This doesn't show humans as these evil perverted creatures, on the contrary we are all motivated by natural instincts; and if that manifests itself in constructing a skyscraper-sized penis to replace all the boring normal skyscrapers in virtual New York then so be it.