goodtimes
Latest
Good Times knows when you're concentrating, sets your phone to 'do not disturb'
There's a reason we cover technology instead of create it. When we see a pair of Necomimi ears we see a opportunity to embarrass a poor intern. (Thanks for being a good sport Daniel!) Ruggero Scorcioni, on the other hand, sees a way to automatically control AT&T's Call Management system. At the company's mobile hackathon in January, he was presented with a pair of the brainwave-tracking novelties and immediately cracked it open to gain access to its precious torrents of data. The project he whipped up, Good Times, feeds readings from the cat-eared electrode to an Arduino, which then interacts with the Call Management and M2M APIs. When a significant amount of brain activity is detected, indicating that you're concentrating on something, calls are rerouted. Instead of distracting you from the task at hand, would-be interlopers simply receive a message that "this is not a good time to call please try again later." The version Scorcioni brought to AT&T's Foundry showcase this morning, in New York City, was a little more sophisticated. The Arduino was gone and the motorized ears were replaced with a MindWave from NeuroSky. The EEG monitor communicated directly with a computer running an application that triggered the do not disturb setting through the API. For now there's a static threshold for activity, which led to quite frequent fluctuation in availability. Future versions should be trainable -- making it possible for the app to recognize what serious concentration looks like for different people. For now it's just a proof of concept. For one, brain wave monitors are hardly unintrusive, but it's a glimpse at what's possible with powerful APIs and a little creativity. Check out the gallery below. %Gallery-184779%
GoodTimes for Mac lets you create sophisticated photo collages
Update: The GoodTimes app is actually normally priced at $19.99, but was on sale during the holidays for $9.99. Our apologies for the mixup. GoodTimes is a US$40 OS X app (on sale for $19.99 as of this writing) US$19.99 app that creates unique photo collages without requiring any deep computer skills on the part of the user. The app is template driven, and contains 30 templates, plus 130 objects to insert and manipulate, 30 backgrounds and 25 frames. Frame sizes can be manipulated, along with color and textures. Themes include things like vacations, parties, families and love. The app contains spoken and graphic tutorials, but really, GoodTimes is easy to figure out because tool tips are available for most controls. Your finished collage can be shared with Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and email, as well as Mountain Lion sharing. %Gallery-174538% I found the app easy to use, and was able to create some very nice collages that would have been tricky in a high-end photo editor like Photoshop. If you run out of templates, you can create your own, but that takes some skill. I tried using the app on some landscape photos, and the results looked nice. My only gripe is the app's high price of $40 $20. While Mac apps often sell for more than the iOS variety, I don't think this is the kind of app a person will constantly use. Still, GoodTimes proved to be reliable, and the output was quite attractive. There are enough options so that you can fiddle with a theme and make it unique. If you are wanting simpler collages at a lower price, take a look at Diptic, which is now available for OS X for $0.99. GoodTimes is a 593 MB download due to all the high-quality picture elements, and it requires OS X 10.7 or later. Check the gallery for some screen shots I grabbed while working with the app.
