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Recon-Zeal Transcend goggles now shipping, GPS and head-mounted display included
Don't you just love it when a plan comes together? If you'll recall, we heard that Recon Instruments was fixing to up-end the winter sports goggle market in February of this year, with an optimistic-at-the-time ship date of October 2010. Lo and behold, the outfit has managed to nail its estimate, and the planet's first GPS-enabled goggles are now available to highfalutin' skiers and snowboarders. At least initially, the company will be rolling out a limited set, with two models to choose from: the $499 Transcend SPPX is fitted with an SPPX polarized and photochromic lens, while the $399 Transcend SPX features an SPX polarized lens. Aside from the fact that these probably cost less than those ho hum Oakleys in the ski shop, they're equipped with a Zeal Optics' frame design with a micro LCD display, which appears to hang approximately six feet in front of the user. That head-mounted display provides real-time feedback to the wearer, including speed, latitude / longitude, altitude, vertical distance traveled, total distance traveled, a chrono / stopwatch mode, a run-counter, temperature and time. Yeah, wow. You can bet we'll be trying to snag a set for review when we do our best impression of "hitting the slopes" post-CES. %Gallery-104018%
A Holiday Cocoa Duel
Jason Harris over at Unsanity announces A Holiday Cocoa Duel at ten paces. It sounds to me like some kind of make-up between a few Mac devs over the "unpleasantness," as Jason called it, regarding the whole Macheist thing. Apparently inspired by old TUAW favorite Snö, it's a contest similar Ironcoder to write the best holiday-themed application and release it as Open Source software. The winner will be determined by voters contributing money to various charities chosen by the participating developers. According to the site, "the winner is picked by whichever charity got the most donations. And the winner gets the gift pool from the other devs." If you're a Cocoa developer interested in participating you must be willing to contribute "a gift of a $20 value (or two six packs of good beer) for the winner" and you must contact Jason by midnight MST Dec 20th. The winner will be determined by the contribution total as of midnight MST Dec 26th. I'm interested to see what "useless" applications well-known Mac devs like Jason, Gus Mueller, John Casasanta, and others can cook up.
Download Squad running '12 days of holiday downloads'
On Friday our friends at sister blog Download Squad began a new series titled 12 Days of holiday downloads, rounding up holiday and Christmas-themed downloads for both Mac OS X and Windows. Day 2 was posted today, and so far it looks like a neat series for those of you who like to get their Mac (and Windows PC) into the holiday spirit. Day 1 covered Snö, an app we've mentioned before, can create a snowfall on your desktop (though, as of this writing, Snö's site seems to be unavailable). Day 2 for Mac (today) covers X-MasTree, which we posted about a few days ago.Frivolous, cycle-wasting apps? Sure. Fun, holiday spirit nonetheless? You bet. Stay tuned to Download Squad for the rest of their 12 Days of holday downloads series for more ways to get your Mac in the holiday spirit.
TUAW Desktop of the week for 11/12/06
I know I know, it's a slight bit early for holiday-themed desktops, but there's enough cleverness going on here that I thought it warranted a TUAW Desktop of the Week award anyway. Flickr user rVEO has more than just a pretty wallpaper going on in Xmas Mac - you're witnessing the powers of Sno, MacLampsX and X-MasTree to create the ultimate in festive desktops. The snow, for example, is actually animated, inducing the digital version of that warm eggnog experience that only a snowy day at the end of the year can. Nice work rVEO, though if you leave this running for long enough, you're probably going to need an iShovel to get back to work.In other news, the TUAW Desktops of the Week are going to get a bit more regular from here on out, so keep those submissions to our Flickr group coming, and be sure to check out our previous posts in the series and the original announcement for details on what it takes to make the cut.
