spiral
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Spiral training Android application turns anyone into Peyton Manning... in theory (video)
Ah, ingenuity. We've seen Google's Android platform used for a host of unorthodox applications over the years, but Ben Kokes' concoction deserves a round of golf claps to call its own. The so-called Replay Football system employs a Bluetooth-enabled Nerf football with a 9-axis inertial sensing motion processing module (MPU-6000 by InvenSense), and when linked to a visualization / throw analysis application, you're able to analyze the rotation of a football in real-time as it's thrown. From there, the app breaks down the nuts and bolts of the toss, and while it's not able to blurt out pointers on correcting things just yet, we're seeing endless potential for the next revision. Don't believe us? There's a video just below that'll make a believer out of you, yet.
Apple patents Cover Flow-like spiral interface
Patently Apple has unearthed a new patent that shows off a Cover Flow-like interface for browsing icons or album covers, only instead of Cover Flow's linear layout, this one organizes content in a spiral. We've seen rotating menus in Apple's patents before, but this looks more involved. It's described as a "receding spiral in a virtual 3D space," and you would use your finger (so probably in an iOS interface) to spin the spiral around and browse through whatever you were looking for. There's also a "V" shaped display listed, and users might even be able to reorganize icons or art in the display (while creating or sorting a playlist, for example). A finger is explicitly shown in the patent, but presumably this would work with a mouse, or even a scroll wheel, as in the case of the non-touchscreen iPods. It's definitely an intriguing idea, and it adds a little more visual variety to browsing through various media or icons. As with all of these patents, there's no guarantee that Apple will actually use this plan in a future product, but clearly someone in Cupertino is thinking about how to put a new spin on the Cover Flow interface.
