HighRise
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One Millionth Tower documentary elevates the art of HTML5
Impressive demos of HTML5-based wizardry may be more common than ever now, but that doesn't mean there isn't still room to be impressed. One of latest to raise the bar is the One Millionth Tower documentary from the National Film Board of Canada's Highrise project. The main feature itself runs just over six minutes if you choose to simply sit back and watch, but things get quite a bit more interesting if you dive in and explore the highrise neighborhood that's the focus of the documentary, which is realized in WebGL-based 3D environment. Naturally, there's also a behind-the-scenes look at how the documentary was made, and the NFB has even made the source code available for those that want to dig deeper. Head on past the break for the trailer, and hit the source link below to check out the full thing for yourself -- we'd recommend switching your browser to full screen mode for the best experience. [Thanks, Kat]
Robotic smart buildings under development in Japan, J.G. Ballard says 'told ya'
Think of it as home automation but on a far larger scale: The Small Robotics Building project is a joint undertaking by Shimizu Corp and Yasukawa Electric Corp in Japan. Utilizing smart infrastructure technology and robotics, the companies are creating an automated living environment that can handle such duties as reception, deliveries, cleaning, and security, without the need for human intervention. Instead of relying on individual robots to perform functions like human detection and device control, all this is handled by the building-wide network, which then dispatches robots to perform various tasks. Sure, this all sounds very High Rise, but don't start mulling over notions of postmodern alienation yet: all we have right now is a demo called the Smart Showroom, where visitors are greeted by an adorable robot, who gives a little presentation while involving spoken explanations and a projector. Sounds innocent enough, right?
Greatascent: Highrise meets Address Book in web and desktop 2.0 harmony
Web 2.0 is great and all, but I bought a Mac to utilize the power of Mac OS X and its software. While working in a browser certainly has its advantages, I believe that the sweet spot of getting work done shouldn't force the user into choosing between two appealing environments. The sweet spot of which I am speaking, of course, is integration and sync - the much sought-after, hard-to-find features that some companies offer with their products, while others at least leave the door open for enterprising 3rd parties to pick up the slack. Fortunately, one of the 'others' I speak of is 37signals with Highrise, their popular web-baesd contact and correspondence app, and the enterprising 3rd party in this case is Simon Menke, developer of Greatascent. This is one of the hands-down coolest plug-ins I've seen in a while that unites web 2.0 with what I like to call desktop 2.0 - the place where desktop apps can interact and sync with online services. Greatascent, currently in a private beta, is a plug-in for Address Book (and soon other parts of Mac OS X) that serves as a middle man between the contacts on your Mac and those in Highrise. In its early beta state, Greatascent can pull down the contacts you're already working with in Highrise, but its real appeal is allowing you to drag and drop contacts from Address Book onto a new group that is added (pictured) to instantly sync them up to Highrise. Once synchronized, however, another gem of working in Highrise is brought to the desktop: from Address Book's File menu, you can select a Highrise contact and create a new Highrise note or task that is then synched up to the service. Read on after the jump for some screenshots and details of just how cool this plug-in can get.
Integrate Highrise with iPhone
I'm a real fan of 37 Signal's Highrise. If you're unfamiliar, it's an online contact manager that lets you track conversations, contact information, pending communications and more.Randy Hunt at Citizen Scholar has written a great tutorial for using Highrise with the iPhone. It's a simple process that consists of importing a vCard template into Address Book and then synchronizing Address Book to the iPhone. We love it!Of course, you can just navigate to the Highrise homepage via Safari on the iPhone, but as Randy points out, his solution will allow you to forward emails or add to-dos to your Highrise account without launching a browser.[Via 37signals Product Blog]
