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Apple introduces OS X Mavericks at WWDC 2013
Apple has run out of cat names for its new OS, so it's gone to a California theme. The next OS X will be... ta da... OS X Mavericks. Apple claims the new release, OS X 10.9, will have deep improvements in battery life and finder tabs. Apple is also adding tagging, which will enhance search greatly and will be welcomed by power users. In an on-stage demo by VP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi, you could see the power of tabs and tagging. Tags can appear in the finder sidebar, making this a very useful addition to OS X. Multiple displays also got a lot of applause from the crowd. Spaces can be shown on any display, and an AirPlay-connected TV can act as a fully independent display. In a demo of the new feature, you could see the ease of moving assets around the screens, and it was impressive seeing an HDTV added as an extra display via an Apple TV. Apple has also put a lot of thought into battery life and other advanced technologies. Mavericks is claimed to "intelligently align" interrupts, so CPUs can get up to a 72 percent boost in performance. Apple has also highlighted "Compressed Memory," a method of improving memory use on the fly. That's just a bit of what is coming in OS X Mavericks. It looks to be a big leap over the current offerings, and seems focused on ease of use and performance. A beta version of OS X Mavericks will be available today for developers, while the final version will debut this fall. You can read more about OS X Mavericks on Apple's website.
Mongoose Studio's dozen iPod cluster display is an expensive way to watch Tron (video)
Most of us would be happy to get a single video to play on our PMP without having to run it through some sort of transcoder first, but the folks at Mongoose Studio needed something more complex. They've released a video of a project that's been in the works for some time, clustering 12 iPod touches into a sort of bezel-riffic widescreen display. All are controlled by a master, 13th iPod that can cause them to display a clock in the interest of verifying synchronization (which is far from perfect, as you'll see in the embed below), or to trigger the playing of a movie. We're guessing that the footage must be manually split into appropriate files for each device, and we're also guessing that horrible things would happen should someone come along and re-shuffle them. But, if you have a lot of friends with iPhones and a lot of free time to prep the film, this could make for a rather interesting movie night -- until someone gets a call, that is.
Runco's WindowWall gives you the $100,000 view you always wanted (eyes-on)
You see them, as soon as you set eyes on the gigantic, nine-panel screen. Those black lines are plainly visible. But the 46-inch Samsung panels in Runco's WindowWall have 7.33mm bezels that almost disappear from ten feet away, and when we first walked in, we actually thought they were part of the image. In a nutshell, WindowWall is a modular display system that turns entire walls into displays capable of rendering giant images across many screens, or display different media -- say, Doctor Who, LOST, FlashForward, V, Castle, 24, a couple computer screens and an episode of Firefly for good measure -- on each individual one. Making the system work in sync requires quite a bit of hardware, including a power supply unit and display controller unit for every four 1366 x 768 panels used, not to mention an upscaling box and a seriously sturdy stand (sorry, Humanscale) to hold up all that glass. The company boasts the whole system is scalable, meaning you can make it work with as few as four or as many as twenty panels and still run the entire system as a single screen at its full, gigantic native resolution. We weren't able to see these nine pumping pixels at 4098 x 2304, unfortunately, as the only content on hand was 1080p, but the footage did seem to be well synced across all nine screens. Of course, with a system like this the catch is cost -- for the nine panels, frame, reels of CAT cable and veritable server rack required to run this particular WindowWall, Runco said we should expect to pay a heartstopping $100,000. Droolworthy, to be sure, but too rich for our blood. Perhaps if the whole neighborhood chipped in, right before Super Bowl? %Gallery-89982%
Motorola patent combines multiple devices to make one large display
It seems to us that if you indulge in mobile video from time to time, you're either lugging around a device with a decent display size (netbook, tablet, whatevs) or more likely than not you're watching your Britain's Got Talent! clips on a handset -- either solution is obviously less than ideal. What if we told you that Motorola has filed a patent application for a "Reconfigurable Multiple-Screen Display"? This technology will essentially let you configure multiple devices for use as one big display: Instead of lugging around your Thinkpad or suffering the indignity of watching postage stamp-sized video on your Droid you can simply and conveniently carry four phones around. Why didn't we think of that?
