dimming
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Philips' latest Hue kit gives you wireless light dimming
Dimmable lights can add an air of sophistication to your abode, but setting them up? Not fun -- not unless you enjoy messing with home wiring or paying a lot of money. Philips might have a better way, though. It's trotting out a wireless dimming kit that turns any white Hue bulb (one is included in the box) into a dimmable light. The only real challenge is finding a place to mount the holder for the battery-powered remote switch. After that, you can dim as many as 10 bulbs at once just by clicking buttons. The kit will cost you $40 when it arrives in North America this September. That's not a trivial outlay, but it's inexpensive enough that you may be tempted to skip plug-in dimming kits or in-wall installations.
TUAW's Daily Mac App: iFogg
Apps that help you to focus when using a Mac that's chock-a-block full of distractions can be really helpful. iFogg, a US$0.99 app from the Mac App Store, helps you focus by dimming other windows and leaving only the active window at full brightness. iFogg sits in your menu bar, like many other programs that do similar tasks, and is active the moment you switch windows. The amount by which the rest of the windows and programs are dimmed is adjustable from full brightness to total black-out using a slider on a drop-down menu. You can also adjust whether the app dims all other windows, just windows from other programs, or just those windows not selected, meaning that you can have two windows from two different programs active at the same time. Dimmed windows can still be accessed, with drag-and-drop, scrolling and clicking unaffected. iFogg can also be quickly turned on and off from the menu bar icon and supports Spaces just fine. The odd thing about iFogg is that it'll only cover one monitor, so people with multiple monitors won't benefit from the inactive window dimming. You can also select the dimming overlay in Expose, which shows that it's just putting a colored full-screen window overlay on top of all the rest of the windows that aren't active. Still, it works and is pretty light on resources. iFogg is available now in the Mac App Store. A demo video is embedded below.
HazeOver dims background windows to help you focus
Have you ever wished that you could fade out non-active windows in the background, leaving you to focus on the task at hand? HazeOver does just that in a simple and Mac-like fashion. A small utility that runs in the background, HazeOver dims any non-active windows automatically in a smooth ramp down to darkness. The amount of dimming is adjustable, from 10 to 80 percent, with an option to have a menu bar icon for quick access to settings. When you switch to a new window it is instantly thrust into the light, but when you switch away from it, HazeOver will fade it out smoothly into the background darkness. It's a really nice little utility that creates a very Mac-like effect and helps you focus on one window at a time. For US$0.99, HazeOver is worth a buck to add a little spice to your desktop and help you focus in on the task at hand. Hit the break to see HazeOver in action.
Toshiba 'Space Chair' ad redefines armchair viewing (video)
There's something wrong when an advertisement is more memorable than the product. Nevertheless, here we have Toshiba's Space Chair ad campaign promoting its new 2010 REGZA SV LCD TV series, Toshiba's first with LED backlight and local dimming. The campaign will later expand to include a second take featuring the Satellite T Series of 11-hour CULV laptops set for introduction in 2010. The ad follows the journey of "an ordinary living room chair" to the edge of space before falling back to Earth where the ground crew relied upon a GPS beacon to locate the craft. A few facts about the shoot: A helium balloon lifted the chair and Toshiba's own IK-HR1S ultra-compact 1080i camera to a height of 98,268 feet above terra firma FAA regulations required that the weight of the rig had to be less than four pounds The chair is made of biodegradable balsa wood at a cost of about £2,500 The rig was launched in Nevada's Burning Man Black Rock desert The temperature dropped to minus 90 degrees at 52,037 feet The chair took 83 minutes to reach an altitude of 98,268 feet and just 24 minutes to fall back to earth Truly amazing stuff. Now buckle up and click through for the show.
Samsung updates A950 LCD HDTVs, early adopters left frowning
So you went out and purchased a brand new LED-backlit A950-series HDTV after hearing such good things, did you? Guess what? It's already old hat. Okay, so maybe that's a bit extreme, but it doesn't change the fact that Samsung has already rolled out an updated version of the unit without providing an easy / free way for existing owners to get the upgrade. Reportedly, all A950s manufactured after September 20, 2008 have the upgrade; ones crafted before that, don't. The tweak raises the black levels in very dark scenes, improves shadow detail and eliminates some of the worst blooming effects. However, the "older" model still exhibits darker overall black levels, and according to CNET, the changes weren't drastic enough to warrant a revision to their original rating. Those looking to make a mountain out of a mole hill can probably kvetch enough to land some new hardware required for the update, but in all honesty, we'd probably just try and forget about it.
Darken apps in the background with Doodim
For those times when you need complete, uninterrupted concentration on a particular app you're working in, there is Doodim: a simple menubar utility that creates an Exposé-like dimming effect on the desktop and all background app windows. Doodim's product site offers a simple animated screenshot demo to help you see what really goes on, and users can even take the dimming effect all the way to black, so no nothing else is visible, save for the app you're working in. It's a slick idea and is done well, and toggling the dimming effect is simply handled from the menubar (the menubar, if you're wondering, is not dimmed). The site lists one known catch so far, which I personally haven't run into while playing with this: apparently, the dim effect can fail sometimes while switching between apps. Bouncing from Firefox to Mail, Adium, NetNewsWire, Safari and iTunes hasn't produced any issues for me yet though.Doodim is provided free from La Chose Interactive, and I'm not sure if it's 10.4-only or not.
