TAG
Latest
First Tag Heuer cellphone mockups surface
As we suspected, it looks like Tag Heuer will indeed be joining the ranks of D&G, Prada, Aston Martin, McLaren, and the host of other brands out there who are joining the cellphone craze. Dial-a-Phone is reporting that the forthcoming handset should be "a completely new design," unlike the D&G RAZR which was devoid of originality save for the branding, gold finish, and dangerously high pricetag. Additionally, the Paris-based ModeLabs will indeed be crafting the design, and if all goes as planned, should be launching in undisclosed locales "within a few months." Currently, all they know is that it should be "made of stainless steel" and closely resemble many of Tag's unmistakable timepieces, and while chances are slim that the phone will actually be in a watch, be sure to hit the read link for the first wave of mockups.[Thanks, Stokelake]
Blow off clothes in body spray advergame
Most online advertising games are pretty dull -- extremly basic sports and racing games are par for the course. But there's something a little more titillating in the latest online advergame from Dare Digital. Lynx Blow doesn't have much of a setup, just a full screen video of a scantily clad woman in a barren winter landscape and an entreaty to blow into a microphone or headset "to make me hot." Indeed, constant blowing thaws out the woman and eventually blows her top off, at which point she runs off and you can start all over again. Don't want to bother with blowing for your PG-13 fun? Check out this flickr set of the photo shoot or this video of clips from the game. While the game certainly captured our attention, we can't really vouch for its effectiveness as advertising. We had to search the interwebs for ten full minutes just to figure out what the heck this Lynx product was. No, it's not a portable game system or a text-based web browser -- apparently it the British version of America's Axe body spray. I suppose most of the game's target audience would already know this, but would it have killed them to at least squeeze a link to the product page in with the scantily clad goodness? [Via Coolzor]
TAG Heuer to partner with ModeLabs on luxury handset?
It looks like the competition in the luxury phone market is heating up, as folks still trying to choose between Gresso, Vertu, GoldVish, the D&G RAZR, or the ridiculously pricey Black Diamond could see one more alternative in addition to the recently-unveiled LG Prada. According to Sybarites, TAG Heuer -- the folks responsible for Jeff Gordon and Tiger Woods' sumptuous wristwatches -- is teaming up with ModeLabs to introduce "a completely new phone" for deep-pocketed talkers. While details (including a sneak peek) are scant, the phone is "expected to be made of stainless steel and have many similarities to TAG watches," but it seems we'll just have to wait this one out before making any other far-reaching predictions.[Thanks, James]
Cyber-concrete gives walls a voice
Technology makes for strange bedfellows: that's the lesson to be learnt from the partnership of YRP Ubiquitous Networking Laboratory with the Sumitomo Osaka Cement company. The two groups have developed what they call "cyber-concrete," which is basically a lumpy soup of regular cement and RFID tags with durable coatings. The tags hold basic information about when, where, and how each part of the concrete was manufactured, allowing safety inspection teams and concerned residents alike to check how stable their building is. To aid this process, the researchers have developed a special reader that can convert this information into speech when placed on a correctly tagged wall -- so much for "the walls have ears," now they eat pollution, display images, and speak. Sumitomo is to start testing the RFID concrete soup this month, and is aiming to make it available to large construction companies in the spring of 2007. What with a recent scandal rocking the Japanese construction scene, it sounds as if this clever concrete can't come soon enough. Just as long as it's not too clever -- lets just say that we know we're bad at darts, and that we don't need no screaming walls to tell us.
Advert pseudo-games [update 1]
More and more companies are producing interactive full-motion video websites to promote their products. What's impressive is the production values going into these websites. Corporations are catching on that paying Kyle in accountings nephew to put together a decent website isn't cutting it anymore ... and hasn't for a good while. Depending on what tickles your fancy, we have the objectification of women in a TAG body spray website, and the objectification of men in a Reversa Skin Cream website. A little bit more time these could have turned into actual games, but the playful sexual nature of the sites make us not care. It would be nice to see gaming companies put as much effort and innovation into making a cool website to market games as these beauty product companies put into marketing their wares.(Update 1: Both objectification links led to same site, mean old intertubes are against us)
Keyword Manager for iPhoto
For as long as I can remember, Ken Ferry's Keyword Assistant has been the only iPhoto plugin (at least, AFAIK) for adding some real power and, dare I say, "tagging" to iPhoto's keyword system. Now there's a new kid on the block by the name of Keyword Manager, and it definitely brings some interesting features to the table. Keyword Manager uses two separate windows that both have their own keyboard shortcuts for toggling visibility. The first is a Quick Assigner window (pictured on right) which, as you might guess, allows you to quickly tag add keywords to your photos. It offers keyword completion (via a slick drop down menu) and support for multiple word keywords. The second panel (on left) is a very nice Keyword Manager, allowing you to organize keywords in a hierarchy to help keep your organization in check. Naturally, since both of these panels have their own keyboard shortcuts, you can call them even when in iPhoto's full-screen mode. All this is done with a very nice iPhoto Adjustment Panel-like UI.Now Keyword Manager is pretty impressive, but I think they're reaching just a little too high by charging $19 for a plugin, especially in light of Keyword Assistant being free. I think $14.99 would hit the sweet spot for a plugin like this, but then again, I admittedly haven't plunged into organizing my increasingly sprawling iPhoto library yet, so YMMV.[Update: Commenters Jools tipped us off to promotional codes at VersionTracker that drop the price to $12 in the US or €12 in the EU: VT-542U845 (US) and VT-542E845 (EU). No word on how long those codes are good for, but that's a much more reasonable price in my book.]Keyword Manager is available from Bullstorm, and a demo is available which allows you to assign keywords 75 times before requiring a license.Thanks Bernt
School bans tag, other recess games
Citing fear that students will get hurt and sue, an elementary school south of Boston has banned tag, touch football, and all other "chase games" from the playground. Students should also be advised to take caution when racing one another; should one student take the lead it might be observed that the other students are merely "chasing" first place. To alleviate confusion, all students should run in straight lines and finish each race in a virtual tie. Even though 40% of every Joystiq writer's childhood was wasted on video games, we can't help but look back fondly on games where we would run around in circles smacking one another until we grew tired or our parents called us in for dinner. This incident is just part of a growing trend. Restricting a child's choices for recess will impede on their desire to actually enjoy physical activity and increase the chances of obesity, perpetuating an already-growing problem in America. And guess which popular entertainment medium will be faulted for the overweight adolescents?Next time: basketball, hopscotch, and all other "jump games" are banned from schoolyards everywhere, citing fear that children with no balance will fall down and skin their knees.
iTunes song tagging redux
We reported a method for tagging iTunes tracks and creating on-the-fly playlists way back in January. However, it involved using Quicksilver and a couple of home-grown scripts, but we can dig it if some of y'all aren't down with a tool as broad-reaching as Quicksilver. Fortunately for the rest of you, a web designer and developer named Steven Campbell has written up a basic method for tagging iTunes tracks and creating playlists based on those tags. It more or less involves revealing the comments column in the song list for easy access, and using a simple system of comma-separated words to get your iTunes tagging on. This can work wonders for Smart Playlists, and Steven offers a few examples in his post.For those still interested in the aforementioned Quicksilver scripts and tools, the author has issued a bit of an upgrade and a new script since we first reported them. First of all, the scripts now live at their own domain name, TuneTag.com. The scripts still allow you to tag the song you're listening to on the fly and create on-the-fly playlists from those tags, but the author also added a new script that lets you select any number of tracks in iTunes and tag them all in one fell swoop. As a Quicksilver fan I'm already in love with the power of these scripts, but either method should work well for bringing the web 2.0 tagging craze to iTunes.
Keyword Assistant updated for iPhoto 6.0.5
Apple updated their apps for Aperture 1.5's arrival, and Ken Ferry stayed right in step and updated his fantastic Keyword Assistant plugin for iPhoto, which we've mentioned before. Version 1.9.3 also brings a Russian localization to the table, meaning it now works in English, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Swedish.Ken offers Keyword Assistant for free from his .Mac homepage.
kip - iPhoto for your documents (digital or otherwise)
kip is one of the few applications to take a real stab at helping you organize all your documents, both digital and 'real world'. It combines the look and feel of iPhoto with the real world aggregate paradigm of Delicious Library, then tosses in some really slick tagging and .Mac syncing features for that finishing shine. On the left is a dynamically scaling tag cloud that keeps track of all the tags you've used on all documents. Mouse over it and smaller tags will scale up in size to help you read them better. Mouse over a document (as you see in the screenshot) and a live preview of that section of the document is displayed next to your mouse. Documents can be viewed from within kip or opened externally via Preview.The 'real world' aspect enters the scene when kip's scan function is used, as this app wants to help you organize all your documents, including those receipts and old tax returns that are just decomposing in a box somewhere.One of the drawbacks I've found after poking around with kip is that it seems very focused in the kinds of files it will accept. It takes picture files and PDFs, but not text files or (not surprisingly) Word docs. Overall though, this is a clever app with a nice implementation. It offers a lot of handy methods for storing all sorts of metadata, including author and URL, and seems to be one of the first i-app-like applications to do tagging well (hint hint, Apple!).This initial version of kip is free, but as its product site plainly states: the next version will require the purchase of a license, with the price TBD. Grab a copy while it's hot, and free![via digg]
Trinity low-cost Linux-based portable digital audio workstation
Upstart Trinity Audio Group is looking to attract budget-minded music producers and podcasters with their self-titled handheld, which promises all the capabilites you'd expect from a full-fledged digital audio workstation in a package smaller than a laptop. Based around CompuLab's tiny CM-X270L module, the Trinity runs Linux along with a variety of open source audio applications, including Audacity and Ecasound, for which Trinity says it's developing its own graphical front-end. The rest of the specs seem decent enough as well: you're getting a 6.5-inch TFT running at 640x480, 128MB RAM, 20GB hard drive, built-in WiFi, two Neutrik combo jacks, and a purported four hours of battery life "under rigorous audio demands." If that sounds like just your fix, Trinity is happy to take your $1000 now and ship one whenever it's ready -- they're currently saying October.[Via Linux Devices]
Flock releases 0.7 beta
Finally, after months of small alpha version bumps, Flock, the social web browser based on Firefox, has unleashed a 0.7 beta with a whole slew of updates, improvements and bug fixes. Along with a site re-design, check out their blog entry for a thorough rundown of what's new and what's still on the way.This beta-worthy version has been a long time coming, and my copy is downloading as I write this. In case you aren't familiar: Flock has Firefox at its core, but includes a ton of features and capabilities built around the concept of using and interacting with the web - not just surfing it. Features like built-in blogging, uploading to/keeping tabs on Flickr and integrated del.icio.us bookmarking are all on the feature list. It's quite a slick browser if you've been looking for a solid, integrated tool for both browsing and participating in the web. Check it out.[via Download Squad]
Taco HTML v1.7.2 is Universal
If Dreamweaver is a bit overkill for some web work on your desk, Taco HTML might just be the editor for you. It's a small yet feature-packed web editor with tag coloring, HTML preview, syntax checking, code snippets and more. It's my favorite editor for HTML pages or tweaking a WordPress PHP page file or two.As far as I can tell, Taco HTML is provided free, and is a Universal Binary. Check it out if you read this post in less time than it takes Dreamweaver to start up.
Details of upcoming Thunderbird 2.0 release
Hawk Wings has tracked down some details on a tantalizing v2.0 update to Thunderbird, Mozilla's email client. New features at the top of my list are message tagging, a tabbed message viewer and a built-in notification system. It's great to see more developers bringing the tagging paradigm to email, as Scott Morrison has done with his MailTags plug-in for Apple's Mail.Check out Mozilla's Thunderbird development blog for the full (and lengthy) post of what's coming in this major release for Thunderbird, including plenty of Mac-specific features and fixes.
Menulicious
Menulicious is a utility like Delibar that allows you to access your del.icio.us bookmarks right from your menubar. One nice option of Menulicious is that it can display a bookmark count for each of your tags. An annoying quirk, however, is that your tags are listed under a "Tags >" menu; not directly under the utility itself.Regardless, Menulicious is a Universal Binary, so it'll run a little faster on your Intel Mac. Menulicious is free and available either from Versiontracker or Kainjow's iPod-like website - surf to Software > Freebies > Menulicious.
delicious2safari goes Universal
C.K. blogged delicious2safari what feels like a year ago, and not much has changed since. It still allows you to import your del.icio.us bookmarks into Safari as either a flat list or in folders according to your tags, except now it has gone the way of the Universal Binary.delicious2safari is freeware and available from Christina Zeeh's site.
Quicksilver scripts for tagging iTunes songs, creating playlists
A MacOSXHints reader has put together an interesting set of Quicksilver scripts that will allow you to both easily tag your iTunes music as it is playing, and create on-the-fly playlists based on these tags. The way they work is simple: while music is playing in iTunes, you can use Quicksilver's text abilities to easily add tags to the music file's comments section. The beauty here is that tags are prefixed with an asterisk (*), and they are appended to anything that might already be in the song's comments field, preserving what you might already have added. The second script allows you to create an iTunes playlist right from Quicksilver based on any of your tags.I haven't gotten to test these out yet, but the download includes detailed instructions from the author's site.
Automated labels the mac geek way
Tagging is all the rage now adays. Web 2.0 companies have risen and fallen over tagging. People love it so much that some folks would like to tag files in the Finder so that they can leverage Spotlight%uFFFD for their own purposes. However, wouldn't it be cool if you could automatically 'tag' files? Well, Mac Geekery is on it with this little bit o' command line magic that will do just that (when combined with cron).
