Apple – Mac OS X Leopard – Features – Accessibility

Lost in all the hoopla, are a couple of other important new features that will be in Leopard. Above, is a link to experiencing a very nice one. A new Text-to-Speech voice named Alex, that sounds very natural.

Another is that Photo Booth can now record video and do all the cool backdrop effects seen in iChat. The DVD Player now has full-screen controls, and a time slider at long last. Front Row works and looks like Apple TV.

One ‘feature’ I’m not happy about though, is the non-inclusion of a new blue Aqua wallpaper image. You don’t fuck with tradition. The green grass used during the keynote looked very Vista to me. And Steve claimed nobody uses the blue wallpaper for long, they like to put their own digital photos up.

In my own experience, no matter what I change the wallpaper to, I always come back to the blue Aqua gradients. Because they work, are soothing, and don’t distract the eye from anything else on the desktop. If any delicious generation developers can code a shareware app to randomly create those Aqua-style wallpapers, they’ve got my $15.

Attention people. This is art.

Gizmo Project now allows voice chat with MSN contacts over the Mac client (something Microsoft’s own Mac MSN does not do). In trying it out last night with Stuart, I had it add my entire MSN contact list (recommended option). Bad move. Deleting contacts from the Gizmo contact list also deletes them from your MSN contacts!

So I have added everyone to my new MSN again, for the 2nd time in a week. Sorry about that. Don’t dismiss the request it because it was already done once. Thanks.

Nevermind that it’s out for Windows too… Holy mother of God, the Mac Safari 3 beta is working perfectly on Blogger, Google Calendar, and Google Docs pages. It now has an inline Find, just like Firefox. And I am very, very tempted to move back.

HARAJUKU | Tokyo Street Style – Japanese Street Fashion Site

STYLE ARENA – A great resource for Japanese street fashion shots, covering Harajuku, Shibuya, Omotesando, Daikanyama, Ginza, and maybe a few other painfully hip districts. The above link is for the Harajuku page.

When I was in Japan, my lack of personal style and fashion sense became painfully apparent. Nobody just goes out in Tokyo. Everyone is accessorized, layerized, their hair has been done, stuff has been pierced and painted and encrusted with crystals, things hang from every catch on their bags, cellphones, zippers. And every combination looks jarring to the unaccustomed eye at first sight. But I suppose that’s what fashion is. Ridiculous as it may be (and sound coming from me, after greater heads have long decided), I think Japanese street fashion is onto something.

(Edited)

One of the most amazing photo processing apps I’ve ever seen. Takes the premise of intelligent tools like AutoStitch and amps them a thousandfold. It’s being done at Microsoft now, but I think the presenter said that the technology was acquired along with a company.

Essentially, PhotoSynth grabs all the pictures of a given area, and recreates the 3D space by comparing data. The dataset shown in the video is Notre Dame cathedral made entirely from tourist photos found on flickr. Using the power of crowds to document something, the power of the web to aggregate the data, and technology to assemble them. In the process it creates a richer metadata context, automatically determining relationships.

Edit: Turns out it was announced last year, and small video demos have been available for awhile now. The video above came from this year’s TED conference in March. I found it via Slashdot today, and the BBC has plans to use the technology in a new documentary on How We Built Britain.

Of equal interest is the SeaDragon image scaling technology behind PhotoSynth. You can see it in action before the PhotoSynth demo in the video above. Straight out of an SF movie!

This is Microsoft’s corporate video of PhotoSynth. Also demos what it’s capable of:

Camino. Mozilla Power, Mac Style.

The new version is out, and I think I’m ready to leave the imperfection and GUI irregularity that is Mac Firefox once and for all. I’d initially switched over from Safari to have compatibility with Google Apps and Blogger, but now with almost complete feature parity* (RSS, Tab Session Restore, Spell-Check), Camino looks ready for the big time.

*Apart from Add-Ons, of course. But I hardly use any.

Oolong tea can help you lose weight – Slashfood

I said it last week, and now here’s more proof.