AllThingsD » animations

Spoiler Alert: PlayBook Outshines iPad in RIM Video

John Paczkowski — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 17:15:53 +0000

Research in Motion hasn’t yet launched its new BlackBerry PlayBook tablet and won’t until 2011, but it’s already kicked off the campaign to position it against what’s likely to be its archrival: Apple’s iPad.

In a new RIM video (below), the PlayBook is pitted against the iPad in a side-by-side comparison of “Web fidelity.” And what do you know: The PlayBook comes out looking better. In the video, RIM’s 7-inch tablet pulls up complete Web pages as the iPad slogs behind. Where the PlayBook shows off rich Flash content, the iPad “actually has an error…you’ll see that it says Flash is not supported” and instead delivers a “rather mundane, boring-looking HTML site.” In the Acid 3 test of compatibility with Web standards, the iPad does get an A, but the PlayBook gets an A+ with “pixel-perfect rendering.” And where the PlayBook’s Javascript and HTML5 animations are smooth and fluid, the iPad’s look choppy.

If this is the direction RIM takes with its eventual ad campaign (and if the performance differences are borne out in real-world use), it could score some points. Enough to dent the iPad’s “magic”? Well, we’ll see.

Children's Book Apps Get Curiouser And Curiouser

Nick Wingfield — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 21:41:27 +0000

I’m crazy about Web browsing, movie watching and other activities on the iPad, but the idea of reading ordinary books on Apple’s device just doesn’t appeal to me. I prefer the old-fashioned experience of reading in the printed form.

When cards really attack

I’m intrigued, though, by the idea that the iPad, and eventually other tablet devices will give rise to a hybrid medium—call them book apps—that mix text with video, sound and game-like interactivity.

After sampling several early examples of these books apps, I’ve seen some tantalizing hints of the creative possibilities for authors and publishers who recast themselves as app makers.

I focused on kids’ books because they’re among the first to cleverly exploit the iPad’s capabilities and their rich illustrations can look great on the iPad’s color screen. It also helped that my 7-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son were fascinated with the iPad, looking for any opportunity to smudge up its touch screen.

The most interesting of the book apps I found in Apple’s (AAPL) online App Store was “Alice for the iPad,” a 52-page version of “Alice in Wonderland” by a small company called Atomic Antelope that costs $9.99. (A shorter “lite” version of the book is free.) The color illustrations for “Alice for the iPad” are based on the elegant wood engravings Sir John Tenniel did for the original 19th century “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” which, like the text of the book, are now in the public domain.

White Rabbit’s pocket watch swings as you tilt the iPad.

The first sign there’s something different about “Alice for the iPad” comes when you flip to its third page, where the White Rabbit’s old-fashioned pocket watch, dangling by its chain from text, starts swinging whichever way the reader is holding the iPad. Other animated objects appear on later pages—a jar of marmalade, and collection of mushrooms—and move when you tilt the iPad or touch an object and drag it across the screen.

The animations can be predictable. On a page where Alice eats a cake that shrinks her body, a pile of cupcakes falls to the bottom of the screen, accumulating in an undamaged little pile, an action repeated on many pages with other objects. How much cooler would it be for the cupcakes’ frosting to get messy when they drop? I wanted to be able smear them all over the text on the page.

Still, there are wonderful moments in “Alice for iPad.” My favorite is when Alice is assaulted by a pack of flying playing cards. Alice’s arms and body bobble as a blizzard of cards slams into her. My daughter and I couldn’t resist trying to make the cards pile up on her by angling the iPad just so.

There’s something fitting about the sensation of gravity that the animations bring to a story with so much body-shrinking and mind-blowing going on it. It will be exciting to see what the Atomic Antelope crew does with their next project: an iPad version of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”

“The Lorax” ($3.99, also for the iPhone) from Oceanhouse Media is a vivid rendition of the Dr. Seuss classic, with some nice features to assist early-readers.

The app lets you read “The Lorax” like a traditional book, but with fun atmospheric sound effects like the sound of wind blowing and old crows cawing.

With my son, I choose another option that reads the book to him in a narrator’s voice. Words on the page were highlighted as the narrator said them.

While there’s no animation, one nifty feature of “The Lorax” app lets readers tap objects, like faucets, rocks and pails, to hear their names sounded out. My son was particularly fond of tapping to hear the words “Grickle-grass” and “Once-ler” over and over again.

The iPad version of “The Lorax” was the most static of the book apps I looked at, but considering the modest interactivity it brought to a lovely reproduction of a classic kids’ book, it was worth the price.

“Miss Spider’s Tea Party for the iPad” ($9.99) from Callaway Arts & Entertainment is based on a picture book about a lonely, tea-sipping spider that longs to make friends with other insects. The app narrates the story to readers or lets them read it on their own. Bumblebees, beetles and other illustrated characters make noise and move when readers tap on them—another big hit with my son.

The app also lets you passively experience the story as a short animated movie. With another option, you can assemble puzzles or color in paintings featuring the story’s characters.

“Miss Spider’s Tea Party” illustrates an approach I predict many book-app creators will take: tacking a lot of multimedia material onto an electronic book, without paying enough attention to weaving it all into one coherent story.

This app can’t decide whether it’s a book, a movie or a game.

I believe it’s a matter of if, not when, the great book apps for iPad will show up. I wager the good book apps will be original works, rather than adaptations of existing books, with an electronic version built from the ground up that will take advantage of the device. For now, “Alice for iPad” is the coolest book app out there.

Walter S. Mossberg will return June 24. Email Nick Wingfield at nick.wingfield@wsj.com.

Digital Cameras With Room for New Views

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 23:36:02 +0000

At a glance, the most obvious physical improvements on today’s digital cameras compared with those bought five years ago are slimmer size and larger LCD viewing screens. Other than that, they don’t look a whole lot different.

But this week, I tested two physical features that I’ve never seen on digital cameras.

[ See post to watch video ]

I used the $430 Nikon Coolpix S1000pj (nikonusa.com), which has a mini projector built right into the camera itself. This extra characteristic lets you take pictures and, by pressing a button on the camera, project them onto any nearby surface, in old-school slideshow style. The projected image can measure up to 40 inches, growing or shrinking as you walk away from or toward the surface onto which the images are projected.

I also tried the $350 Samsung DualView TL225, which had two LCD viewing screens—including one on the front side. This front screen lets the subjects of the photograph see how they look as the photo is being captured, raising the concept of instant gratification to a new level. The outward-facing LCD can also display a smiley face or cartoon animations to encourage children to smile. It also can be used to display a timer’s countdown clock so you know exactly when the photo will be taken.

Technical Advances

These two compact cameras also feature less obvious technical advances that aren’t quite as eye-catching as a built-in projector or dual LCD screens.

Each camera can capture photographs with over 12-megapixel resolutions, and the Nikon and Samsung have 5x and 4.6x wide-angle zoom lenses, respectively.

Both cameras have built-in automatic scene-detecting capability, meaning they can analyze a scene to determine which shooting mode would work best. And they allow the user to edit images directly on the camera like brightening an image or rotating a photo.

The Nikon sticks to one traditional 2.7-inch LCD screen with separate buttons that control functions like menu, timer, deleting and playback. And, like many digicams, it accepts a SecureDigital (SD) memory card.

Getting your good side: Samsung’s DualView TL225′s front LCD shows people how they’ll look in photos.

In somewhat unusual fashion, the Samsung requires a tiny microSD memory card. The viewing screen on the back of the Samsung is a generous 3.5-inch touch LCD that covers close to an entire side of the camera; the front-side LCD is 1.5 inches.

I focused my testing on the unique physical features of each camera: the Nikon’s built-in projector and the Samsung’s two LCD screens. I tried them out over the course of a week and used them in real-life situations including at a birthday party and at the Army 10-Miler, an annual run in Washington, D.C.

When the Nikon’s projector isn’t in use, it functions like a regular camera—albeit an expensive one at $430. Nikon says this price is largely due to the cost of its built-in projector. Until now, most people who wanted portable, mini projectors bought them as standalone products; for example, the Pico Pocket Projector from Optoma Technology Inc. is listed for $230 online at Best Buy (BBY).

Subway Show

I took the Nikon Coolpix S1000pj along to the Army 10-Miler, capturing photos of runners as they ran near the National Mall. Later on, while I waited with hundreds of people to get on the D.C. Metro subway system, a friend and I looked through photos from the day by projecting the camera’s images onto a concrete wall.

At first, passersby thought the slideshow images were put there by the race organizers, and they commented about how neat it was that the race images already were posted for everyone to see.

The D.C. Metro was an ideal spot to use the Nikon’s projector because of its low light and white concrete walls. Outdoors, the projected images weren’t quite as easy to see.

I also used the projector in a house and in my office, setting it on a table and turning off the lights for the best view. A tiny remote comes with the camera if you want to sit back and give your friends and family a slideshow. Videos taken with the camera also will play in video format.

To start the projector, I pressed a button on the top ledge of the camera, which immediately covered the lens and turned on the projector’s bright light. A slider button adjusts focus. The image size can be as small as five inches and as large as 40 inches, and it will project from about six feet away. Nikon says the camera’s projector will work for an hour before its battery runs out.

Nikon’s S1000pj displays images and videos with its brightly lit projector—just right for a subway slideshow.

Surprise, Surprise

The $350 Samsung DualView TL225 is black with an accent color that comes in purple or orange. Its front-side LCD screen isn’t visible when the camera is turned off, making for a surprising experience when you take pictures of friends who can suddenly see themselves.

A similar but slightly lower-quality and less-expensive version of this camera is available in the $300 Samsung DualView TL220. This camera’s back LCD screen is a half-inch smaller than the TL225′s and not nearly as bright. Other notable differences include the TL220′s plastic casing compared with the TL225′s aluminum.

Clowns in Action

This front LCD performs various functions in addition to showing people what they look like. A scene called Children puts animated cartoon clowns on the outer LCD in hopes of making a child smile for the camera. Another setting puts a large, yellow smiley face on this LCD when the shutter button is pressed down halfway. And when the camera’s timer is set, the outer display counts down, showing “3, 2, 1″ until the image is captured.

I used this Samsung camera with two LCD screens to take pictures of friends who were all surprised and delighted when they saw themselves on the camera before the photo was taken. At a birthday party, the clown animations made even a group of people in their 20s laugh.

Some Downsides

The downside to this display screen is that it’s to the left of the camera’s lens, so if you’re taking a close-up shot of someone, they will appear in the photo like they’re glancing away slightly.

Another negative of this display is that it blacks out a split second before the photo is taken, so as long as you can hold the pose you saw of yourself on the screen, you’ll look fine.

It’s too early to know whether the innovations in these cameras will catch on, or be viewed over time as expensive gimmicks.

If these features become more common, hopefully the prices will come down and more consumers will be able to enjoy them.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Macworld ’09: iMovie '09

John Paczkowski — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 17:33:03 +0000

Next up on the Macworld agenda: iMovie. This Apple (AAPL) software has been given not just a refresh, but a full rewrite. We’ve added so much to iMovie this year, says Phil Schiller, that iMovie will be the consumer video editing software to have. And that may turn out to be so. Precision editing, drag and drop. Dynamic themes. Automatic stabilization. Animated travel maps. Randy Ubillos, Apple’s chief architect of video, takes the stage to demo the product.

He quickly demonstrates the optimization of a video clip, adjusting its audio, the angle of the video. It’s a very complex edit and he does it very, very simply. The video stabilization tool is, and I hate to sound like a fanboy here, mind-blowing at first look. It’s accurate and fast, and appears to be professional or near-professional in quality. Furthermore, these enhancements are for the most part being done in real time.

A set of new built-in animations, transitions and themes rounds out the application. All very slick.