If youve seen Danny Boyles movie Sunshine, you may be a little disappointed: NASAs mission to visit the Earths Sun wont include sending people up there. But it will be sending a spacecraft into the Suns atmosphere, approximately four million miles from its surface. The project, called Solar Probe Plus, is slated to launch sometime before 2018.Four million miles doesnt sound very close, but its still very exciting, since this is a region no other spacecraft (created by us) has ever encountered. NASA plans for the project to unlock the suns biggest mysteries.Although the spacecraft will be relatively far from our stars surface, its carbon-composite heat shield will have to withstand intense radiation, as well as temperatures exceeding 2550 degrees Fahrenheit.The experiments selected for Solar Probe Plus are specifically designed to solve two key questions of solar physics why is the suns outer atmosphere so much hotter than the suns visible surface and what propels the solar wind that affects Earth and our solar system? said Dick Fisher, director of NASAs Heliophysics Division in Washington.Weve been struggling with these questions for decades and this mission should finally provide those answers, said Fisher.[Image credit: NASA]More About: mission, NASA, space, spacecraft, sun, SunshineFor more Tech coverage:Follow Mashable Tech on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Tech channelDownload our free apps for iPhone and iPad
Continue reading Plex announces paternship with LG, pledges to beat Boxee Box and Apple TV for free
Plex announces paternship with LG, pledges to beat Boxee Box and Apple TV for free originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Sep 2010 07:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink |
Plex | Email this | Comments
Qi gets branded products
The wireless power consortium, Qi, is celebrating the launch of a solution with a known brand - Energizer - attached, but the technology is still a long way from the mainstream.…
Since Twitter acquired Tweetie and rolled out an official iPhone client, the company has focused more and more on improving the mobile experience across all smartphone platforms.Twitter CEO Ev Williams wrote just now on the company blog that mobile usage of the site is up 62% since in just over four months, and 16% of all new Twitter users are starting out on mobile devices as opposed to web signups (this number is up from just 5% earlier this year).In the days before Twitter started issuing official apps on a platform-by-platform basis, the company wasnt seeing the kind of mobile adoption it had hoped for. Williams wrote, Even though there was a plethora of third-party Twitter apps, people were having trouble finding and selecting one because none were called Twitter. This kept them from using Twitter at all.The company adopted a new strategy for mobile; rather than leaving all the mobile app development to third parties, Twitter decided to consolidate efforts. In the short term, this caused some consternation for third-party devs; however, looking at Twitters stats, its clear the company did the right thing for its shareholders and bottom line.Twitter acquired Tweetie in May this year; this was our first indication that Twitter would be creating and distributing its own mobile apps for a change. Tweetie was revamped and renamed Twitter for iPhone in May. A BlackBerry app was released in April, and the companys official Android Twitter app was released later the same month.Twitter is also seeing strong growth in its mobile site and SMS service, and Williams notes that third-party apps such as TweetDeck continue to be valuable and important parts of the Twitter mobile landscape.And as for the long tail, Williams writes, There are a tremendous number of other apps that people are using, not necessarily as their main Twitter client, but as an alternative way to create or view Tweets. The number of registered OAuth applications is now at almost 300,000 this number has nearly tripled since Chirp [Twitter's developer conference, which was held in April in San Francisco].While the above chart shows percentages of unique users per app, wed also love to see a breakdown by volume of tweets.Has your own mobile usage of Twitter changed or grown at all with Twitters releasing several official apps? Do you still use third-party applications for tweeting on the go? Let us know what you think about these stats in the comments.More About: apps, Mobile 2.0, twitterFor more Mobile coverage:Follow Mashable Mobile on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Mobile channelDownload our free apps for iPhone and iPad
Quick off the mark
Spammers have been quick off the mark in exploiting Apple's new iTunes social network to punt survey scams.…
Regarding specs, we're told that a Mobee charged Magic Mouse will last for 6 days under constant use. After that, it requires 6 hours to reach a full charge. Otherwise, the idea here is to park the mouse on its dock when not in use. While the company has considered an inductive charging mouse pad, they opted against it so that people can mouse on the surface of their choice and to keep the whole package portable and inconspicuous. The Magic Charger itself matches the materials, look, and feel of Apple's Magic Mouse perfectly. Oh, and the blue charging light you see above will be green once the product ships worldwide in mid-October for €49.90 (with tax) / $49.90 (before tax). At that price, it offers a 6-8 month break-even for the typical Magic Mouse user relying on disposable batteries. Honestly, the Mobee Magic Charger is an idea so good that it makes you wonder, why didn't Apple think of that?
Expect to see a "few more" Mobee products launch for Apple products before the end of the year and into 2011. While Mobee wouldn't tell us exactly what products are coming, it did admit to looking at Apple's new Track Pad, the iPhone 4 (we expect to see a case), and wireless keyboard. We look forward to it.
Mobee's inductive Magic Charger for Apple's Magic Mouse really is magical originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Sep 2010 05:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink | | Email this | Comments
Apple has posted a dedicated page detailing the new features coming to the iPad in November. iOS 4.2 is the unifying release that finally brings the iPad and iPhone in feature sync. The iPad was originally launched with iOS 3.2 and has sin...
Download Apple iPhone PSD template for free. This is template is very useful for designing screenshot, banner, etc.
Apple announces all-new iPods, including an iPod Touch with front and back cameras (lower in resolution than the iPhone 4 camera) and the "retina" display; plus new iOS versions with bug fixes and a "Ping" social network for "music discovery"; and a tiny new Apple TV that acts as a streaming client for Apple's new movie and TV rentals, as well as streaming content from your computer and from iDevices.
Following yesterdays announcement of the upcoming iOS 4.1 update, Firemint has released details of its plans to integrate new Game Center features into its own apps. Games Room enhancements will be available on all supported devices, while older generation devices will be offered similar functionality through Cloudcell. Things such as achievements and leaderboards will be available within a game, on the Cloudcell website, and through the Game Center. Currently, Firemint offers two games in the App Store, Flight Control ($1) and Real Racing ($5), and both are anticipa...
Directories - Games - Apple - Standard Model - IPhone
To many users, Twitter for iPhone (the artist formerly known as Tweetie) is perhaps the perfect Twitter client (though I'd argue that the new Twitter for iPad is right there with it). But the one thing it has been lacking and that users knock it for is the lack of Push Notifications. Well, good news. They're coming. Soon.
Twitter is currently internally testing the feature, we've confirmed. Interestingly enough, we learned of its existence when the latest version of the app went out yesterday (the universal binary that included Twitter for iPad). It appears that users who have iOS 4.1 installed (which just hit Gold Master for developers, but won't be official out until next week) get the option to enable Push Notifications for Twitter. They don't appear to be working yet, but the feature is definitely there.
Last time we wrote about Notifo, we called it a "simple mobile notifications platform for anything" -- and really, that's probably the best way to describe it. Take your iPhone, install the Notifo app, hook it up to your favorite services (like Twitter, or GitHub) or any of the "Projects" (read: plugins, like Growl alert forwarding, or Chrome-to-Notifo ), and bam! You've got push notifications coming down to your iPhone from just about anything you could imagine.
All that notification sending takes two things: users to send the messages to, and a message pushing backend to handle all the heavy lifting -- the same two things, as it just so happens, that one would need to create a basic instant messaging service. And so they have.
In Case of Zombies, a classic Threadless t-shirt by Olly Moss. This is a blog post from Laughing Squid, subscribe via RSS, Email, Twitter, Facebook & Tumblr. Here are a few other possibly related posts you might enjoy:-A T-Shirt For People Who Love Killing Zombies -Plants vs. Zombies -Warning: Zombies Returning To San Francisco -Zombies Invade San Francisco! -$0.99 Cardboard iPhone Recession Case
iPhone and iPod cases come in various shapes, sizes, and levels of protection, but rare is the case that lets you connect your iPhone to a dock while you're...
IPhone - iPod - Shopping - Consumer Electronics - Digital Portable Players
When you walk into a cafe and note the numerous iPhone-toting denizens with telltale white earbuds firmly embedded in their ears, do you wonder what they’re...
IPhone - Smartphones - Handhelds - Apple - Wallpapers and Themes
When I read Twitter CEO Evan Williams post tonight about the state of Twitter from a mobile perspective, the first thing that jumped out at me what that Twitter for Android, an app Twitter worked hard on, isn't even in the top 10 most-used apps for the service. But Williams also used the post to whip out some impressive numbers. Chief among them: Twitter now has over 145 million registered users (though presumably less than 150 million, or he would have said that). And there are now nearly 300,000 registered apps in the Twitter ecosystem.
The latter number above is technically the number of registered OAuth apps in the ecosystem (and includes multiple instances of some apps). Twitter made the switch over from basic authentication to OAuth a few days ago, leaving behind some apps, such as the old Tweetie (which was reborn as Twitter for iPhone). Williams says this number of registered apps has tripled since their Chirp conference -- which was only this past April.
New iPhone app aims to map the happiness of Britain. Becky Anderson reports.
Hugh Pickens writes "Ryan Lawler writes on GigaOm that although many have touted the availability of Flash on Android devices as a competitive advantage over Apple's mobile devices, while trying to watch videos from ABC.com, Fox.com and Metacafe using Flash 10.1 on a Nexus One over a local Wi-Fi network connected to a 25-Mbps Verizon FiOS broadband connection, mobile expert Kevin Tofel found that videos were slow to load, if they loaded at all, leading to an overall very inconsistent experience while using his Android device for video. "While in theory Flash video might be a competitive advantage for Android users, in practice it's difficult to imagine anyone actually trying to watch non-optimized web video on an Android handset," writes Lawler. "All of which makes one believe that maybe Steve Jobs was right to eschew Flash in lieu of HTML5 on the iPhone and iPad.""
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
This evening Twitter CEO Evan Williams put up an interesting post about Twitter mobile usage. By just about every measurable metric, it seems to be skyrocketing. He also included a graph of the top 10 ways people are now using Twitter. This includes both Twitter's own apps and third-party clients, but notably, Twitter for Android is nowhere to be seen.
I've confirmed with Twitter that this isn't a mistake. It seems that Twitter for Android is in fact not in the top 10 ways people interact with the service. That's incredible considering that Twitter for iPhone is number 4 and Twitter for Blackberry is number 5. Both of those were built by the Twitter team, just as the Android app was.