This week we showed you how to make potato chips in the microwave, demystified the legality of recording phone conversations, and helped you add Mac-like gestures to your Windows laptop. More »

This week we showed you how to make potato chips in the microwave, demystified the legality of recording phone conversations, and helped you add Mac-like gestures to your Windows laptop. More »

In order to have access to iPad testing units, developers and testers had to agree to keep the device tethered to a fixed object in an isolated room with blacked-out windows, according to a report by BusinessWeek.

That’s pretty hardcore. It’s unclear from BusinessWeek’s report if that was a condition enforced before the iPad was unveiled to the public or if it’s something that will be kept up until the April 3 launch date.

Apple is a notoriously secretive company, especially when it comes to new products. Outside of partnerships with content publishers like The New York Times, Wired and The Wall Street Journal who have either confirmed interest or already shown demonstrations of their applications, the few developers that do have access to the iPad are keeping their mouths shut.

It also appears that in order to be on the list for the iPad, developers or companies had to be pretty high on the totem poll. Not even Trip Hawkins, who founded Electronic Arts and once worked at Apple, could get a testing unit for his new company, Digital Chocolate.

Now, not having physical access to the device doesn’t preclude developers from creating apps for the iPad — Apple actually started accepting apps for review today — but it does make refining the app much more difficult.

As was the case with the iPhone, we expect the best iPad apps to be those that can take advantage of multi-touch in ways that just feel better. Gestures and interactions on a bigger screen are probably features that will need to be refined over time — just as they were with the original iPhone.

The degree of Apple’s iPad-related secrecy might sound well, paranoid, but the fact is, at least for now, the company can get away with it. The mobile ecosystem is so hot — especially for the iPhone — that getting on the iPad and getting on early is worth the hoop-jumping for many developers. Some would even to settle for using an emulator until the product is officially launched.

What do you think of Apple’s corporate culture of secrecy? Let us know!

Tags: app store, apple, developers, ipad, secrecy

Haven't updated your laptop's trackpad driver lately? Then you may well want to consider doing so, at least if your laptop is equipped with a Synaptics trackpad. As a user on the Hardware Zone forums discovered, the latest Synaptics driver seems to enable multitouch gestures on older laptops that didn't previously support them, including two-finger scrolling, and three-finger click. What's more, while the drivers themselves come from HP, they should work just fine on other laptops with a Synaptics trackpad. Hit up the link below to try it out for yourself.

Synaptics driver enables multitouch gestures on older trackpads originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:38:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you've been following closely, there are really two sorts of input available to the PlayStation Move. The one that gets the most love and screen time is the camera-based, 3D meatspace tracking that the PlayStation Eye performs in conjunction with the fancy colored ball at the end of the PlayStation Move wand, but most of the actual gameplay we've seen is in truth much more similar to the Wii's MotionPlus than Sony might want to let on. The MotionPlus and PS Move have very similar configurations of gyroscopes and accelerometers, and actually use the same software from AiLive (co-creators of MotionPlus) for developing the gesture recognition that goes into games. We actually got to see the LiveMove 2 development environment in action, and it's pretty impressive: basically you tell a computer what gesture you want to perform (like "fist pump," for instance) and then perform a bunch of examples of that movement. LiveMove then figures out the range of allowable movement, and in playback mode shows you whether you're hitting the mark. AiLive showed us gestures as complicated as a Graffiti (of Palm OS yore) handwriting recognition in the air, built with just a few example movements from people back at their offices. So, this is great news for developers dealing with the significant complication of all these sensors, but at the same time we can't help but be a little disappointed. LiveMove 2 doesn't even use the PlayStation Eye, and as we mentioned in our hands-on impressions of PlayStation Move, we could really sense that a lot of our in-game actions were built from predefined gestures, not us interacting with the 3D environment in any "real" or physics-based way. It's great tech either way, but hopefully that's something that can be improved upon by launch or soon after. Check out a demo of LiveMove in action after the break.

Continue reading AiLive shows off its LiveMove 2 software for building MotionPlus and PlayStation Move gestures

AiLive shows off its LiveMove 2 software for building MotionPlus and PlayStation Move gestures originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 12:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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BoingBoing pal and fellow happy mutant John Cusack visited the Boing Boing Video studio this week for an internet video crate-digging session, and shared the 10-minute clip above. This find is ample proof that Cusack possesses a doctorate degree with honors in the Studies of High Weirdness. The video is titled "Tiny Tim at The Hunt Club (The Festival Green Room)," and neither of us could figure out much about its origins. Which Hunt Club? What city, what year? What were the circumstances, an afterparty in a "green room," after some festival? There are some clues (the blip-flash between songs to sync light and sound suggests a certain era), but no answers. What is evident in the video is what a delightful freak Tiny Tim is. Cusack points out that the video is different from all the other clips you can find of Tim on YouTube, mostly television appearances in which his character is louder and over-the-top. But this one seems more vulnerable and personal. Tim meanders in and out of modified Vaudeville classics, dips into an Al Jolson impression somewhere, all the while strumming his uke. "There's something about him that reminds me of Joey Ramone," Cusack observes—Tiny Tim was anything but classically handsome, just like Joey, and he had a certain talent and force of personality that the "normal" world had no use for. Until that talent burst forth, and the world came to appreciate it, weird punk freak that he was. Cusack also got a kick out of the "thank you/goodbye-kissies" hand-gesture Tim uses in this video, and compared it to Noh theatre. There's no kiss, really: he's just tapping his chin, a sort of oblique blessing-greeting. I'm tempted to use that one myself now, at tea parties. Here's to high weirdness. I've asked Cusack if he might join us on Boing Boing as a guestblogger, and he's thinking about it. If you have some thoughts to share with him on that matter, why don't you speak up in the comments? Incidentally, Cusack has a movie coming to theaters on March 26 that you should go see: Hot Tub Time Machine. It's not on YouTube, but it might show up on YouTub....

The tension between Tel-Aviv and Washington is not letting up; at stake is who is in charge of the Zionist movement and who determines their common strategy in the Middle East. To assert his leadership in the region, the Netanyahu government - during Vice-President Biden's recent visit - announced its intention to carry on with the de facto annexation of East Jerusalem by building 1 600 new homes earmarked for Israeli Jews only. Washington responded to the affront, on the one hand, by showing its annoyance - Joe Biden turned up one hour late at a dinner in his honour - and, on the other hand, by making three demands. Reportedly, in a letter signed by Secretary of State Clinton, the Obama administration requested: the annulment of the decision to build the new housing; a gesture of good will towards the Palestinians, such as the release of prisoners; finally, a declaration of commitment to tackle the key issues with Special Envoy George Mitchell, whose patience is running (...)