Archive for May, 2011

Robot learns to read

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

One robot specific issue to deal with is the font. An average person can encounter hundreds of fonts during their lifetime as a reader. For a human the ability to distinguish the same letter in different fonts is innate, for all but the most ornate or obtuse fonts. A robot is a bit more literal, and requires more processing power and learning time to keep track of 200 different ways to write the letter L or Z.

If you happen to have an ROS platform robot you can download the software for the upgrade from the school for free.

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RIM Launches Gold Release of BlackBerry Theme Studio 6

Thursday, May 26th, 2011

Research In Motion has announced that it is launching the gold release of the BlackBerry Theme Studio 6, a free and powerful device personalization set of tools that includes the Theme Builder for creating themes, and the BlackBerry creator for creating animations and graphics to use in themes. This new release of Theme Studio makes it even easier for users and professional designers to customize virtually everything, with backgrounds, sound effects and ringtones, icons and menus, and fonts. You can even add animations and screen transitions. Amongst the exciting new features are:

  • A new user interface for Theme Builder that lets you click on any item on the preview and directly change its settings.
  • Background Wizard that makes it easy to add dynamic wallpapers to your theme.
  • New productivity features that permit you to batch update all of the graphics in a theme automatically and also change fonts across multiple phone screens automatically.
  • A new export choice that makes it simple for professional designers to offer themes through BlackBerry App World.
  • Support for the BlackBerry 6 devices, including the new BlackBerry Torch and BlackBerry Style smartphones, and new BlackBerry 6 UI elements like the graphic context menus.
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Editor’s Note

Monday, May 23rd, 2011

Sometime around 1439, a German craftsman from the city of Mainz swiped an inked roller over a frame filled with metal type, made words on paper, and created the world of print publishing. More than 500 years after Johannes Gutenberg, we have electronic fonts and pixelated pages, but words, whether printed on paper or glowing on a computer screen, continue to inspire, excite, and teach.

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Is Apple’s new brand really all that Noteworthy?

Thursday, May 19th, 2011

Apple filed a trademark for the name “Noteworthy” according to Patently Apple. It’s classification with the international code 009 — which includes categorizations such as computer software for authoring, downloading, transmitting, receiving,  extracting, encoding, decoding, displaying and organizing text, graphics, images, and electronic publications and pre-recorded computer programs for personal information management, character recognition software, electronic mail and messaging software, mobile telephone software — led Patently Apple to wonder that this could represent a new app that would provide optical character gratitude capabilities or give scanner functionality to your iPhone. Although these are fun speculations, the computer software classification is quite broad and not all that precise, so the speculations should be taken with a particle of salt.

The copyright also includes a second classification under printers’ type. This may narrate to a new font that was included with the new iOS update to version 4.3, which is called Noteworthy. Whether there is a connection among this new font and an undisclosed app is uncertain.

In fact, some of Apple’s other trademarked fonts have also been assigned the international code 009. This includes Charcoal, the defaulting menu font in OS 8 and 9, and Monaco, which shipped with all versions of Mac OS X

Is Apple’s new trademark really all that Noteworthy?

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