Yahoo released an new online service that let you remix and mash-up rss-feeds on the fly. They deliver a visual programming language, that works with javasript directly in your browser. It looks easy, but seems to unleash the real power of xml and feeds possibilities for the web. With this tool you really can filter, code and mix up every feed that is online available. The resulting feed will also be made online available, ready for new mix downs. The only issue is the need for an yahooID to mess around with this tool.

Connecting and filtering xml-feeds directly in your browser.

For the future yahoo promises some enhancements and extensions for this patcher tool. The website says what they plan for the future:

– Programmatic access to the Pipes engine
– Support for additional data sources (such as KML)
– More built-in processing modules
– The ability to extend Pipes with external, user-contributed modules
– More ways to render output (Badges, Maps, etc…)

Like always it’s a work in progress and beta-testing everything. If you want to try and play around a little start with the digital tools pipe to clone and mash-up.

The New York based designer Stewdio made a really nice videoclip for the indi-postrock band Granddaddy. The track Jed’s Other Poem (Beautiful Ground) is featured on the album The Sophtware Slump.

Steward used an original 1979 Apple II and a dose of BASIC to make the video. Watch the video Jed’s Other Poem. The author of the clip also reveals the lines of code that generated the clip in the video. Cute and somehow very open source. You can also have a download of the source.

Maybe not this guy, but the technique showed here could be the future of virtual turntabelism.

The video comes from Djwiij (alternative link). Tutorials and Howto connect the Wiimote to the PC are also provided at the website. My head keeps spinning around thinking about totally new ways to control everything digitally available.

The gaming think tank “Project Horseshoe” solve in their own words “Game Design’s Toughest Problems”. In an outline of a group discussion they held on a 2006 gaming conference they write on “the creation of radically new game experiences”.

“In an effort to bring experiences generated by games much further then they have gone today we considered a variety of new or different approaches to game design; approaches which are not currently well understood within game design circles. By presenting these approaches we hope to enable further discussion in an effort to expand the tools available today.”

They come up with digital and thinking tools accompanied by game examples that cover new possibilites for the creation of new game experiences. One approach is the reducion or aggregation of significant senseble information to build new experience structures. Based on the fact that your surroundings can always be read in more than one perspective.

“There is a social bandwidth of information present in our lives that normally isn’t included in a game. By understanding what these are and finding ways to include them, we can make our games richer interpersonal experiences.”

Another approach ist the Temporal Emotion Engine: it “‘reads’ the emotional content of a scene, based on generic parameters like rapidity of user input or density of movement and characters in a scene, as well as custom-designed input factors which can be scripted by the developers using the tool.” Such an approach could make clever use for kind of tools, like hiding features, that are not suitable for non-power users.

Read much more at the Project Horseshoes Website.

New tools to play with from Google. They come up with a new application, that fills the gap between web and the desktop PC. Google Desktop is a mixture of the good old google search functionality and the Apples Dashboard application from the OS X Leopard. This tool highly extends the option of collecting local and webbased data to customize your web experience. An addition you can add gadgets to the toolbar like task management, showing on- or offline-fotos or a notepad.

Linger at the plugins-site or read about ten great uses for Google Desktop.

What is Smoove?
Smoove is a free open-source pixel, tile and sprite-editor for the Sony PSP programmed in Lua.
You can read, write and edit .PNG-Files.

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Marius Watz is one of the leading players in the Generative Art movement. He set up a conference on Generative Art and a touring exhibition called ”Generator.x“ that can be seen all over Europe. His designs and own works are very strong and they seem to ask the question ”how can something so colorful be such a beauty“? Marius Watz just sits between the the ancestors of the Generative Art who developed of the programming language
Processing, Ben Fry and Casey Reas, and pushes the boundaries for this emerging form of art in the 21th century. Generator.x takes the art out of the web and prepares the ground for it in the real world. I met Marius in Berlin with some questions in the backpack.

How did you get into that computer stuff?

I started coding when I was 11, my dad brought home a Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer and I fell in love. I was an awkward but bright kid, so programming was a perfect creative outlet. I figured I would become a software engineer, but then I started using programming to create graphics. I ended up giving up computer science and started doing graphics for posters and flyers for the Oslo techno scene. That was in 1993. The result was that I worked as a graphic designer for many years, combining commercial work with self-initiated projects. These days I call myself an ex-designer, working as an artist only. I’ve lost the interest in client-based work, instead I focus purely on developing my own work.

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