Blogs by Magic

Thoughts & ideas from a digital magician.

When video conferencing goes mainstream

Cisco may be the first vendor out of the gate with a successful Android-based tablet when its Cius portable collaboration and communication device—announced today—officially launches in the first quarter of 2011. 

The Cius ("see us," get it?), aimed squarely at business users, will integrate with Cisco's business applications such as WebEx, and it can dock into an optional phone base to connect to a user's corporate communications infrastructure.

The Cius is dominated by a 7" WSVGA touchscreen, weighs 1.15lbs, and appears to be much smaller than an iPad. It's also powered by a customized Android OS, though there has been no mention of what version of Android. 

With the heavy focus on real-time communication, the tablet comes equipped with a 720p HD front-facing camera for video conferencing, as well as a 5MP rear-facing camera that can stream VGA-quality video. 

via arstechnica.com

It may be a decade or so late, but it seems like video conferencing is finally going mainstream. Ten years ago there was a push by quite a few companies to get video conferencing units into the home, over regular telephone lines no less.

Now with Apple leading the way for consumers with the iPhone 4, and Cisco leading the way for business, video conferencing may eventually become ubiquitous in the way that Kubrick and many others always thought it might.

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Skype adds video calling six years too late

via blogs.skype.com

What the hell is Skype doing? They finally added group video chat (only 6 years after iChat) and they are going to charge a premium for it?

 

Group video calling is just one in a set of new premium features you’ll see us roll out during 2010. We haven’t set prices for these premium features yet, but rest assured that we’re still absolutely committed to bringing you free voice and two-way video calling.

My response when I first read this: LOLWUT?

iChat offered this six years ago, and with higher quality. Tokbox offers this for free, via the browser, on every platform, for free. What kind of a business model is this? Try to charge people for a service when there are other, better, alternatives for free? Are they just trying to dupe grandma out of her money?

I understand that Skype has a very paradoxical business problem (if everyone uses Skype, they make no money because Skype-to-Skype calls are free), but this is not the solution. This is just retarded. 

And they can't even release the Mac version in-step with the Windows version? Failure.

 

 

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Announcing Pictodeck v1.0

Pictodeck is just what it sounds like — a deck of pictograms. It’s a collection of over 700 vector pictograms taken from four different sets: PICOL, Android Icons, Pictoico, and Freshpixel. I have converted all of these sets into graphical assets that exist within a Keynote deck. No need to open them in a program like Adobe Illustrator and import them individually. All you have to do is open Pictodeck in Keynote and copy and paste or drag them into your own decks. You can even drag the entire series of 720p slides into your decks (although I wouldn't recommended leaving them there, since Pictodeck is rather large at about 30MB).

       
Click here to download:
Announcing_Pictodeck_v1.0.zip (374 KB)

I created this because I’ve found myself spending a lot of time using Keynote to tell stories. I like telling stories through creative uses of typography and pictograms. I found myself using PICOL (Pictoral Communication Language) a lot last year and decided to formalize my collection and distribute it a way that makes the entire library more accessible to those in advertising, marketing, finance — any industry really. If you work with Keynote, Pictodeck is for you.

You may not realize it at first, but Keynote actually runs on a vector based layout engine. When you drag a vector-based image (Adobe Illustrator, SVG, EPS, etc.) into Keynote the vectors are preserved. Keynote converts all vector based images into PDF assets that preserve the vectors. Just look at them in the Inspector — you’ll notice they all get the filename “droppedImage.pdf”.

If you have no idea what vectors are (or why you should care), I’d encourage you to look up the difference between vectors and bitmaps on Wikipedia. If you just want the short version, it’s this: There are two primary kinds of image files: bitmaps and vectors. Vector graphics can be scaled to any size without a loss in quality; bitmap images cannot. You know how sometimes you find an image and try to make it the entire size of the canvas, only to find out that it’s terribly blurry and pixelated? That’s because it’s a bitmap image and they can’t be rescaled without a loss in image quality.

In addition to a massive collection of vector pictograms, I’ve also included a collection of 32x32 bitmap icons for popular social networking sites created by Komodo Media. 

You can download Pictodeck v1.0 for Keynote ’09 here and a package for Keynote ’08 here. They are both ZIP files. I'm currently hosting them on Dropbox. If it's really slow for some reason let me know and I'll move them to Amazon S3.

☞ Pictodeck is made possible only because the original authors have graciously chosen to license their work under Creative Commons (in one form or another).
☞ I claim no copyrights of my own and only ask that you respect theirs.

Pictodeck exists to help others tell their stories visually though Keynote. I hope you find it useful. Feel free to leave feedback in the comments or shoot me a note if you know of any other pictograms you feel might be worth including in a future version, or if you want to share something you’ve created with Pictodeck. You can also contact me on Twitter @ralphthemagi.

I’m already planning the next version which will feature a mirror set of pictograms with inverted colors so that you can make better use of them on color backgrounds. In the meantime, if you want to use the pictograms on a black background, consider matting them on top of a white rounded square.

Cheers.

Saying more with less

I hate presentations with a lot of words. No one reads them. Why bother? I’ve never understood the purpose of filling a slide with a bunch of words that no one is going to read. Most of the time people don’t even look at the words, let alone attempt to read them.

For the past six months I’ve been using PICOL for everything. PICOL (which stands for Pictorial Communication Language, in case you were wondering) is set of over 500 vector icons. It's a free download and you can check it out at picol.org. I’ve used it in decks and animations. I've used it for product labels and logos. I even use it on my resume.

It’s a brilliant resource and a brilliant idea. There's something inherently awesome about trying to create a standard for visual communications. It’s also licensed under the Creative Commons, so you can use it and adapt it however you want to. Because they are all vectors, it’s very easy to combine different icons together.

One of my new goals is to make a presentation that has no words at all. Or perhaps a blog made purely out of pictograms.