Tag Archives: kid-friendly

Angry Birds Saves Life Of Stranded Man…Kinda

18 Mar

Angry Birds Saves Life Of Stranded Man...Kinda

A man stranded for three days on a snowy mountain road in Montana in the US attributed his survival to God, a rationed supply of beef jerky and the video game Angry Birds that he played on his mobile to keep his wits.

David Weatherly said that his 4WD vehicle became stuck in the snow on Sunday afternoon on a back road in the Lewis and Clark National Forest, where he had gone to take photographs of the scenery and wildlife.

After discovering he had no phone reception and concluding that nobody else would brave the remote road in the blustery weather, the 42-year-old postal employee took stock: He had a pouch of beef jerky, some water and a little coffee.

via Angry Birds game kept stranded man sane.

HTML5 Makes For Faster Game Play, But Where?

5 Mar

car

HTML5 is the new lingua franca of the internet, but games that are written in the format tend to run too slow.

The platforms that run HTML5 faster are likely to have an advantage in running a whole new wave of applications and games. So Spaceport.io, the cross-platform mobile game development tool maker, ran a study to find out whether iOS (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) is faster than Android at running HTML5 games. Hands-down, iOS won.

If HTML5 games run sufficiently fast, then a lot of benefits accrue. For instance, a game could be written in HTML5 for one platform and then work perfectly fine in another.

iOS performed three times better at running HTML5 games than Android, according to the new study. Spaceport.io created a benchmark dubbed PerfMarks to test performance at running HTML5 code.

The benchmark tested a device’s ability to animate image movement — a key measure of game performance. The report measures the number of moving images on a screen at 30 frames per second (FPS), a frame rate which provides a near-native user experience.

Repeated tests show that iOS performed far better at running animations than Android. The newest iPhone 4S scored 252 PerfMarks and the iPad 2 score 327. That compares to just 53 for the iPhone 3GS from 2009. By comparison, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone scored 147 and the Kindle Fire scored only 25.

via Apple’s iOS runs HTML5 games three times faster than Android | VentureBeat.

What Do You Get When You Combine A Kinect With A Shopping Cart?

28 Feb

Kinect Shopping Cart

This.

The quest for a high-tech “shopping cart of the future” is nothing new, but Whole Foods is planning to test a new spin on the concept, using Microsoft’s Kinect sensor for Windows. The motorized cart identifies a shopper with a loyalty card, follows the shopper around the store, scans items as they’re placed inside, marks them off the shopping list, and even checks the shopper out in the end.

Microsoft showed the very early prototype, being developed for Whole Foods by a third-party developer, Austin-based Chaotic Moon, during an event on the Redmond campus today, hosted by Craig Mundie, the company’s chief research and strategy officer.

The company says the project is literally weeks old, and that was apparent in the demo, which included a couple of false starts where the sensor didn’t precisely the shopper. The technology will need to be ironed out before it’s deployed, lest our shopping trips turn into destruction derbies.

But it’s an interesting application that shows what outside developers can do now that a Kinect software development kit has been released for Windows, expanding the sensor beyond the Xbox 360 game console.

via Whole Foods prototype puts Kinect on shopping cart, follows people around store – GeekWire.

KidFriday Show #100 Coming….Soon

30 Jan

O.K.  If you’re a listener of the KidFriday Podcast, you know we usually deliver 1 kickin’ new show each week.  We wanted show 100 to be special in some sort of way, but it might not go down like that.  #100 is too easy.  SO, stay tuned for show 100 while we take more time to see how show 101 could actually be the big show.  At least that’s our excuse for now.

Do you realize that we could have just done the podcast in the amount of time it took to write this?  Remember.  Show #101.

Hmmmmmmmm

Watch the KidFriday Podcast Live via UStream Tomorrow 12/31

30 Dec

We’re going to be recording a new KidFriday podcast tomorrow 12/31, and you’re invited to take a behind the scene look as we will be broadcasting video live.  No real fancy hi-tech camera’s, but you will be able to interact with us.  You can get the UStream app for free in the app store or android marketplace, or go to http://ustream.tv  We’ll announce the time tomorrow via our Facebook and Twitter page and at KidFriday.com

 

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