Techno Babble

Remember Scratch – a drag and drop programming paradigm from MIT?

If not refresh your memory at

http://www.kf12.com/blogs/techno/2007/11/drag-and-drop-programming/

or

http://scratch.mit.edu/

Well, now there’s something else, in a similar vein, Kodu from Microsoft Research. (Based on Boku – here’s a Boku report from March 2007)

http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2007/03/microsoft_resea.html

Kodu is a a visual programming language which has been designed for creating games by children. It runs on the Xbox and uses the game controller for input.

Kodu - Visual Programming

Using a simple language, which is entirely icon-based, programs are broken down into rules which are further divide into conditions and actions.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/kodu/

There’s a video of an interview with Matthew MacLaurin the man behind Kodu

CES 2009 Matthew MacLaurin on Kodu

Kodu will be available for download from the XBox Live Community Games channel.

Tagged: Boku, Kodu, Scratch, Xbox

Noted the recent announcement about the soon-to-be-available Nikon COOLPIX P90.

I don’t normally write about cameras, but was amazed to see how technology has evolved, since I got my Canon EOS 400D, and the amount of functionality that now gets packed in.

Nikon COOLPIX P90

Ignoring, for a moment, the vast range of features such as the 24x zoom, 12.1 effective Megapixels and 6400 ISO capability, 1 feature that stood out was the pre-shooting cache mode. This enables you capture up to 10 frames as soon as you press the shutter release (i.e before releasing it!) – effectively taking a picture up to a second before you release the shutter.

Was also impressed by mention of some of the features in the Smart Portrait System which includes:

• Smile Mode – the camera takes the shot when the subject smiles.
• Blink Warning – the camera detects that the subject blinked as the shot was taken.
• Automatic in-camera Red-Eye fix.
• Enhanced Face Priority AF – technology that detects up to 12 faces and Face priority AE adjusts the brightness of the subjects face.

This is not to mention the Image Stabilization and Motion detection technology that is used to minimize the effects of camera shake to produce sharper results.

As the camera also provides the facility to automatically recognise and choose the best from 1 of 6 scene modes is there anything left for the user to do ?

All the details are available at

http://www.nikonusa.com/Find-Your-Nikon/Product/Digital-Camera/26171/COOLPIX-P90.html

Tagged: Coolpix, Nikon, P90