Gooii :: Blog

15 years ago everyone was banging on about “virtual reality”, a phrase that seemed to be applied to anything from enormous monitor wielding headsets, to almost everything interactive. Thankfully the buzzword has been buried with cyberspace, Y2K and Dirty Den but that doesn’t mean the ideals and notions have gone away. Instead, now they’re actually possible, they have less ambitious and more meaningful names like ‘Personal 3D Viewer’.

Designed to work with the Playstation 3, Sony’s Personal 3D Viewer dispenses with the futurisms, to provide a viewing experience that often fails leaves most company’s concept departments. When worn, the device provides two 720p OLED monitors, one for each eye, replicating the 3D cinema experience and proving ideal for 3D movies and gaming. Costing around £700, the headsets aren’t cheap but for those with plenty of disposable cash, this surely has to be the ‘must-have’ gadget of the year.

For the full review please visit the Digital Foundry website.

The early days for any console can be a tricky time for hardware companies. On one hand you have a fantastic and powerful new system but on the other, actual software to play on it can be a little thin on the ground. The PlayStation Vita, Sony’s successor to the PSP, looks to buck this trend.

Sony has just announced the first party launch games for its new handheld and it’s an impressive line-up that includes killer apps such as ‘Uncharted: Golden Abyss’, ‘MotorStorm RC’ and ‘WipEout 2048’. With a system rumoured to be almost as powerful as the PS3, could this be the device to knock the iPhone off it’s portable gaming perch?

The full line-up includes:

Uncharted: Golden Abyss
WipEout 2048
Reality Fighters
Little Deviants
ModNation Racers: Road Trip
Everybody's Golf
Escape Plan
Gravity Rush
Hustle Kings
MotorStorm RC
Top Darts
Super StarDust Delta

With some impressive 3rd party games on the way too, Sony's handled could truly be a thing of beauty - check out the mouth watering trailer for ‘Uncharted: Golden Abyss’ below.

Some sites are wrongly suggesting Adobe has abandoned Flash, it hasn’t. What Adobe has announced is they’ll no longer be developing Flash for mobile browsers, which is something very different indeed.

Adobe aren’t stupid, nor have they beaten by Apple’s refusal to allow the Flash player on iOS, despite appearances and reports the contary. Adobe will now be focussing on developing HTML5 software that incorporates all the Flash features we love (and hopefully leaving out the bugs and ones we hate) into new applications. An early demonstration of this software was showcased in the preview release of ‘Adobe Edge’, their HTML5 animation tool. How advanced the final software will be and the price is shrouded in mystery but if Adobe get these things right, they could once again help change the face of how we create web content.

So the big question is, does this mean the end for Flash desktop? The answer clearly is no, not for now at least. Currently Flash offers designers and developers the ability to create content rich software, games and applications that can be delivered online far quicker and cheaper than via any other web platform.

Like any good software house we use all the technologies available to us and pick the best one for each job. Thankfully fewer websites are being built in Flash, with the software instead being used to create interactive applications that anyone can view – as long as you’re not on an iPhone or iPad and if you are, we can build you a very nice app for that.

Mac OS X Lion is sitting in my dock, winking at me, waiting to be installed. Despite the great temptation to install, I'm going to hold off for a day or so, as my current copy of Xcode, the software used to build and complile iOS apps, isn't Lion compatible. In the meantime the Lion compatitble Xcode 4.1 is downloading on our spanking new Mac, to ensure we can code and compile effectively without interrupting our workflow. What I have seen of Lion so far looks very, very good.

Mac OS X 10.7, or Lion as it's better known, is released today and it's just not its weatlh of features that sets this release apart. Lion is the first operating system to be released almost exclusively as a download, as well as being one of the cheapest OS at only £20.99 (or $29.99 if you're dollar lucky). This is compared to Microsoft Windows 7 Professional, which retails at a whopping £219.99.

So what's OS X Lion like? I have now idea, over an hour in and my download's still not even 25% complete.

For more infomation the Lion's roar visit: www.apple.com/macosx