What if your ads watched you while you were watching them? Microsoft is set to debut its new motion-sensitive advertising project NUads next month, which the company says will revamp the TV ad industry by doing just that.

The company’s natural user-interface ads, or NUads, use Xbox Kinect’s motion sensing technology to transform TV commercials into something you can actively participate in with minimal effort. For instance, people can vote in real-time for a product or service by waving their hand, schedule a calendar reminder for an upcoming TV show, or say “Xbox Near Me” to see a map of locations for whatever retail store just advertised to them. Microsoft first showed off its NUads project at the Cannes International Advertising Festival last June.

There is a studio which creates soft toys based on children’s drawings that their parents send in. Once completed, parents can buy these toys for their children, which I think is a very interesting concept and business model.

But what is more interesting is seeing these weird creatures that come “alive” as toys.

Here is the table of contents of this issue:

• CSS Regions and CSS Exclusions, by Deepa Subramaniam
• Drag and drop with jQuery UI on mobile devices, by Michaël Chaize
• JavaScript Object Creation, by Keith Peters
• Using Backbone with jQuery Mobile, by Christophe Coenraets
• Crafting native looking iOS apps with HTML, by Christophe Coenraets
• Demo of Handlebars, by Raymond Camden
• Real-time data exchange in HTML5, by Ryan Stewart
• Swipe to delete items, by Michaël Chaize
• App-UI, a library by Andrew Trice
• HTML5 Multimedia components, by Ian Devlin
• Interview of Pamela Fox
• Colour Match, Cutest Paw, Bit Timer: showcase
• Which Element ? Pull quotes, comments
• PhoneGap and the File API
• WTFJS: False advertising
• Generate color palettes from HTML5 video
• CSS variables draft
• News

created by Matt Richardson

The Descriptive Camera works a lot like a regular camera—point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype outputs a text description of the scene. Modern digital cameras capture gobs of parsable metadata about photos such as the camera's settings, the location of the photo, the date, and time, but they don't output any information about the content of the photo. The Descriptive Camera only outputs the metadata about the content.

As we amass an incredible amount of photos, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage our collections. Imagine if descriptive metadata about each photo could be appended to the image on the fly—information about who is in each photo, what they're doing, and their environment could become incredibly useful in being able to search, filter, and cross-reference our photo collections. Of course, we don't yet have the technology that makes this a practical proposition, but the Descriptive Camera explores these possibilities.

Technology

 

The technology at the core of the Descriptive Camera is Amazon's Mechanical Turk API. It allows a developer to submit Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) for workers on the internet to complete. The developer sets the guidelines for each task and designs the interface for the worker to submit their results. The developer also sets the price they're willing to pay for the successful completion of each task. An approval and reputation system ensures that workers are incented to deliver acceptable results. For faster and cheaper results, the camera can also be put into "accomplice mode," where it will send an instant message to any other person. That IM will contain a link to the picture and a form where they can input the description of the image.

Very cool

This week, Adobe released global research in a State of Create report to uncover how people feel about their own creativity as well as its role in the economy, society, the workplace and our educational institutions. The findings were enlightening. A few highlights from the data:

• 8 in 10 feel that unlocking creativity is critical to economic growth
• Only 1 in 4 believe they are living up to their own creative potential
• 75% said they are under growing pressure to be productive rather than creative at work
• More than half feel creativity is being stifled by the education system – and that feeling rises to 70% in the US
• Only about half of Americans would describe themselves as creative (global average is even lower at 39%)

We call this separation between the importance and the day-to-day reality of creativity the “creativity gap.” That gap is pretty sobering.

So, what can we do to close the creativity gap? First, we need to make time for creativity as well as provide the necessary technology tools and training. Productivity and creativity should not be mutually exclusive – we all need to find ways to create at work, rather than considering it a weekend hobby or luxury for those with more time. As for our educational institutions, they need to foster the growth of the entire child, with more opportunities to participate in arts programs and foster “out of the box” creative thinking. Most importantly, we all need to think of creativity more broadly – it’s not just the domain of professional designers or artists. It’s a critical capability in a successful society and one that is in all of us.

Please check out the full report online, and let me know what you think either in the comments section or on Twitter (@alewnes).

The blog post is the first in a series of posts that attempts to outline what a modern web development toolchain looks like and how to use the best-of-breed tools for efficient, effective development. Part two will outline how to use to set up your Terminal, zsh, and vim

The mobile landscape today is all but monopolized by WebKit, as a result, most of the tooling and infrastructure to support mobile web development on the frontend is taking place in the WebKit Inspector, so I’ll focus on it, and take a deep dive into its entire feature-set and how and when to use it.

Google and the Chrome team have been pumping a ton of resources into the WebKit Inspector. The changes have enabled a whole new class of complex and ambitious applications that would have otherwise collapsed on their own weight. This is great news, of course, but as I talk to more and more web developers about their process and tooling, it became clear to me that many of them haven’t caught up with the changes or aren’t making effective use of the tooling available. This blog post attempts to remedy that, not only by walking you through the inspector’s feature set, but also highlighting certain techniques for bug hunting and feature development that I’ve found to be indispensable. The post is meant to be scannable and shareable. You can click on any header to share a URL to a specific tip/technique or feature to your friends.