WordPress 3.0 has just arrived on the scene — the thirteenth major release of the popular blogging software. It’s the result of six months of work from a total of 218 different contributors. You can download it now or upgrade from within your WordPress dashboard.
What’s new in 3.0? One of the best ways to find out is to try out the new Twenty Ten theme, which shows off many of the release’s (which is also called “Thelonius”) major new features, including custom backgrounds, headers, shortlinks, menus, post types and taxonomies.
Thelonius also features a lighter interface, more contextual help options, a boatload of bug fixes, bulk updates and much more. To learn more details about five of the most important updates, check out this brief and informative guide. This video from the WordPress team also explains some of the new features:
For those of you laboring on the backend, including developers and sysadmins, you might appreciate that MU and WordPress have finally merged. Now you’ll be able to run one or multiple blogs from the same installation.
Interestingly, the staff of WordPress/Automattic won’t immediately rush off to start work on WordPress 3.1. Founder Matt Mullenweg said his team will be taking some time to focus on things other than the core product.
“Over the next three months,” he wrote this morning, “we’re going to split into ninja/pirate teams focused on different areas of the around-WordPress experience, including the showcase, Codex, forums, profiles, update and compatibility APIs, theme directory, plugin directory, mailing lists, core plugins, wordcamp.org… the possibilities are endless… We think this investment of time will give us a much stronger infrastructure to grow WordPress.org for the many tens of millions of users that will join us during the 3.X release cycle.”
Apple is one of the biggest supporters of HTML5, and Steve Jobs clearly thinks this new standard is the future of the web. To show why Flash is no longer necessary, Apple has launched a HTML5 showcase displaying what an HTML5-capable browser can do without the need of additional plugins.
In typical Apple style, the showcase consists of simple, elegant, yet quite impressive demos of the technology. In one demo, you can type in some text, quickly change the font, its size and transparency, rotate it and add a shadow effect. Another lets you browse through a horizontal, vertical or grid-shaped gallery of images, while a particularly impressive demo lets you spin a 3D object by clicking and dragging.
Apple’s message is clear: HTML5 is mature enough for wide adoption, and sites which require add-ons to display content are a thing of the past. In an obvious jab at Flash, the text on the site states: “Standards aren’t add-ons to the web. They are the web.”
Yes, you can definitely cover a lot of ground that used to belong to Flash with HTML5. What Apple doesn’t tell us is that one could create a similar showcase in Flash with far more advanced effects, which are way out of reach of HTML5 and CSS3.
To try out any of the demos you’ll need to download the latest version of Safari.
If you love your cat so much that you can’t stand to be away from it — even for a hot second — you’re in luck: Sony Computer Science Laboratories (CSL) Inc has developed a liveblogging device for Mr. Mistoffelees and friends.
This revolutionary new toy, which was created with the help of the University of Tokyo, comes all pimped out with a camera, an acceleration sensor and a GPS, which monitors kitty’s every move, translating actions like walking, eating and sleeping into tweets. Sadly, there are only 11 fixed phrases currently available (I’m guessing, “I left a lovely hairball in your sneaker” is not among them), but Sony CSL is hoping to improve Fluffy’s conversational skills soon.
The device fits easily onto the cat’s collar, so as to avoid hindering its movement, which means your cat can tweet all over the neighborhood.
We’ve seen an influx of novel Twitter functions of late: tweeting trees, tweeting beds and even tweeting cows. While the tech may seem kind of, well, silly, we could see it being of use to people besides lonely cat ladies. For instance, such a collar could be exceedingly useful for zoologists and the like.
What do you think of the tweeting cat collar? Genius or cat-astrophically ridiculous?
Google Ventures has just invested an undisclosed amount in Recorded Future, a company that is working to accurately predict the future.
As its name implies, the web application uses a wealth of quantifiable data from the past and present to forecast trends and predict outcomes. It likely has around the same level of accuracy, give or take, as a weather report.
Recorded Future offers alerts on topics such as financial markets, geopolitical news, industry changes, public figures, technology and information security. The app can be customized to return results for an individual or other topic, as well.
Predicting the future is big business in industries such as finance, marketing and bookmaking. The way the analysts in these areas make their predictions is also through quantifying and parsing massive datasets. Applying the same principles to other topics makes sense, and we’re interested to see what Recorded Future does with this investment and onslaught of press and user attention.
Here’s the company’s demo, showing how its product works for users who want to know about the future:
In fact, we recommend browsing the company’s YouTube profile for an in-depth look at their cool visualizations and case studies.
What do you think about Recorded Future? Can a data-based, scientific approach to prediction really give us insights about the future? Will you be trying out the app yourself?
Robots are cool, but unless you stop by Stanford regularly or make it to MIT often, chances are you don’t see that many in your day-to-day life.
That’s where the internet comes in, and specifically YouTube, which offers hours and hours of robo-themed footage for your on-demand entertainment.
So, grab the popcorn, hit up the videos now and let us know in the comments which automatons get your vote.
Oh, and should you subscribe the the belief that robots are pretty much evil and will eventually overturn their human masters and rule the world, then you might still want to watch these videos to check out the kind of tech on display and see how far off such an uprising might be.
1. Giant Robot Dinosaurs from Japan
A video entitled “Giant Robot Dinosaurs from Japan” is never not going to be good. The next logical step is clearly to use these creations in a new feature film called “Rob-assic Park” in which an amusement park gets overrun by robo-dinos while Jeff Goldblum stalks around looking tall and saying I told you so.
2. CES 07: Honda Asimo Humanoid Robot Demo
A bit of a YouTube star, if there’s ever a robot to be voted least likely to rise up against his human overlords, it’s Honda’s humanoid “Asimo” who resembles a kid in a space suit and boasts a nice line in running, climbing stairs and conducting symphony orchestras.
3. Aldebaran Robotics’ Nao
This amazingly advanced robot boasts cognitive skills, a high level of motion (with 25 degrees of freedom) and is programmable, so you can customize it to do pretty much anything. Currently available to academic institutions for a high price, a consumer model is planned for 2011, so watch the demo above to start getting excited.
4. Dancing Sony Robots
Sony’s Qrio (notable for being the first bipedal robot capable of running) never reached production (it’s development was axed at the same time robo-dog AIBO got his marching papers), but as this video shows it could bash out some sweet moves in its time.
5. BigDog Overview
The DARPA-funded BigDog is a quadruped robot designed to be used as a kind of robotic mule in the field. This video demonstrates its incredible stability over all kinds of terrain, and even when taking a hit. It’s certainly much improved from the early beta.
6. Toyota’s Robot Quartet Band
This video is in Japanese, but music, or for that matter robot awesomeness, needs no translation. If this has got you hot for robots playing instruments, then be sure to check out the violin-playing android, also from Toyota.
7. Hanson Robotics ALICE
Hanson Robotics busies itself by “awakening intelligent robotic beings and granting them sparks of true consciousness and creativity.” Its Alice-bot is one example of the progress it has made with giving robotics realistic facial impressions with the aim of enabling “machine empathy” in the future. Be afraid robo-phobes.
8. The Robot Barman
Human barkeeps fear for your future! This “alcohol administering automation” created for Japanese beer brand Asahi could well be tending bar in a few year’s time — if they can programme it to have selective vision and a suitable sneer when someone orders anything with “Lite” in its name.
9. Robot Fish
If you’ve got the technical ability to re-create something from the underwater world as a robot you’d go for a shark, right? Not these guys. They make a blue goldfish. And it doesn’t even have any frickin’ lasers.
10. NASA Robonaut Humanoid Space Robot
The benefits of using robots in oxygen-free outer space have not gone un-noticed by the NASA brainiacs. NASA’s Robonaut, a futuristic space-man with flexible fingers, could one day be used in space to carry out repairs, leaving the humans free for more important tasks. Like tweeting.
If the amount of videos on YouTube capturing cats sat on robotic vacuum cleaners is anything to go by, then the accepted wisdom that cats are clean animals certainly appears to be true.
