Weblog of Fernando Reig Matthies

Say hello to Gmail voice and video chat: “Posted by Justin Uberti, Software Engineer


I’m a big user of Gmail chat. Being able to switch from email to chat as needed, all within the same app, is really great for productivity. But people can only type so fast, and even with our new emoticons, there are still some things that just can’t be expressed in a chat message.

That’s why today we’re launching voice and video chat—right inside Gmail. We’ve tried to make this an easy-to-use, seamless experience, with high-quality audio and video—all for free. All you have to do is download and install the voice and video plugin and we take care of the rest. And in the spirit of open communications, we designed this feature using Internet standards such as XMPP, RTP, and H.264, which means that third-party applications and networks can choose to interoperate with Gmail voice and video chat.

Once you install the plugin, to start a video chat, just click on the ‘Video & more’ menu at the bottom of your Gmail chat window, and choose ‘Start video chat.’ You’ll have a few seconds to make sure you look presentable while it’s ringing, and then you’ll see and hear your friend live, right from within Gmail. You can click the ‘pop-out’ iconto make the video larger, or click the fullscreen iconin the upper left-hand corner for a fully immersive experience. See this all in action in the video below:

Via Gmail Blog

Via Common Craft

New York Times:

The idea that you do not have to be a professional to create a good commercial is becoming widespread, in a trend known as consumer-generated content. Leave it to Apple to paraphrasing the company’s old slogan a bit think differently.

A television commercial for the new iPod Touch from Apple, scheduled to begin running on Sunday, 10-28 is being created by the longtime Apple agency, TBWA/Chiat/Day. It is based on a commercial that an 18-year-old English student and Apple devotee named Nick Haley, who says he got his first Macintosh when he was 3 created on his own one day last month.

His spot offers a fast-paced tour of the abilities of the iPod Touch, set to a song titled ‘Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex’ by a Brazilian band, CSS.

Mr. Haley said he was inspired to make the commercial by a lyric in the song, ‘My music is where I’d like you to touch.’

He based the visual elements on video clips about the iPod Touch and other new products, which can be watched on the Apple Web site (apple.com). He uploaded his commercial to YouTube, where it received four stars out of a possible five and comments that ranged from ‘That’s awesome,’ followed by 16 exclamation points, to ‘Makes me want to buy one and hack it.’

Via fscklog

I had seen a demo of BumpTop before on YouTube and for many weeks there where rumors about Leopard, Apple’s new OS X 10.5, getting this sort of interface for it’s new Finder.

Nothing of that will happen, as Steve Jobs told us at the last WWDC ‘07, what we know is that we will get Cover Flow style views in our trusty Finder.

What opened my eyes in this video is that same UI approach used with digital images, which really resembles a shoe-box full of photographs one may have.

A demo of this occurs at the very end in the following video.