I so want one of these sweet Draganflyer X6 helicopters. The two pound powerhouse can carry up to one pound of camera equipment, carrying it smooth enough to get decent video and stills.

More videos are at the Dragonfly website, including one which supposedly demonstrates that it’s quiet enough for wildlife photo work (scroll down and look for “hawk”). Who knows how much it costs, but I requested a quote. Anybody want to guess the price?

Extra: MIT’s take on helicopter surveillance.

(Via)

Games

Tilt, described in programmer Joe Hewitt’s blog:

…Christopher introduced me to a very talented video game designer, Nicole Lazzaro, who had an endless stream of ideas for games that would use the iPhone’s accelerometer. Nicole’s ideas quickly ran into the limitations of the phone, as we discovered that the browser doesn’t rotate when you hold it vertically upside down, nor is it possible to distinguish the two horizontal orientations. When we realized that her four-sided Tetris idea was not possible, we initially tried to compensate by adding in button pressing and other methods, but decided that we wanted to make a game that was very simple and used only the tilt sensor for input. Nicole’s philosophy is to focus on the emotional ride a player feels while being challenged and rewarded at just the right times, as opposed to just realistic graphics and long monotonous missions. From an engineer’s standpoint, I was overjoyed to focus on the psychological impact of my code instead of trying to build a technical or artistic masterpiece.

Hewitt also developed iUI: “As much as possible, iUI maps common HTML idioms to iPhone interface conventions.”

Meanwhile MacMost and iGiki both offer a number of iPhone optimized games.

Chat

JiveTalk, a web-based AIM/iChat, MSN, Yahoo!, GoogleTalk, ICQ, and Jabber client. The public alpha is online at iphone.beejive.com, though one imagines the company will eventually charge for use (they sell a chat client for Blackberry).

Gear Live offered instructions on how to cobble together IRC access on the iPhone with Colloquy on your Mac (you do use a Mac, don’t you?), the Colloquy web add-on, a bit of configuring, and a visit to http://YourIP:6667 on your iPhone.

I’ll probably tweak some Twitterers by categorizing them under “chat,” but we should at least be happy to see Hahlo and PocketTweets, two apps that make it east to Twitter via iPhone.

Remote Control

Telekinesis and Remote Buddy both make it easy to control your Mac with your iPhone, but Nate True’s WebVNC hack brings remote desktop support to the iPhone (Windows only).

Application Manager

How can we keep track of all these apps (and so many more not mentioned); how can we get to them quickly? AppMarks promises a sweet solution.

iphone, applications, chat, IRC, AIM, IM, games, remote control

Sure it’s old news, but I am pretty happy that Mac OS X 10.4 has a built-in VNC server.

You’ll still need a client, like Chicken of the VNC, but it couldn’t be much simpler to make work. Though, you could run a separate server app (even several instances of it) and work up a hack like this to allow you to have several people all logged in to the same machine (and getting different screens) simultaneously. And it’s also worth mentioning the VNC to Flash screencasting trick.

And…if what you really want to do is use and control a couple (or more) computers side by side, then what you might really want is some virtual KVM software (or, more properly, some keyboard and mouse-sharing software). Zach is super excited about Synergy for these things.

built-in, mac, Mac OS X, Mac OS X 10.4, remote control, screen sharing, virtual network network computer, VNC

I live quite a distance from any Apple Stores, so it’s only now that I’ve been able to see the new stuff. The Photo Booth application bundled with the new iMacs is actually more fun than I expected. That’s me above with the “comic book” effect applied.

But Front Row is every bit as sweet as it looks in the demos. Yes, I want it on my current machine. And, yes, I would pay $49, or maybe $79, I might even be convinced to pay $99 for the remote and software. Apple should move quickly, as it’s already been found in the wild.

tags: apple, apple media center, apple stores, front row, imac, isight, mac media center, photo booth, remote control

I have a sort of guilt complex about looking at home theater issues. Nonetheless, I’ve been building one piecemeal ever since I found an incredible deal on a video projector. Now I’m working on assembling a video jukebox of sorts and I need to face the remote control stumbling block.

That’s why I like the Logitech Harmony 520, available at Amazon. Credit due: I got the tip from a post at Engadget some time ago.

tags: control, harmony 520, home theater control, home theater remote, home theater remote control, logitech, logitech harmony, logitech harmony 520, logitech harmony remote, logitech harmony remote control, remote, remote control