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Pixar development team tests iPad Pro & Apple Pencil, says palm-rejection is perfect

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Michael B. Johnson, who heads the Pixar team that develops the tools used to create its animated movies, tweeted that his team had been given the chance to test the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil – and described palm-rejection as perfect.

Lovely of our friends from Apple to stop by to let us take iPad Pro & Pencil for a test drive […]

It has perfect palm rejection as far as we were able to see … 


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Google Spotlight Stories arrives on iOS – beautiful, 360-degree, immersive animations

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stories

There aren’t too many cool apps that launch first on Android, but Google Spotlight Stories is one. It plays sweet, animated stories using a mix of 2D and 3D imagery – the cool part being that you can ‘look around’ the scene simply by rotating your phone.

Immerse yourself in a world of storytelling made just for mobile. Engineers and critically-acclaimed filmmakers are bringing stories to life using the latest advances in mobile technology. Using 3D and 2D animation, 360° spherical cinema-quality video, sound sphere audio and sensor fusion techniques, the screen is now a window into a story that unfolds all around you. Look anywhere, follow individual characters, watch it over again and again. It’s a little different each time. Google Spotlight Stories is your mobile movie theatre.

There’s some heavy-duty talent behind the creation of the stories, the debut story Windy Days being created by former Pixar animators, and Help by Justin Lin, director of The Fast and the Furious … 


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Adobe Slate lets you publish magazine-like stories from your iPad without design expertise

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Adobe Slate

Adobe is out today with its latest app for content creators on the iPad. The new Adobe Slate app is available for free and joins the similar Voice app Adobe launched last May. Where Adobe Voice focused on using the iPad and later the iPhone for story telling with the spokenword backed by visual elements, the new Adobe Slate app pairs text with fluid and customizable attractive layouts that look great whether you’re a designer or not.
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Video of iOS 8 vs iOS 3 shows the longer animations since iOS 7 reduce responsiveness

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ti0KdXrgSE]

A user experience expert has put together a video showing that the longer animations introduced in iOS 7 and continued in iOS 8 have a small usability cost: user input is ignored while the animation is running, making the user interface seem slower. The video compares it to iOS 3 running on the original iPhone.

While William Van Hecke believed that the issue was that animations used to be interruptible, this isn’t actually the case except for Springboard. In other cases, iOS has always ignored input until animations are complete, it’s just that they used to be shorter. If you’re fast with your fingers, there will now be times when you’re trying to do something while the animation is still doing its thing.

The new spring-based animations also make it less clear when the animation has ended, so the device seems unresponsive to input, but in reality it’s that the animation hasn’t quite finished.

Do you see this as an issue in real-life use? Let us know in the comments.

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Pixar names its main studio building after Steve Jobs

As noted by the PixarTimes, a Pixar employee tweeted the photo above showing what is apparently the entrance to the main building on Pixar’s campus newly named in memory of Steve Jobs. Jobs actually played a big role in designing the building itself as CEO of Pixar, as recently noted in the Walter Isaacson “Steve Jobs” biography. Pixar recently honored Jobs for his contributions to the company in the end credits of its latest animated film “Brave”, but the naming of the building is obviously a more permanent tribute to the man who helped form the company. OfficeSnapshots has a good account of Jobs’ role in creating the main Pixar building, much of which is found in the biography (excerpt below):

According to Jobs’ recent biography, the headquarters was to be a place that “promoted encounters and unplanned collaborations.”… Jobs also strived for a campus that stood the test of time. Tom Carlisle, Pixar’s facilities director adds that, ”He didn’t want a standard office-park building—one with corrugated-metal siding or ribbon windows. The building had to look good 100 years from now. That was his main criterion.”

Pixar’s campus design originally separated different employee disciplines into different buildings – one for computer scientists, another for animators, and a third building for everybody else. But because Jobs was fanatic about these unplanned collaborations, he envisioned a campus where these encounters could take place, and his design included a great atrium space that acts as a central hub for the campus.

Brad Bird, director of The Incredible and Ratatouille, said of the space, “The atrium initially might seem like a waste of space…But Steve realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen.”

And did it work? “Steve’s theory worked from day one,” said John Lasseter, Pixar’s chief creative officer “…I’ve never seen a building that promoted collaboration and creativity as well as this one.”

[tweet http://twitter.com/ijunns/status/265678354794037249/photo/1]