Saturday, October 23, 2010

Apple Takes Aim .... at Cadence?

Having formally entered IC design, ostensibly to increase its gross margin by eliminating middlemen, Apple ought to have figured out by now that it makes little sense to give enormous sums of money to Cadence Design Systems for IC design software when it could design its own software inhouse. After all, Apple doesn't depend on any third-party software to build its products (except M$ Excel of course - which is not frightfully expensive).

What they do know is that an intuitive interface is the key to user experience. Why not improve on what Cadence has by adding gesture recognition, etc to boost the productivity of its IC designers?

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Arduino Direct USB

That's what I want to see at next year's Maker Faire. Screw the FTDI chip that's outlived its purpose.

This is not just about hardware. The reason I want direct USB, is that I want people to start thinking their programs in direct USB, not some glacial emulated serial port. And then we can all be free from Apple - the evil Empire.

Saturday, October 2, 2010

Gmail Goggles

Hokay, Google has this Android App called Google Goggles. Shoot a pic with your phone, they'll try to tell you about it. How about the same thing for gmail? Some kookie forwards you a kool picture. You'd like to know more about it. How about Chrome give you a right-click menu-item "Search with Google Goggles"?