#ted2012

cant bbelieve my first post here is an oc for the freakin movie Ted, well I need to feed myself somehow right?

He's name is Bun (cause Bunny, ya know) he's summoned alive at the same time as Ted, but the kid that wished him alive passed away some years later, and then he was alone until he was found by a person and they became buddy's or something idk y'all I'm still figuring this out

Oh and also white fur version cause I can't decide

"Robots that fly ... and cooperate"

Vijay Kumar, School of Engineering & Applied Sciences, University of Pennsylvania

Great guy, great moment

Two things stick out in my mind about getting in touch with Cesar Kuriyama. First, I'd seen his Ted2012 talk, really impressive. Check it out if you haven't seen it (also check out his bio, can't wait to see what's next from this guy):

The second thing was that not only did I get along with Cesar right away, but I got one of those great New York compliments. I found out that everyone he spoke to in tech told him he should talk to us about building a premier Android app. Very grateful to all the great people who recommended us and thanks so much Cesar for putting it in writing on your kickstarter page!

  One Second Everyday

1SE already had a great iPhone app and we were really happy to bring it to Android. After the initial discussions, we got the opportunity for our creative director, Paul, to really dive into the design and make sure it was a true Android experience (not just a ported iLook).

Cesar is presenting the app tonight, June 11th at the New York Tech Meetup (congrats Cesar!!) but in case you miss it, here's a few screens for you:

Solving development challenges

The types of projects we like at Touch Lab are the ones where we get to push and make things happen that no one else could. Luckily the 1SE app gave us a few major challenges to solve. Here's three, for those of you that like this stuff:

iOS has libraries for cutting and pasting videos; Android, not so much. We had to pull together various utilities to get that sorted out. Because of that, cutting the 1 second clips is a little slower than iOS, but compiling videos on Android is MUCH faster ;) 

Audio actually ended up making the compiling even more difficult because while the video cuts to exactly 1 second, the audio has a few ms left over. That's fine with a few videos, but with hundreds, it adds up. The solution is took a while, but it works great now.

Because of the way video is encoded on Android, it doesn't start exactly when you want. When you say "start at 21.43", Android finds the next key frame, so maybe it'll actually start at 21.57 and play for a little under a second. Our team did a little movie magic and got that video to start exactly when the user wants and play for exactly a second. 

The app is still in beta, but as soon as it's on the Play store, we'll update here with a link.

Congrats again to Cesar on One Second Everyday! We'll be keeping an eye out for your next amazing project.

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As we expect more from technology, do we expect less from each other? Sherry Turkle studies how our devices and online personas are redefining human connection and communication -- and asks us to think deeply about the new kinds of connection we want to have.