Whitenoise

Hello all and welcome to another episode of this column which has become quite infrequent. This in part due to a new assignment that I took up at work . The work is quite interesting. Will make a post on it quite soon.

One of the many events that happened this month was OReilly ETech conference. I am not a big fan of this event but this year had nice talks that might interest you.

Real hackers program DNA : While you were guessing about the  next avenue for hackers, here is   someone from MIT who is hacking into DNA!  Reshma Shetty has done a PhD on Biological Engineering from MIT and is now part of ginkgobiworks ,a  synthetic biology startup .

She is one of the speakers at the recent ETech conference. One of her interesting works was  tinkering into an E.coli bacteria  with genes from a petunia plant and made E.cloi ‘smell nice’.  For more on this and the field of  synthetic biology have a look at this interview .

New YouTube features: You Tube got an overhaul recently and with some new features to its armor.I could also see a lot of HD videos and it has become quite seamless  in switching to HD vides from the normal ones. The site also integrates Twitter functionality,that allows you to share the video link as a tweet.

Another upgrade is better mobile integration with the company  launching its official YouTube application
for Symbian and Windows Mobile.  I remember of a beast called Android. But I couldn’t find a version of the YouTube app  for this.. Surprising! as YouTube is from the Google stable.

Designing for Gestural UI: The mobile and PC UI design is getting ready for the next disruption – Touch   and Gestural UI. With the huge success of iPhone and its fabled multitouch,

‘Gestures’ have become the new areas of interest in the mobile application world with most users opting for ‘touch based UI’.

If you are into this domain and are working on designing of better usability for Gesture based UI ,then here are some suggestions from the  SXSW2009 interactive conference that happened recently. There was a  session on Gestural UI with examples from some cool apps on the iPhone.

Bruce Eckel on C++ and Java: The C++ 0x standard is coming up with new features (one of them is named as ‘futures and promises’ ) I don’t know where/how these functions might be used and how many are still using this language and these new features on a daily basis.  Here is a short comment by  Bruce Eckel’s on what languages like Java/C++ and brought in to the programming community.