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Along with announcing their much anticipated IPhone OS4 Steve Jobs introduced the all new iAd. Apple’s expanding their presence in mobile advertising and this unique mobile advertising platform promises to incorporate elements of traditional television advertisements with the acclaimed interactivity of web ads.

Currently the advertising delivery on mobile devices is an obtrusive experience that brings users outside of the application to the webpage linked to in the ad. A user then has to navigate back to their application in order to resume their experience.

The all new iAd will solve this flawed User Experience by allowing the ad to display full-screen video and interactive advertising content right within the application. The newest version of the iPhone OS (4.0) will enpower mobile application developers the ability to easy embed hooks to iAds.

Now comes the interesting part. Apple is going to sell and handle serving the ads and they are offering as much as a 60% revenue split with the advertisers.

Watch out Google. They purchased Double Click to successfully cross into the online advertising delivery business but Apple is a flagship that they have no chance at acquiring.

First the App Store now this. Apple is positioning themselves to go toe to toe with the Goliath’s in cyberspace.

Well there goes the bell I have to get back to working now even though i’m compelled to go off on a Flash rant about Apple versus Adobe.

Print might be the fastest declining type of media in the world today but what lies ahead is surely to be captivating for device technologies and content publishers that can harness the power of digital media to breathe new life into their content.

Being in the Digital Marketing space from 9 to 9 everyday (no that isn’t a typo) I get my fair share of time to dabble and experiment with new concepts for content interactivity.

I’m really excited to have opportunities to work with experts in content creation and help them translate and expand their ideas to offer a whole additional layer of interactivity.

We were been playing with Webcams and Gestural navigation concepts where we used facial recognition and point tracking to create augmented reality experiences.

With hardware advancements in multi-touch enabled devices like the kindl and ipad the next generation in interactive user experiences is going to be a whole lot more exciting.

Posting some of the things we are and have worked on might piss off some of our clients and agency partners so i’ve grabbed some similar examples of interactive content using tablets and multitouch devices. I did not have any part in the below examples and clicking on the videos will give you full information on those who should be credited for their hard work and cutting edge ideas.

Alexx Harvey from Viv Magazine showing their Ipad digital magazine.

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Time Inc’s Tablet magazine.

We have already been working on completing an iPad application that lets our Creative Strategists and business developers carry around an interactive version of our portfolio where we can show prospects and review project status in person with our clients.

Sketches from our iPad App in progress.

For the non-techy folks that haven’t caught on yet the digital landscape is changing by the minute and the need for content changes happens so fast printing something is just such a waste of time and money when it will date and make itself extinct in a matter of days.

We packed up our pocket folders and traditional leave behinds and went for a more progressive way to demonstrate our work to our clients.

What about when we leave and they don’t have anything to reference?

No problem we email them a web version of it which uses jquery and a standard mouse hover/click interaction to experience the work. They can view, print and email their colleagues links to showcase things.

if you would like to demo the beta version of the application shoot me an email at pete [at] peter sena dot com.

Sander ter Braak is exploring changing properties of a 3d object using Distorted Projection. As the viewer moves the experience changes based on their perspective.

I love seeing stuff like this so I figured I would pass this along.

Augmented anamorphosis from Sander ter Braak on Vimeo.

Now if only Apple would put isights into the Ipad we would be having a very different set of things to look at.

Squeeze is a great application to compress large folders and still have Snow Leopard read them like regular directories.

For $9.95 to save tons of hard drive space its a great little tool and don’t worry it doesn’t really slow down your computer much at all.

Download or Buy Squeeze

Adobe Browser Lab:

Fast tool to see a screenshot of a webpage in many browsers. it has a nice side-by-side feature for seeing your sites next to one another in various browsers. I like this tool cause its faster then using a Virtual Machine but its not a feasible tool for testing things like rollovers and functionality. However as a “screenshot” snapshot tool its quite awesome.

Cost: Free

Link to Tool

Browser Cam:

This service lets you use Browsercam’s farm of virtual machines to quickly test your Websites and Web Applications inside a browser, email, or on a device. I haven’t tried this one yet but i’ve heard some pretty good reviews on it. I keep meaning to test the Free Trial and consider bringing this into our studio for 2010. They also are featuring a device capture system for Iphone, Android, Blackberry and Windows Mobile.

Cost: Plans starting at $39.95/month

Link to Tool

Browsrcamp:

I haven’t tested out the paid version but if the folks over at Browsrcamp wanted to offer me a trial i’d be happy to test them out. they offer all major Webkit and Gecko based browsers but being that it is a VNC server session there is no way (to my knowledge) to test the dreaded IE. Now if you are a PC user you can easily use Super Preview and Browsrcamp if you don’t have a mac. See for me I abandoned Windows after they stopped supporting XP and i realized how big of a piece of shit Windows Vista and 7 were. This is not me being an Apple fanboy or going for the Mac versus PC debate just a little rant.

Cost: Prices range from $3 to $99 based on the subscription but their one year subscription is only $99

Link to Tool

Cross Browser Testing:

This tool I especially enjoy due to the ability to actually login and test a site in addition to screenshots and seeing it. They offer VNC sessions and the ability to pick an operating system, the browser of choice and then experience it in the form of screenshots or an actual “live test”

Cost: plans ranging from 19.95 to 199.95 per month

Link to Tool

IPhony:

Looking for a down and dirty way to visualize a website inside of the Iphone? This Free tool is great for seeing how your webkit based website will look. Its a Mac only program and not a great way to test for anything other then sizing and aesthetics because its basically just calling Safari inside an iphone wrapper. Therefore if you goto a site using Flash or other non iPhone supported content you will see it rendered just how safari would render it as opposed to seeing the blue X.

Cost: FREE

Link to Tool

Litmus:

This hosted service lets you test your designs on all browsers and offers precise bug tracking so you can find out the incompatibilities of some things performed on the site. their Free version limits you to 50 tests/month and only offers support for MSIE7 and Firefox2 on the browsers and Outlook 2003 and Gmail for email.

They offer a series of very affordable plans ranging from around $39 for a 14-day pass all the way up to $199/month for a team unlimited subscription. I’ve used this and have had nice luck with it.

Cost: FREE and Paid programs ranging from $39 and up.

Link to Tool

Super Preview:

a Microsoft tool thats actually worth half a shit. This tool lets you visualize a site in various Internet Explorer versions.

Cost: FREE

Link to Tool

DIY Solutions:

Running Virtual Machines is a Do it yourself solution. This route you would install a program like VMWare or Windows Virtual PC and then you can install multiple copies of an operating system on a server or your local machine. In essence that is what most of the above services are doing. Some automate taking screenshots and some actually give you a virtual session using something like VNC or a browser based version of this and you can pay for “minutes” or “processing” time. Currently at my company we are using a combination of the above tools depending on the needs of the project.

I personally use VMWare fusion quite a bit on my mac when testing IE7 and IE8. I used to use it for all versions of internet explorer but recently dropped IE6 from the dreaded lineup of Microsoft Browsers we support. Now our solution for IE6 is to put a “blocker” script in place that throws up a jquery modal window telling the user to upgrade. I borrowed and modified this from our friends at CSS-Tricks

Found this Helpful?

I’m a pretty busy guy but when I discover a set of great tools that helped improve our productivity and effectiveness I like to share. I remember the days when I would try to ask google for help and it didn’t help me. So if you enjoyed reading this, have something to add please Comment and Share this.

Interesting little video showing the growth of Twitters Codebase from April 2006 till now.

I’ve downloaded and played with just about every twitter application or webapp that I can get my hands on. I will leave a list of them at the bottom of this post so you can check them out yourself but I wanted to call your attention my newest favorite twitter application.

With Hootsuite you can manage multiple Twitter, Facebook, Linked In and Ping.fm accounts all in one place. This is especially helpful if you manage multiple accounts for yourself or for your clients.

The interface is clean and the color palette is easy on the eyes. I especially like the “schedule tweets” feature which lets you stagger your tweets over a period of time.

Nothing is more annoying then seeing a bunch of someones tweets back-to-back to bulk down your twitter feed when your looking for whats happening in the tweetscape.

If your like me when you get a few hours to surf and catch up on your social life (the cyber version) its nice to be able to spread out when you are pushing out the 100 new things you just discovered so you don’t force your friends/followers to just unfollow/unfriend you.

Other features include:

• Multi-Column View
• Tabbed Layout
• Create Groups
• Schedule Tweets
• Quick Search
• View User Information
• Report Spam
• Clickable Hashtags
• Full Ping.fm integration
• Built-in URL shortener with trackable Statistics

Other Twitter Applications for you to experiment with:

• Twitterrific
• Tweetdeck
• Twittervision
• Twitterfeed
• Twhirl
• Twitpic
• Digsby
• Twitterholic
• monitter
• Seesmic – Previous Favorite
• Tweetie – Mac & Iphone only
• Ubertwitter – Best Twitter App for Blackberry Users (blackberry only)

Did I leave out an awesome Twitter App? Would you like to see me expand on something. Well I’m not a mind reader so let me know.

Minus having an Edit undo function in real life there is something nice about being able to organize your physical workspace into various piles of things and stick a post it note to your bulletin board or computer screen to put things into plain sight. Though its been around for sometime for Windows they recently released this cool little application on the Mac.

I love having this program on my macbook pro especially when i’m doing my usual weekend routine of surfing and catching up on emails, rss and the occasional creative or programming project.

Introducing BumpTop: bringing the 3rd dimension to your desktop

Whats not awesome about Ninjas opening up a Cell Phone? Exactly..