http://jpgmag.com

ok, i haven’t written any posts in a LONG time but i figure i better get one in during december, before the new year is upon us. the reason for this absence is that for the past couple of months i have been totally addicted to jpgmag.com - and because of this, jpgmag.com gets my favorite time suck and social network of the year for 2009. woot woot!

in case you don’t know about it, jpgmag.com is a photo sharing social network site. the thing that makes it different from flickr or any other photo site is that the most popular and well accepted photos by vote make it to an actual printed magazine. in some old school analog way, that is way cool! the other difference is that jpgmag.com doesn’t want all your photos; they just want your best photos. of course flickr has some great photos and jpgmag also has some crappy ones, but when you’re asked to upload your best, it really makes one (and in this particular case, photographers) really think about what they will show the public. after all, we all want to get our best work published.

Sister mine. by edd carlile

so to make a long story short, i have spent hundreds of hours looking at and uploading photos -  and the truth is that i have spent most of that time looking at great work from some awesome professional and amateur photographers. i have probably viewed thousands of photos -  from amazing portraits by edd carlile to stunning abstracts by ina k to amazing landscapes by marc krutiak. but i could go on and on… anyway, you can find me here so sign up and vote for my photos (wink). i even got chris sofe to start posting there again. now to get dave schiliro to put up his abstracts.

we all know that it’s a bad economy and the media has done a great job at keeping us on the edge of our seats. every time a new report comes out from the economists or from wall street, a barrage of coverage ensues. we’ve heard it all when it comes to the mortgage crisis, the credit crunch or unemployment rates.

maybe it’s me, but one thing that i have not seen or heard covered in the local new york news is the rising homeless rate. now i don’t have any real numbers to back this up, just casual observation. i’ve been in this city for 37 years and i’ve pretty much seen it all. i can definitely tell you that in the 80’s and early/mid 90’s the homeless problem was rampant. and although i was not a huge guiliani fan, he did at least clean up the visible aspect of the homeless (no, bussing them to the outer boroughs does not count as help). anyone remember the tent cities under the manhattan bridge (which just turned 100 years old) or in thompkins square park?

well, in the last year - probably due to the economy and the lack of funds for public services - the homeless are everywhere and it’s definitely a saddening sight. you don’t have to look too hard to see them in the street, but the one thing that really got to me was seeing the amount of people sleeping in penn station. the weather is getting colder and people need to be indoors, but it was really shocking to see all hallways lined with sleeping bodies. where are the human services professionals? where are the city agencies to help these people? surely the police know that they’re out on the street. are there no reports filed?

as for our newly re-elected mayor who personally spent $100 million on his campaign and has risen to be one the wealthiest men in the world during his last two terms in new york, where is his compassion in all of this? mr mayor, if you love your city so much i’m sure you could find some way to help these poor people. it doesn’t take billions to be a philanthropist. and in case you don’t see them from your limo, take a walk with me on my route to work, they’re impossible to miss.

chromacircuit

we’re finally developing our first iphone app at visual mercenary group and that’s what led to the current favorite time suck. we’ve been talking about apps for a couple of years and have been part of the iphone developers group, but we just never really got around to it until now, when our friends at 4corners (see shca post) asked us to help them develop an app for one of their clients.

to make a long story short, i finally opened up xcode and started playing with the developers kit. apple really makes it easy, but still…not being an objective c developer has it’s drawbacks (and i don’t want to hear stories on 11 year olds programming iapps). so with my head exploding with code and model/view/controller logic i was bitching to my social network and vincent higgins pointed me to adobe.com, and the demos of CS5 which is slated for release next year. one of they key components of cs5 is that developers will be able to program in flash using actionscript3 and compile their work into an iphone app. well sign me up!

one of the lower chromacircuit levels

so while checking out the demo, i was led to the game chromacircuit by bowler hat games. bowler hat coded the game using flash cs5 and as3 from a pre-release of the software. so while that’s pretty cool in itself, the game is also great. and although us iphoners get to take it along with us, everyone else can still play on the web.

the object of the game is to rotate the elements in order to match the colors on all the sides. very simple yet very addicting. as the levels progress in difficulty, the elements also gain sides. it’s a really cool experiment in pattern recognition and gets addicting in trying to best the amount of moves required to finish. remembering which way to swipe on the iphone is a bit tricky and adds extra moves but it’s still great nonetheless. chromacircuit gets 4 out 5 stars for time suckiness. oh…and even cooler, you can download the source code and embed it on your own site for free!