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!

photoshop mobile on iphone

photoshop mobile came out a few days ago at the iphone app store and although there was anticipation for a mobile app from adobe, this one doesn’t really satisfy. the paltry set of effects is actually quite disappointing, considering the amazing breadth of photoshop. my own personal bummer was that there were no layers - imagine something as cool as a single type layer where you can type a name (or phrase) and position it on a photo wherever you want.

the app allows you to open or take a photo via the camera. then gives you the choice of the crop/flip/rotate tool or 3 main sets of effects you can run. the choices are a little more than canned color overlays and a couple of blur effects - the blurs which I actually like a bit. I just wish that I could layer something over the blurry images. and c’mon adobe, do we really need the ’sketch’ effect? it doesn’t even look good. just for that alone i can’t really give it more than 2 out of 5 stars.

for now though, i think i’ll still use some of the other graphics apps - like doodle buddy - that i like (and my kid loves!) and then bring those images into ps mobile. but really, i’m already ready for the update. of course this is probably just adobe signaling the beginning of their cloud apps along with their online service at photoshop.com, but more on that later…