On  August 16, 1960 Joseph Kittinger ran one of 3 series of tests for the U.S. Air Force called Project Excelsior.

Jumping from a hot air balloon at a world record of  102,800 feet (31,333 meters) to test high-altitude parachutes and the effects on the human body. His descent took almost 14 minutes and reached speeds of  614mph. Reaching temperatures of -90 degrees and nearing the speed of sound.

This has to be one of the most amazing recordings as he  jumped with a camera at hand. Till this day Joseph Kittinger holds the record for the highest jump in history.

Below is a clip of the jump. The clip is edited after 2:20, as it was used in one of my fav  Scottish electronic music duo,  Boards of Canada.

Recently, Red Bull sponsored Felix Baumgartner at an attempt to break the 50 year  record.

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!

I love this modern design take on Little Red Riding Hood. Originally developed as a class project by Tomas Nilsson, a design student at Sweden’s Linköping University.