Patents To Stifle Innovation

Posted on September 5th, 2011 by Ian G. Clifton

In Article 1 Section 8 of the United States Constitution, Congress is given the power to “…promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” This is essentially from where patent and copyright laws (in the United States) originated. Clearly, the purpose in regards to technology should be to promote innovation; unfortunate, the opposite has been happening. Continue reading →

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RenderScript 101, Part 2: RenderScript Interaction

Posted on August 24th, 2011 by Ian G. Clifton

Note: This tutorial continues on from RenderScript 101, Part 1: RenderScript Basics Tutorial. If you have not yet read that tutorial, you should do so before starting this one.

The previous tutorial ended with a simple app built that could display a green screen with RenderScript. The next step to making RenderScript more useful is understanding how to interact with it when it’s already running. We want to be able to pass values to the RenderScript code and we also want to pick up on user interactions with the view. Continue reading →

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RenderScript 101, Part 1: RenderScript Basics Tutorial

Posted on August 24th, 2011 by Ian G. Clifton

A couple of months ago, I had to do a lot of work with RenderScript. Unfortunately, there was not much documentation available then and there isn’t much more now. The purpose of this post is to provide the foundations for actually using RenderScript for graphical purposes. You should have already read about RenderScript and understand the overall concept (just not necessarily implementation details). I assume that you know Android and Java and aren’t scared of some basic C-style code. An understanding of computer graphics (or a graphics library such as OpenGL) definitely helps but is not a requirement. Continue reading →

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An Evolving Career Path

Posted on August 9th, 2011 by Ian G. Clifton

As you can probably guess, I’ve always been interested in technology.  My career didn’t lead directly to mobile development though. I worked with tactical satellite communications in the Air Force and even earned a degree and certification for teaching English at the secondary level (essentially, high school). Continue reading →

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Asus Transformer Review

Posted on July 17th, 2011 by Ian G. Clifton

I received my Asus Eee Pad Transformer more than a month ago, and I have to say that I am very impressed with it. The ability to add on the keyboard dock adds a huge amount of value to the device, allowing for productivity that is not matched by stand-alone tablets. Of course, there are times when the tablet alone is better (such as for presentations or certain games), and the Transformer makes it easy to pull the tablet out of the dock and just keep using it.

I wrote a review called [Review] ASUS Eee Pad Transformer – A Month With A Tablet In Disguise at Android Police, so I will not go into excessive detail here. If you are looking for a tablet that can actually be used to create real content, particularly for typing on the go, take a look at the Asus Eee Pad Transformer.

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