Mashed Articles

The end is nigh for the modern graphics chip. It genuinely pains me to say that. After all, I’m an unapologetic chip aficionado, someone who loves the technology of integrated circuits for the sake of it. But it’s becoming increasingly apparent that GPUs are over-engineered, increasingly irrelevant and almost definitely not long for this world.

The background here involves a confluence of technological trends. The most ominous of these in terms of the GPU’s longevity as a discrete component is the architectural convergence of CPUs and GPUs. However, one of the most debilitating symptoms of the graphics chip’s terminal malaise is complexity – sheer, pointless complexity. Take Nvidia’s latest uber pixel pumper, the GeForce GTX 480. It weighs in at three billion transistors. That’s getting on for triple the size of Intel’s beefiest PC processor, the six-core Core i7-980X.

If the GTX 480 was any use, that monster transistor count would actually add to the allure. But the harsh truth is that it isn’t – for almost anything. And that makes it dumb. You see, despite the hype regarding running non-graphics applications on GPUs, there’s still very little outside of games that makes more than passing use of a desktop or laptop GPU. More to the point, the number of games demanding a really high-end GPU that are actually worth playing isn’t merely a small number. It’s zero.

Put it all together and you have a terminal mismatch between the cost and complexity of GPUs and their real-world utility. In truth, I’ve felt this way for some time. But it’s the apparent emergence of a radical alternative to established 3D rendering technologies that really brings home how bloated and ludicrous graphics chips have become.

This alleged revolution in rendering comes from a small Australian software startup known as Unlimited Detail. It’s not actually brand spanking new, having been in development for a year or three. But thanks to the random nature of web-based content aggregators, Unlimited Detail was lifted from obscurity recently in a flurry of YouTube-powered publicity.

Anyway, as far as I could tell the basics of this new rendering technology involve ditching polygons in favour of atomic points in 3D space. The claimed result is quite literally unlimited geometric detail. Oh, and the whole thing runs in software at smooth framerates on a conventional PC processor. The GPU doesn’t get a look in until it’s time to spit out the final 2D images.

You hardly need me to point out it all seems too good to be true. So, there was nothing for it other than to go straight to the source and speak to the guys at Unlimited Detail. The technical brains are provided by Bruce Dell, a former supermarket manager, while the business nous comes courtesy of Greg Douglas, a games insider formerly of developers Auran.

The idea of using atoms or points is not new, of course. The really clever bit in UD is the 3D search algorithm developed by Dell. The precise details are UD’s big secret. But according to Dell, “The algorithm takes point cloud data and files it in a certain way so that it can be quickly sorted and accessed.”

When the algorithm searches for points, it doesn’t do so indiscriminately. Instead, it only pulls up a single point for each on-screen pixel being rendered. “We only grab the atoms we need for each pixel, we don’t touch the others,” explains Dell. In other words, the workload depends on screen resolution, not the underlying geometric detail of the scene being rendered. Thus, an impression of unlimited geometry is created.

The UD guys claim the algorithm is so efficient it runs in real-time in a single thread on just one core of a conventional PC processor. Apparently, it will even scale down to simple CPUs in mobile devices.

So far, the only hard evidence for these incredible claims takes the form of a few pre-recorded videos of dubious quality. However, having spoken to the UD pair, I’m happy to confirm they’re not only incredibly passionate, but strike me as completely genuine. It’s potentially extremely exciting stuff.

Still, even if UD works exactly as advertised, the established players in graphics are hardly going to embrace a technology that instantly renders several decades and billions of dollars of investment obsolete overnight. You have to assume Nvidia, and to a lesser extent AMD, will resist the idea strongly. But if Unlimited Detail’s technology gains any traction at all, GPUs really will look sillier than ever.

Online apps let you become more productive on the move, doing away with software installation entirely.

Thanks to the ubiquity of internet access, web-based applications are taking off like never before. Beyond the realms of Twitter and Facebook lurks a fresh and vibrant world of online software that’s designed to run anywhere on our connected planet.

As the distinction between computers, mobile devices and the internet continues to blur, web applications are coming into their own, becoming globally important services. These are sites that do one useful thing and do it well.

But sites promoting applications have been around for donkey’s years, you might say. What’s the difference between a web app and an application that’s available for download on the web? Well, web apps are applications that run over the internet. So unlike the free utilities hosted on Sourceforge or similar, there’s no download, installation or configuration to carry out, nor hours of frustration to endure while you try to find the right libraries to compile them. Just point your browser at the relevant website and it will do the rest.

Outside of the box

Freed from the restrictions of an operating system’s windowing subsystem, software designers can allow their imaginations to run riot. Interfaces that owe more to high-tech thrillers than to Windows, Linux or Mac OS X are beginning to appear. Also emerging are more intuitive drag-and-drop interfaces that require at most a few seconds of exploration to get you going. Software use is slowly evolving and becoming as much about discovery and experimentation as it used to be about reading manuals and clicking options.

In this special roundup, we bring you 10 cool web apps that all share these traits. It’s a diverse bunch, ranging from future essentials to those that you’ll need infrequently. They all exhibit the sort of rich functionality that is beginning to appear through the medium of web browsers, and remove the need to download and install an application suite. If you want something, it’s probably already been written, and so we’ve also included a site that will help you to find other incredible web applications. Happy browsing!

Newsmap

Newsmap is a global news aggregator site like no other, and it’s almost guaranteed to get people peering over your shoulder as you use it. The app presents a page covered in blocks of different sizes. Each represents a story, coloured by subject. Newsmap takes input from news feeds and then gives the stories that are more prominent bigger boxes on-screen, a little like a tag cloud. Simply move your mouse over a story to see its details and a link to the original article.

PC Plus Verdict: 4/5

Instapaper

Instapaper is a way of bookmarking long web pages so that you can read them when you have time later on. The URLs are stored in Instapaper’s central database, so you can access them from anywhere. A range of iPhone apps support it, as does the Kindle, making it flexible and a great way of keeping hold of interesting things to read on long journeys. To use Instapaper, drag and drop the ‘Read Later’ icon onto your toolbar. When you subsequently find a page you want to save, just click the icon.

PC Plus Verdict: 4/5

Lovely Charts

There are plenty of times when you need access to some good chart-drawing software for just half an hour. However, it’s usually supplied as part of a far larger application. Lovely Charts is different. It’s a free web app that creates some very lovely charts indeed. After signing up and creating a new document, you simply drag and drop symbols and connectors from a range of predefined types to create the chart you want – anything from a simple flowchart to a complex route map.

PC Plus Verdict: 4/5

Bing Visual Search

Bing’s Visual Search capability is still in beta, but it’s already showing promise as a new way to search the expanding universe of information out there. On the main Bing page, click the ‘Visual Search’ link. Search categories are organised into galleries, and everything is point-and-click. Instead of typing in your search term, you simply click the relevant picture. The list of galleries is still small, but it’s an interesting glimpse of what could be to come.

PC Plus Verdict: 3.5/5

Fonolo

Calling Fonolo a work of genius is perhaps a little strong, but if you’re heartily sick of wading through phone menus to talk to a human being then it probably comes close. Fonolo walks you through company phone systems to find a human voice. If a company isn’t listed, you can add your own, and test the service by calling special test hardware set up by the developers. Ideal for Skype users, Fonolo’s is also available for the iPhone, which should see its popularity rise further.

PC Plus Verdict: 4/5

Netvibes

Netvibes allows you to create what it calls a dashboard for your interests. Unlike a simple RSS feed reader, the app has a large number of widgets that present feeds from your favourite sites in a highly editable form, making it very customisable. Netvibes is also partly a social-networking service. People can follow you and read your public page if their interests are the same as yours. For the sake of privacy, you can also set up a private page with feeds that only you can see.

PC Plus Verdict: 4/5

Floor Planner

People are crazy about home improvement at the moment, but good, free planning software is hard to find. The free version of Floor Planner allows you to create a plan, make specific rooms and then decide where to place the windows, doors and any of a large number of items of furniture. You can inspect your work in 3D from any angle to see exactly how your ideal home would look. You can then save your work and send it straight to your architect – easy peasy!

PC Plus Verdict: 4/5

Wakoopa

The brainchild of Dutch founders Wouter Broekhof and Robert Gaal, Wakoopa is a social-networking site that is designed to help its users discover new web apps and other software they might enjoy. It does so by first searching for people that use the same apps and installed software as you do. It then finds the software they use but you don’t, and which they rate highly. These it recommends to you. But how does Wakoopa know what software you and others use? A downloadable tracker monitors the sites you visit and the installed applications you use.

Every 15 minutes, it sends this information to your Wakoopa profile for those on your contacts list to take a look at. When your contacts search for new apps, this information is cross-matched with their own to generate a selection of software recommendations picked especially for them.

It’s a simple idea, and one that lets you explore an ever-expanding universe of web apps and installable applications and utilities without ever having to spend hours scouring the web for information – plus you know that none of the programs will turn out to be malware.

Explore and amaze

Once the tracker is installed, right-clicking on the Wakoopa icon in the system tray enables you to suggest a new application that others may like to try. To keep the underlying database free of spam, any suggestions you make that aren’t either installed apps or something that runs in your browser will not be accepted.

When you find a particularly intriguing application in Wakoopa that you’ve never heard of before, clicking on its symbol opens a page giving its details, alternatives that you might like to try and – perhaps most importantly – both good and bad comments from its existing users. This enables you to quickly make decisions about whether to use the app without the frustration of downloading and installing it, only to later discover that it’s not for you.

As well as relying on custom recommendations generated via your contacts list, you can also use the Wakoopa search box to simply enter an application field, making software experimentation as easy and hassle-free as it could ever possibly be.

PC Plus Verdict: 4/5

RescueTime

You’re in the middle of writing an important email but the right words won’t come, so you decide to spend a couple of minutes reading your friends’ statuses on Facebook to clear your head. By the time you’re finished, you fancy having a look at what the celebrities on Twitter are up to. News doesn’t read itself, so it’s off to the RSS feeds next, stopping on the way back to drop by a hobby forum. Armed with more coffee after posting a detailed rebuttal of another forum member’s argument, it’s time to check Facebook again for any replies, and perhaps to glance at Twitter again to make sure that Stephen Fry hasn’t unexpectedly returned. What began as a break to clear your head has somehow blossomed into over an hour of wasted time.

With so many cool new web apps appearing, distractions can only get worse. Some are great for getting things done, but without that vital pinch of self-control, we risk becoming ever busier while paradoxically achieving far less. RescueTime promises to show you how you spend your time online, and also to help you develop the increasingly important skill of self-control.

After installing a Data Collector plug-in, you tell RescueTime the three most distracting and three most productive things you do online. Data Collector then logs the time you spend using your local apps as well as the websites you visit, and can even monitor which of your browser tabs is active. You can also tell it to ignore the time you spend away from the PC so that you get an accurate view of your working day.

Once the Data Collector plug-in has gathered enough data, you can go to your RescueTime account and view detailed reports containing information on everything from the sites you visit to how efficiently you use your time based on how you categorise your activities.

The personal Solo Lite version of the service is free. The paid-for Solo Pro edition ($6 to $9 a month) allows you to block unproductive websites when you visit them too much, and alerts you when Data Collector notices you’re spending too much time dodging work. But you don’t need to splash out: the free service provides a fascinating insight, and helps you to learn a skill that will surely become as essential as using a search engine.

PC Plus Verdict: 4/5

Let’s begin with a quote. “Apple’s recent amendment to its developer agreement – which forces developers to write applications its way, using its tools – has done three things: isolated Apple even more from the wider technical community; wasted the time and money of companies and people who have invested in building iPhone-compatible developer toolkits (and the developers who have used them); and diverted industry attention to other smartphone technologies.”

This was the response I got from Mark Rodseth, Technical Architect at web design company Fortune Cookie, when I asked him for his take on Apple’s recent announcement that it is banning the development of iPhone OS applications using third-party compilers. The likes of Rodseth – and his clients – are responsible for the majority of apps that currently populate Apple’s App Store. And Mark’s isn’t an isolated opinion. I’ve had similar responses from the majority of developers that I’ve spoken to in the last few weeks.

Apple can’t be naive enough to have thought that this move would go unnoticed, and it clearly expected some kind of backlash, but – by the very fact that it included the new stipulations in the conditions for iPhone OS 4 application development – we have to assume that it was a risk the company was willing to take. I find this a staggering example of Apple’s arrogance, and – in the light of a recent report coming out of the US – I think that the company has made a huge mistake.

The report in question is a Mobile Metrics release from AdMob, one of the world’s largest mobile advertising networks (recently bought by Google). Whenever an ad is served to a mobile device via the AdMob network, the company stores and analyses handset and operator data to optimise ad serving. It also uses this information to highlight major trends, and hidden away in the report for March – well, it wasn’t really that hidden – was a very interesting nugget of information. As well as showing facts such as 54 per cent of Android traffic comes from devices with QWERTY keyboards (one of the ‘standout’ figures pulled out of the report for the press), there was a graph in the body of the AdMob report that should act as a serious warning to Apple.

According to the report, March was the first month in which Android ad traffic overtook iPhone traffic in the US: Android’s American OS share increased to 46 per cent, compared to 39 per cent for iPhone OS. These figures weren’t replicated in markets outside the US though, with the iPhone continuing to bag the top spot globally – it has 46 per cent of overall OS share– and Android OS a fair bit behind, with a quarter of the mobile OS market. But despite iPhone OS still being far and away the global leader, the figures released in this report should act as a bellwether for non-US mobile markets. Where America goes, the rest of the Western world tends to follow.

As we’ve already mentioned, AdMob is a company owned by Google – the leading company in the Open Handset Alliance, and the firm now responsible for the development of the Android mobile operating system. You’d be forgiven for pointing out the obvious here – it does seem somewhat suspicious that the first report produced since Google took over the company points to an advantage for the Google-backed OS for the first time. However, given AdMob’s previous pedigree, and the pains taken to establish the credibility of these figures, we have no reason to question their validity.

So, assuming that these figures based on advertising can – by and large – be extracted to represent overall web traffic from mobile devices, Android is now the top dog in the US. When the new iPhone launches this Summer, we can expect a spike in traffic emanating from iPhone OS-based devices – it’s happened after every major iPhone release so far – but the writing is definitely on the wall for Apple. With Android Market boasting more than 38,000 applications at the time of writing, and the developer community embracing this open platform for mobile development, Apple’s decision to kick developers in the face has never seemed more foolish than it does right now.

“While many developers watch from the sidelines and consider where best to invest their time and creative energy on smartphone platforms, I’ve picked my side already. It’s called Android and everyone’s invited,” Rodseth concludes.