animation

If you're a fan of Dyson's bagless vacuums but always wished that the company made a canister model that was powered by its Ball technology, that day has arrived: Dyson has introduced the DC39 Multi-floor and DC39 Animal canister vacs.

Dyson vacuums have never been cheap, and the new models, due out in mid-March, cost $449.99 and $499.99, respectively. Aside from its color and higher price, what distinguishes the Animal from the Multi-floor is the inclusion of an accessory that's specially designed for picking up pet hair. Both models are being marketed as "smooth … Read more

Microsoft's PowerPoint presentation software is to some degree an industry standard, and its presence on both Windows and OS X allows for a decent level of cross-platform compatibility that new Mac users might gravitate toward; however, there are other options besides Office that might perform as well as if not better than PowerPoint, which you might wish to consider.

As I mentioned in a previous post on Apple's alternative to Excel called Numbers, there are a few Office programs out there that have good offerings and which can import and export PowerPoint file formats. These include the free … Read more

Twitter reports that football fans sent roughly 10,000 tweets in the final 3 minutes of last night's game, but that wasn't enough to overthrow the all-time record for tweets per second.

Guess which film roped in 25,088 tweets per second last December? Hint: it wasn't made in America.… Read more

Some readers may remember the flickering, old-timey, surprisingly three-dimensional GIFs that made a splash on the Internet back in 2008. Writer and artist Joshua Heineman created them from images of 19th and early 20th century stereoscope cards he culled from a collection placed online by the New York Public Library.

Heineman took the two slightly offset images on a given card, separated them, dropped them into Photoshop, and created animated GIFs that quickly "flipped" from one image to the other, over and over (a technique known as "wiggle stereoscopy").

Then, as part of a personal project called "Reaching for the Out of Reach," he posted the GIFs on his Tumblr blog, where they were discovered by the blogosphere and spread far and wide.

Now--thanks to that online fame, and to the New York Public Library's push to reinvent itself in the Internet Age--you too can breathe new three-dimensional life into these stereoscopic artifacts.… Read more

If you've ever wanted to get a glimpse of the microscopic world inside the human body, then Drew Berry is your man.

Berry, whose bio describes him as a biomedical animator, gave a TED talk last year in Sydney showing how molecules interact inside the human body. The computer animations he created--scientifically accurate, by the way--to illustrate those processes are mesmerizing.… Read more

Sharing movies while mobile can be fun, but generally will eat a lot of your monthly bandwidth allowance.

Instead of sharing the entire movie while you're out, why not share a quick animated GIF instead? With GIFDroid for Android, you can take a new or existing video and turn it into an animated GIF that you can send off in seconds to a friend or family member.

First you'll need to install GIFDroid from the Android Market, then open the app.

Step 1: Press either the Select Video or Record Video button. Select … Read more

There's really no need for screensavers anymore--modern computer screens don't run the risk of phosphor burn-in from static images that their predecessors did--but that doesn't stop people from using screensavers for aesthetic reasons. Electric Sheep is one of the more aesthetically pleasing and unique screensavers we've encountered, and we recommend it for anyone who's looking for something a little more exciting than typical screensaver motifs.

Electric Sheep creates psychedelic animations, called sheep, that users can then vote for or against; the more popular sheep have their "genetic code" passed on, and over time … Read more

LAS VEGAS--"Electric City" is the latest Tom Hanks animated adventure, but it leaves behind the madcap buddy antics of Toy Story's Woody and Buzz Lightyear for a futuristic utopia with dark underpinnings. Instead of coming to a theater near you, though, the 90-minute-long series will be streamed episodically on Yahoo.

Revealed at the Consumer Electronics Show 2012 here, with a more in-depth formal announcement coming tomorrow, "Electric City" was created by Hanks and will star him, while production is being handled by Playtone and Reliance Entertainment. "It was always our intent to have this project live and breathe online and we felt Yahoo would be the perfect home," Gary Goetzman, co-founder with Hanks of the production company Playtone, said in a prepared statement.

For its part, Yahoo has been exploring original online entertainment for a few years, with reality and news roundup shows like "omg! NOW," "Primetime in No Time," and "Daily Ticker" helping to drive around 26 million people per month. Thanks to Hank's involvement in "Electric City," though, Yahoo thinks the series has the potential to significantly expand the scope of digital-first series. … Read more

Google's Android operating system comes to life in a new manga comic that turns leading handset makers into--no joke--Japanese schoolgirls.

Resting firmly in the Japanese-dominated pop culture territory that lies somewhere in between totally awesome and totally creepy Sweet Android High-school chronicles the soap-operatic goings on among a group of students who just happen to be anthropomorphic representations of huge corporations.

The gang includes "international students" Moto-Laura-chan, Sam-Sung-chan, H-T-Syee-chan, Elle-G-chan and Soni-Eri-chan. See what they did there? That last one is a particularly clever play on Sony Ericcson. There are also characters representing some of the Japanese makers, including Sharp, Fujitsu, and Casio.

The latest scandal at Sweet Android High, of course, is that a teacher named Google has married Moto-Laura-chan. While it's tough to translate the panels, there doesn't seem to be any sign that a headmaster named Trade-Commission-chan opposes the marriage, but Ice Cream Sandwich and the Galaxy Nexus clearly make appearances. Funny--I never envisioned that the first Android 4.0 phone would be so buxom.

See if you can make any sense of the below panels for yourself:… Read more