engineering

These days, a humble smartphone or tablet can be used to create music that would probably have required a bulky electronic keyboard a decade ago. Having all the controls on a touch screen, however, may not be every digital-music composer's cup of tea.

That's where the OP-1 portable synthesizer by Sweden-based company Teenage Engineering comes in. The device has a minimalist aluminum chassis and modular-looking keys, which should make it look right at home next to Apple laptops. … Read more

I get quite a lot of e-mails from 7-year-olds. At least the content suggests they're 7-year-olds.

So I would like to dedicate the film I have embedded to them. For it reveals, once and for all--with a definitiveness that offers vast relief--what technology Santa Claus uses in order to bring the gift of, well, tons of gifts to the world's young and restless.

Larry Silverberg, associate head of North Carolina State University's Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department, has clearly spent much of his life attempting to solve the Santa problem.

I am grateful to WRAL in North Carolina … Read more

Seeker is a powerful freeware search tool that can replace the built-in Windows search feature. It offers advanced search-and-replace capabilities, regular expression searches, several reporting modes, and superfast, highly targeted searching.

Seeker's user interface resembles Office's design a bit, with expandable sections in its left-side control panel and a main report view with draggable categories. Under Search Criteria, we could enter everything from wildcard searches to highly specific file types, a specific word or phrase in the file, and include or exclude our listed files, as well as telling Seeker to search subfolders, ignore case, or use regular … Read more

Over the roar from a 110-cc, two-cylinder engine, Pinnacle Engines founder James Cleeves (nicknamed Monty), pointed out a window in the block.

"You can see the cylinder sleeve moving for the intake stroke," he yelled over the din. Mostly what I could see was oil bubbling in the tiny window, hidden behind the spinning bands driving the camshafts. On the other side of the block was a bigger belt, joining the engine's two crankshafts and spinning at 4,000rpm, the current test speed. The safety glasses I was issued on entering the test room would be little … Read more

According to the descriptions of recent jobs posting on its Web site, Apple is looking for iOS engineers to join its Siri development team to help implement user interface (UI) design for the voice-activated assistant included on every iPhone 4S.

The primary objective of the first position would be to help develop the look and feel of the conversational UI elements while using Siri. This includes a variety of tasks, as the post explains, "we [Apple] take every application that Siri interacts with, distill it down to fundamentals, and implement that application's UI in a theme fitting with … Read more

Does adding a "2" to one of the most popular titles in the App Store make it better? Much like the iPad 2 itself, Infinity Blade II is a refinement and an improvement on its predecessor. As a result, it's better. Does that make Infinity Blade II a must-have game? Most definitely, especially for its $6.99 price. Is it revolutionary? Well, not exactly.

Epic and Chair Entertainment's follow-up to last year's Infinity Blade has garnered as much front-row attention as the original, largely due to its prominent mention during Apple's recent keynotes. Those hoping for a true console-style RPG were let down by the simple, linear-path-based story and Punch-Out-esque gameplay, but most people quickly got over that when they found out how addictive the hack-and-slash/leveling experience was. A sword-and-sorcery version of Fruit Ninja, in a way, but that's hardly a bad thing.… Read more

Leaked from 404 Podcast 957:

Microsoft has acquired video search engine VideoSurf, several reports claim.

According to Israel-based news outlet Globes, Microsoft has acquired VideoSurf for "tens of millions of dollars." In a follow-up report, TechCrunch Europe cited an anonymous source who claimed Microsoft acquired the company for $70 million.

Neither Microsoft nor VideoSurf immediately responded to CNET's request for confirmation of the deal.

If Microsoft did, in fact, acquire VideoSurf, the company will likely be used to improve Bing. VideoSurf allows users to search for video content around the Web from a host of sources, including Hulu, Dailymotion, Comedy Central, and … Read more

day on the job MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--If you don't regularly hang out with coders at work, you may think it takes a long time to write a new feature. That's a quaint notion to Devon Rifkin.

Rifkin is a front-end engineer at RockMelt, the maker of a hot new browser that integrates many of the functions of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media directly into the browsing experience. I've come to RockMelt on a recent Tuesday to shadow Rifkin as part of my Day on the Job series, and now he's schooling me on just … Read more