links for 2008-11-16

iPhone app lets you use either the touchscreen or accelerometer as a mouse to control your computer. A server application needs to run on the computer you control, which is available here.

ACTPrinter operates as “virtual paper” for the iPhone, giving you a place to store electronic tickets, boarding passes, bar codes and other data. You can take e-mails, Web pages, letters and more with you when you leave. The resolution is high enough that you can scan bar codes directly off your iPhone’s display, according to Houdah. ACTPrinter lets you print from any Mac application to the iPhone or iPod touch, and integrates with Mac OS X PDF Services. The Mac and iPhone synchronize using Bonjour zero-configuration networking. It operates in both landscape and portrait viewing modes, and supports pinch zoom.

"Using the combined power of the We feel fine and MOO Api [Brendan Dawes has] created 100 Feelings felt. It pulls out the most recent 100 feelings from We feel fine, and creates 100 different MiniCards. It’s a perfect snapshot of time Рeach MiniCard is printed with a description or emotion on the front, and the name of the feeling on the reverse (happy, sad, angry etc) Рalong with the date and time the feeling was felt. It’s a wonderful piece of history you can hold in your hands."

"remember Zink, that company whose technology prints digital photos on the spot without ink? It's joined forces with toy-maker Tomy to make the xiao TIP-521, a digital camera with a printer built in."

Can't believe I didn't have this bookmarked: these notebooks are possibly my favorite paper product besides index cards. Unpretentious and simple, with a lovely design identity. If the moleskine is too snobbish, or just too big, check these out.

"That’s because this is more a system than a product. Most traditional entertainment is about providing an artifact — a book, a script, a show, a score, a performance — that is then preserved, passed on and reinterpreted. There’s nothing wrong with that. But new entertainment — social networks, games, online communities — is about empowering everyday people to express themselves and interact without a central arbiter. The thing is, interactive entertainment is much harder to design than it is to experience. A great game like chess, poker or Tetris should be easy to play at first and then reveal deeper levels of complexity and skill."

The difference between an excellent horror experience in any medium and a mediocre one is in how it measures out all those little jolts over time. It is balancing the generation and release of episodic tension with a mounting sense of dread that gives the narrative its basic arc. If viewers, players or readers are oversaturated with dramatic and graphic scenes, they can become desensitized. Too much wasted space and the consumer can become bored in a more obvious way.

As Aaron Cope Straup put it, a treasure trove of pen computing resources trapped in a Flash interface. (But still pretty cool for all that)