Last year's "Bouncing Balls" commercial for Sony's new LCD TV's was one of the coolest videos I've ever seen. (If you haven't seen that one yet, check it out here.) Well, they're at it again, and this time they've replaced bouncing balls with paint to spectacular effect. The crazy part? As far as I can tell from the behind the scenes video they have on the website, this was done with zero CGI. All "paint mortars" and explosives, or as one of the technicians described it, "fireworks but with paint". (EDIT: As my friend Brian points out, they probably did use CGI to remove the cranes, barrels, and techicians. But the paint seems 100% real.) Check it out by clicking below.

According to this blog post, the video's filming involved "70,000 litres of paint, 358 single bottle bombs 33 sextuple air cluster bombs, 22 Triple hung cluster bombs, 268 mortars, 33 Triple Mortars 22 Double mortars, 358 meters of weld, 330 meters of steel pipe, 57 km of copper wire", plus a scary guy in a clown costume. All for 60 seconds of your amusement. Now go buy a Bravia TV.

Round 3 of voting is currently in progress (ends tonight at midnight) so if you haven't voted yet, head over and pick your favorites! (And pick up your free copy of Musicast, which I wrote about previously here. ) Be sure to check out comments from a group of 6 very talented UI and icon designers, including Adam Betts, Gedeon Maheux, David Lanham, Piotr Gajos, Bill "BBX" Bart, and Josh Keay.

One of the more common idea submissions for my ongoing software contest, My Dream App, was a "Quicken Killer" and ideas in a similar category. We had literally dozens submitted, and even a minor ruckus once people realized none had made it as a finalist. Why didn't we? Well, to be frank, it was decided that it would be difficult for a small development team to do properly in a relatively quick development cycle. Color me wrong, because Cha-Ching has done just that.

Currently in public beta as version 0.2, the first thing you'll notice when you download and launch this app is its impeccable presentation. Kudos to developer Juan Alvarez (this guy is hilarious, watch this video we shot at WWDC. And I swear if you watch the Keynote video, you'll hear him laughing in the background at points), and UI designer Krzysztof Wrosnki. This is a very pretty, very "OS X" app, and it's clear the team drew inspiration from Delicious Library's three-paned, custom control laden interface. And that's a good thing, because it works. (Delicious Library topped my Top Ten Beautiful OS X Apps list.) Continue reading...

The competition is getting fierce at My Dream App. This morning, contestant Kevin Capizzi posted a mockup video of how a full screen option on his forum browsing app, Hijack, might work. And it's pretty damn gorgeous. Props to him for stepping it up!

Hijack has been doing pretty well in the contest, and grabbed the second most votes in last week's round of voting. I have a feeling it's going to have a shot for #1 with this mockup.

Read his post, download the high-res version here, and if you like it, digg it!

As I wrote a while ago, I had been having hosting troubles for this blog. Those days are now past, as last night, My Dream App web programmer Scott Meinzer helped me move the site over to a blazingly fast dedicated server, hosted by 1&1. (Major kudos to Scott. His internet was acting up so he actually drove over to his workplace to use their wifi in the car. I can't thank him enough.) I know, I know, some of you warned me about 1&1's service in the previous blog post, but no worries... I've had nothing but good service running a dedicated box with them for MDA.

What does that mean? Well, my site should now be completely Digg proof, and should run significantly faster. It's like a fresh install of OS X! I'm loving the snappiness.

And, probably of more interest to you guys, is I have not one, but three previews coming up for cool new apps (and a cool new update). The first should be up today or tomorrow, so stay tuned!

Ah, and a final note... I've been resisting posting about my ongoing project on this blog, with the misguided motivation of separating personal stuff from work, or something. But then I realized two things. First, it's cool stuff, so why not? Second, we've been giving away free apps, and I should've let you guys know! So. For a limited time, while Round 2 of voting just ended, along with the chance for voters to walk away with a free copy of the excellent Mori.

That's it for now... lots of stuff coming soon.

Just a week after my preview, Dave Watanabe's Xtorrent is now available publicly in public beta form. The build will expire when the beta testing period is over, and you can read some release notes on Dave's blog. If you didn't read the preview, Xtorrent is a new BitTorrent application that, among other things, features a truly beautiful UI and unique total search integration, so torrents can easily be searched for and started within the app with just a few clicks. Enjoy everyone, this is a pretty awesome app!

With the RIAA suing grandparents and children every week and P2P apps gaining a reputation for carrying spyware and viruses, many people have been switching to BitTorrent over the past few years. Today, it's estimated that BitTorrent downloads are using over 30% of the internet's entire bandwidth and some people are even claiming that it is threatening net neutrality. I know they've been blaming my blog as well for tying up the internet, but I'll admit it, torrents are a little bit more popular than PhillRyu.com.

The thing is, despite BitTorrent's popularity, torrent apps have always remained a bit hard to use unlike apps like Limewire, forcing users to wade through torrent trackers, find their file, make sure it has enough seeders, and then open the downloaded torrent file in their torrent app of choice to begin the download. Not the most user friendly process for us, uh, media enthusiasts.

That's why I was pretty excited to hear from my friend David Watanabe that his next app is fixing these problems once and for all. And, you guys, my readers, are the first to see what this solution is. It's called Xtorrent, and it's BitTorrent done right. Continue reading...

It's been non-stop for me over the past week as we've judged the thousands of entries that came in for My Dream App and picked 24 finalists. Here are my thoughts on them as a whole.

A good 80% were uninspired, infeasible (probably the most common reason for eliminating entries), or already done. 15% were decent but not well fleshed out. We were judging looking at the potential of an idea as well as its current form, but a lot of them just didn't have much beyond the one good idea. Continue reading...