Software

You hear a new song. Will it be a hit or a flop? Researchers from Bristol University in the U.K. say they can now tell you - well, sort of. After studying the Top 40 singles charts over the last 50 years and examining the audio characteristics for hits and flops, the team has come up with a formula as to what makes for a successful song and used it to devise software that "predicts" hits. The next step is a web app to allow budding musicians to score their own songs. Read More

Those cheeky gear hackers at the Magic Lantern team have announced a very interesting upgrade to their custom Canon firmware mod. As of tomorrow, owners of 550D, 600D and 60D DSLR cameras will be able to use a very cool new tool to shoot video in HDR, meaning that you can capture scenes where the lights would normally be too bright and the shadows too dark to get a workable exposure level. Check out the demo video after the jump. Read More

Not everyone can easily click a mouse. Many people with permanent motor disability have difficulties, along with those suffering Repetitive Stress Disorder or Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, and anyone recovering from hand surgery. Clikka Mouse is innovative "work around" software that addresses the problem and best of all, it's free. Read More

Snapheal, to be released on Wednesday, is a photo editing app for Mac which "can do magic", at least according to MacPhun, the app's developer. In addition to the usual tweaks and minor edits allowed by vanilla entry-level photo editing software, Snapheal allows you to erase whole objects - including large ones - from your photographs. Gizmag took an advance copy of Snapheal 1.0 for a spin. Could it be magic? Judge for yourself. Read More

For more than twenty years, the software program Photoshop has been the industry standard for seamlessly manipulating images, especially the removal of unwanted items like blemishes, wires and telephone poles. When it comes to adding something to a photo, however, the process is still rather involved. Now, a team from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), led by PhD candidate Kevin Karsch, is presenting a new algorithm at Siggraph Asia 2011 that promises to radically simplify the procedure of believably incorporating new or "synthetic" objects in still shots and the results are quite impressive. Read More

Although we may think of smartphones as being like tiny desktop computers, they do have at least one key difference – in order to save battery power, many of their functions are hardwired into highly-efficient dedicated processors, instead of taking the form of software. Because smartphones perform so many functions, however, not all of them can be hardwired. As a result, designers of mobile devices must decide which functions will be handled by software, and which by hardware. Computer scientists from MIT have recently devised a system that should make those designers’ jobs a lot easier – if they’re willing to adopt it. Read More

While traditional mixing desks can bury DJs behind bulky equipment in a dimly lit corner of the club, this transparent, 46-inch multi-touch system from software development company Smithson Martin puts the person spinning the discs - or in this case the touch display - front and center. Read More

Surely one of the greatest fears of modern parents is that their child will fall prey to an online sexual predator. It's estimated that there are over 15 million photographs of child abuse victims in circulation online, and the very nature of the internet makes stemming the spread of such material a difficult and laborious task for criminal investigators. The development of an automated assistance system for image and video evaluation by Fraunhofer researchers is set to make that task a little easier, and a lot quicker. The desCRY software uses complex algorithms to determine if an image or video from a suspect's confiscated storage medium depicts child abuse, in a fraction of the time currently taken to manually trawl through the hundreds of thousands of files often stored on a typical computer's hard drive. Read More

At the recent Adobe MAX 2011 conference, Adobe announced a lineup of Touch Apps tailored for Android and iOS-based devices, including a touch-operated tablet version of Photoshop. Touch Apps will be available either as standalone products, or as components of a larger web-based service called Adobe Creative Cloud, which was also unveiled. Read More