After a bit of tinkering, I think I finally got something that will work with my cell phone. It's only half a communicator, but I guess half a communicator is better than no communicator at all! (I think I'll even crop this puppy down and add it to my sidebar.)
Next, I think I'll make a Steampunk version with rotating gears and what not.
I've had the iphone jones for sometime now, but my foray into the universe of 4G touch-screen geekery is probably down the road a bit. Still, that hasn't stopped me from admiring all the cool Star Trek flavored apps available for the iphone like the TNG LCARS interface,
or the tricorder app.
But by far the coolest is the app that turns your phone into a virtual Original Series communicator.
TOS Communicator App for iphone
As you can see in the video, you can activate it with a flick of the wrist, goggle at the cool graphics and play communicator sound effects and voice clips. You can even punch up an old style keypad should you want to use your phone as... you know, an actual phone. Pretty cool, huh?
Well, instead if sitting around waiting to drop my current phone in the toilet or for my contract to expire, I decided to add a bit of Trek flavor to phone I have now. It is a pretty cool little phone-- a Sony Walkman with it's own set of apps and features like an MP# player. (It is a Walkman, afterall.) But it doesn't support any of the groovy cutting edge stuff like Apple's does.
About the only thing I could do was Photoshop a TOSesque background image to use as wallpaper or a screensaver. And so I did.
The first attempt is a pretty good homage to the original prop. The black window on the bottom is for the clock and date display. Unfortunatley, the clock, which can only be in one of two sizes, and only in orange text, didn't fit right. There wasn't any other formatting option either.
So, after a little piddling and revision, I came up with this:
These are both just simple animated GIFs, but you can set them as wallpaper and as the screen saver, which is only on for about 3 seconds before the phone goes to sleep, which seems rather pointless, but whatever... The aggravationg thing is that the GIF is displayed in wallpaper mode with a white border around it making the text along the edges hard to read. Sigh... Guess I'll just learn to live with it if I want my blinkies!
I know I'm late getting these posted, but here are my interviews with two outstanding Trek/comic/sci-fi artists, Lawrence Reynolds and Joe Corroney. Both attended the (not so) recent Star Trek Fan Days in Plano. I talked to both of them prior to the convention.
10-19-10 Lawrence Reynolds 11.46
First up is Lawrence Reynolds whose online gallery lives at Vivid Fury. Lawrence is a master (yeah, a JEDI Master!) of both realistic illustration and a looser, more painterly style, perfect for capturing the frentic quality of characters like the Joker. He works professionally in print and TV advertising. He's also a very nice guy.
Joe Corroney illustrates for Lucasfilm creating artwork for books, games, trading cards, comic books, posters and magazines. He's done work for the Star Trek, G.I. Joe, Doctor Who and Bukaroo Banzai franchises among many others. He's currently doing cover art for the True Blood comic series. Joe was lot's of fun to talk to, but we encountered a few technical difficulties. He sounded as if he was transmitting from V'Ger. I'm afraid the audio is pretty squonky. (A technical radio term.) I tried to clean it up, but it is what it is. Give it a listen though, Joe gives some great insights to his work.
