As computation becomes smaller and cheaper and more powerful, the big question remains “What are we going to do with all that?”. Cell phones and iPhones are one answer to that question, but in some sense a boring one because they’re mostly just littler laptops. Siftables, on the other hand, are representative of some of the genuinely new possibilities that these technologies enable, and are therefore much, much cooler :-).

To be honest, it’s not the best talk in the world, and probably not as compelling demo of the possibilities as one might hope for. That said, I can definitely see these being a blast, especially as people come up with cool new ways to use them.

Also, many apologies for the silence here. I’ve been much more active on Twitter than here; things have been super busy, and the 140 character world of Twitter has been much more amenable to my life and schedule than thoughtful blogging here. Lame, perhaps, but the truth nonetheless. Figuring out the balance is going to be a challenge, but that’s not today’s activity.

There’s a YouTube group devoted to this thing, and the number and variety of little clips there also speaks well to the Phun’s flexibility. We even have one person building a binary adder, and another a working pinball machine. Very, very cool.

The sad, sniffle, miserable bit is that Phun doesn’t run on Macs at the moment. It supports for Linux and Windows, though, and there are people working on a Mac port, so my fingers are crossed. It just seems like it would be too damn much fun to play with.