Yahoo Anti-Spam Workshop

Interesting reading. In July, Yahoo conducted an “Anti-Spam Workshop.”  The complete transcript  can be found here.

 

Toon Boom

An interesting software suite that MC pointed out.

 

Google Comics and Videos

Search Engine Rap Battle

Why Google Chrome Comicbook?

Google Chrome features Rant Song

iPhone Cupcakes

CC sent me this. Love it!

Finalists: Best Magazine Cover of the Year

The Magazine Publishers of America have released their finalists for best magazine cover of the year

Adobe AIR Humor

I was reading some documentation and was amused by the highlighted item:

“You can keep a window in front of other windows by setting its alwaysInFront property to true. If more than one window has this setting, then the display order of these windows is sorted among each other, but they are always sorted above windows which have alwaysInFront set to false. Windows in the top-most group are also displayed above windows in other applications, even when the AIR application is not active. Because this behavior can be disruptive to a user, setting alwaysInFront to true should only be done when necessary and appropriate.”
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“Note: AIR does not enforce proper use of the alwaysInFront property. However, if your application disrupts a user’s workflow, it is likely to be consigned to that same user’s trash can.”

 

Badger

Grant Skinner rules! From the latest “Adobe Developer Connection Update”:

“If you're building on AIR, you'll want to get Grant Skinner's Badger application, which makes it simple to create seamless install badges that enhance the user experience of your AIR apps.”

Top 10 most useful secret ninja moves in Office

An article from the “Microsoft Inside Office Newsletter.” Some of the tips are pretty cool!

Dust-Me Selectors: Find Unused CSS Selectors

Dust-Me Selectors is a really useful extension for Firefox that finds unused CSS selectors.

http://www.sitepoint.com/dustmeselectors/

“It extracts all the selectors from all the stylesheets on the page you're viewing, then analyzes that page to see which of those selectors are not used. The data is then stored so that when testing subsequent pages, selectors can be crossed off the list as they're encountered.”

If there is a site map (we really ought to create one for Rapattoni.com) it can also go through your entire site.

Adobe(r) InContext Editing online service

I was just reading about a forthcoming service from Adobe: it allows users to edit selected portions of their web page online.

“Let content contributors make website edits so you can focus on design. The Adobe® InContext Editing online service makes web content maintenance easy for designers and content editors alike — no software installation or training needed. Web designers can maintain the design integrity of their sites while enabling clients to make their own web updates from virtually any major browser.”

http://www.adobe.com/products/incontextediting/

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/InContext_Editing

 

Seesmic

“Seesmic provides anyone with an innovative way to communicate and connect online through video conversation. It's so easy: record a video directly on Seesmic's website, mobile phone or upload an existing video straight from your computer or link to a video posted on a social network.”

More

AIR Conditioning

A nice overview of AIR from Lee:

AIRConditioning - Upload a Document to Scribd

YAP

This company seems really interesting. They are also currently working with YouMail.com to transcribe voicemails! (Which is how I learned about them.) So far, I’d give them about 60% accuracy on my voicemails…but it’s pretty intriguing.

“YAP is an automated platform that INSTANTLY CONVERTS ANYTHING YOU SAY on your cell INTO TEXT, for messaging, voicemail, or web services. As an example for how Yap's patent pending system could be leveraged, we allow you to easily send text messages by simply speaking them into a mobile application…. other creative use cases: send wall posts to your friends on Facebook, tell them where you are on Twitter, find the nearest sushi using Google, get info on the latest movie from Yahoo!, read the latest news, research something on Wikipedia, check out fresh videos on YouTube, or search Amazon/eBay for more gear.”

Photoshop.com

Interesting? “Photoshop® Express…is now part of the larger Photoshop.com community.”

The Great iPhone Photo App Roundup

I was just perusing this compilation of iPhone photography applications and thought I’d share:

“Matt’s Roundup of Every Single iPhone Photo App.”

Papervision 3D Video Tutorials

Check this out! Some great PV3D tutorials.
“I've been working on a Papervision 3D tutorial series. If you're looking to get started using the PV3D API this might be a good place to start. It has videos tutorials, source files and example SWFs.”
http://www.madvertices.com/

Papervision3D winners at the Flashforward2008 San Francisco Film Festival

Pretty cool! I really like the visual newsreader.

We are very happy to announce three Papervision3D winners at the Flashforward2008 San Francisco Film Festival.

• In An ABSOLUT World
  Code

• Audi: Rhythm of Lines
  Motion Graphics

• Spectra Visual Newsreader
  Navigation/Experience

Fitbit - Automatically Track Your Fitness and Sleep

Very cool – and a little scary, too? George Orwell meets Steve Jobs.

“Did I get enough exercise today? How many calories did I burn? Am I getting good quality sleep? How many steps and miles did I walk today? The Fitbit Tracker helps you answer these questions.”

http://www.fitbit.com/

One Bad Apple

Newsweek published a slightly cranky, but interesting article asserting that Apple is yet another successful company that needs to be cautious about squashing its competition.

One Bad Apple: Apple is looking like what Microsoft was 10 years ago—a Bigfoot that squeezes smaller competitors.

Swype's new keyboard technology Video

MattF sent this video of a really great leap in the way people write text. I want this on my iPhone!

JavaScript: Get the Value of a Combo Box's Selected Item

I’m always having to look up how to use JavaScript to use the value of a combo box in HTML.

<script>
function comboCheck() {
var comboValue var selIndex = document.frmName.select1.selectedIndex;
comboValue = document.frmName.select1.options[selIndex].text;
alert(comboValue)
}
</script>
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<form>
<select name="combo" id="Hotel" onChange="comboCheck();”
<option value="one">one</option>
<option value="two">two</option>
</form>

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

I thought this was an amazing article (thanks to J.B. for pointing it out). It’s not as anti-Google as the title implies, but rather a look at how the Internet is changing the way we read and learn. Perhaps rewiring our very thought processes.

“For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski. “

*

“Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.”

FLV Bitrate Calculator

Thanks, Adobe! (MM was wishing they’d developed this years ago!) J

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/apps/flv_bitrate_calculator/

Screenshots on your iPhone

From MattF:

“This was a really cool feature that I just found out about, you may already know… Hold the Home button and hit the power button—screenshot saved to photo album.”

AS3 Tooltip Component

Seems nice! Adding here to remind me of where to find it. (This blog is my memory, after all!)

Robot Quadruped!

BH pointed out this amazing robot! It really moves like an animal.

Guides to the 2007 Office system user interface

Handy! Amusing that they’re in Flash?

“If you want to explore the rich, new design with some guidance, try the interactive guides to help you quickly learn where things are. You can run the guides right here, or you can download them to your own computer for use any time you like.”

“If you prefer to see just a list of all Office 2003 menu and toolbar commands and their locations in the 2007 Office system, open one of the Microsoft Office Excel mapping workbooks, which you can browse, customize, print, and save on your computer. Instructions on the first tab of each workbook provide tips for customizing, finding, and printing the lists.”

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/training/HA102295841033.aspx

AS3 - Detecting the Enter Key

A useful snippet courtesy of ActionScript.org.

stage.addEventListener(KeyboardEvent.KEY_DOWN, KeyDownFunc);

function KeyDownFunc(event){

if(event.keyCode == Keyboard.ENTER){

trace("enter");

}

}

Google Chrome - The Comic Book?

Definitely a novel way (or a “comic” way?) for Google to advertise the new browser!

SlideShowPro for Flash AS3 (Final) now available

Awesome! From the SlideShowPro News page:

“At long last, an ActionScript 3 (AS3) version of SlideShowPro for Flash is now available as part of the product download. This gives Flash CS3 users a choice of which version of the component to use in their projects.”

More…

VoiceThread

ER pointed out this interesting tool:

“VoiceThread is a tool for having conversations around media (documents, images, videos or presentations –or any combination of them).”

I couldn’t resist creating one…. J

TinEye

Cool site from BH:

“TinEye is an image search engine built by Idée currently in beta. Give it an image and it will tell you where the image appears on the web.”

AS3: Filtering Data in the DataGrid Component

I recently asked the expert folks at Kirupa about this, but ended up finding an answer navigating Google for several hours. I’ll post my findings here, in case anyone is scouring the web on this issue.

Adobe has a very nice article on how to filter data in the datagrid component. However, the example only sorts from left to right. Example:

Consider this array: “one, two, three.” Searching for “On” will produce “One.” But what if I want to filter by “ne?” Enter the following better tutorial on franto.com. (It’s intended for Flex, but easily ports to Flash, too.)

Not the LA Times

Ah, who thought “The Onion” would ever have any competition for laughs?

http://www.notthelatimes.com/

Yahoo! Search BOSS

Another cool technology courtesy of ER: Yahoo! Search BOSS™
“BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is Yahoo!'s open search web services platform. The goal of BOSS is simple: to foster innovation in the search industry. Developers, start-ups, and large Internet companies can use BOSS to build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index. BOSS gives you access to Yahoo!'s investments in crawling and indexing, ranking and relevancy algorithms, and powerful infrastructure. By combining your unique assets and ideas with our search technology assets, BOSS is a platform for the next generation of search innovation, serving hundreds of millions of users across the Web.”

Examples
hakia - a leading semantic search engine, uses Yahoo! Search BOSS to accelerate its semantic
analysis of the Web by accessing the Yahoo! index's vast amounts of web documents.
Me.dium Search - Me.dium combined the BOSS API with its insight into the real time surfing activity of the crowds
to build a unique "Crowd-Powered" social search engine prototype.

Daylife - Daylife To-Go is a new self-service, hosted publishing platform from Daylife. Anyone can use this
platform to automatically generate 100% customizable pages and widgets. Daylife To-Go uses
the BOSS API platform to power its Web search module.

Cluuz - Cluuz generates easier to understand search results through patent pending semantic cluster
graphs, image extraction, and tag clouds. The Cluuz analysis is performed in real-time on
results returned from BOSS API.

Muxicall - collective composition and improvisation

ER recently pointed out this really neat site:

http://www.muxicall.com/

“Muxicall draws from Newton‘s color theory that associates each color of the visible light spectrum to one musical note, based on its frequencies. There’s also a social aspect, many on-line players can share their musical space at any given time.”

Snipurl

“Snipurl - Snurl - Snipr - Snippetty snip snip with your looong URLs!”

http://snurl.com/site/index

The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It

An interesting book, perhaps? It’s available as a free download or can even be viewed/annotated in HTML.

“This extraordinary book explains the engine that has catapulted the Internet from backwater to ubiquity—and reveals that it is sputtering precisely because of its runaway success. With the unwitting help of its users, the generative Internet is on a path to a lockdown, ending its cycle of innovation—and facilitating unsettling new kinds of control.”

Presenting from an iPhone

An interesting blog post at slide:ology shows a touching presentation can be given from an iPhone!

“…He whipped out his iPhone and gave me one of the most endearing presentations I’ve ever seen. Huddled around his phone he told me the story of how after he’d returned from Africa, receiving gifts for his birthday felt empty. That first year back, he asked his friends and family to donate funds to build a well in Africa instead of giving him birthday gifts. What started as a small token of compassion has turned into an amazing non-profit organization called charity:water. He reeled me in and compelled me to support his cause via very personal storytelling and images. I could zoom in and out of the pictures to see details of the young faces and filthy water.”

Google Chrome

Matt F. was pointing out that Chrome, Google’s web browser, became available for download today.

http://tools.google.com/chrome/

A new chapter in the browser wars!