giovedì, novembre 20, 2008

Protonotes

I was just reading on the Adaptive Path Blog about a nice “sticky note” collaboration tool for designers.

“Protonotes are notes that you add to your prototype that allow project team members to discuss system functionality, design, and requirements directly on the prototype. You can think of it like a discussion board/wiki in direct context of your prototype.”

http://www.protonotes.com/

More from their site:

What's so great?

  • Everyone on your team can easily add notes to your prototype - helps the entire team collaborate quicker and easier.
  • Project team members don't have to install anything or sign up for anything to use it. It just works.
  • It's not bloated with extra "features". It does one thing and one thing well - adds notes to your prototype.
  • Works in all major browsers including Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Opera.
  • Export your data at any time to a .csv file.
  • Subscribe to your group's notes with a Protonotes RSS feed.
  • Hook Protonotes up to your own MySQL database with a single line of JavaScript.
  • It's free.

martedì, novembre 18, 2008

Google - Flu Trends

I thought this was pretty interesting. Google is using search results to track the progress of the flu!

http://www.google.org/flutrends/

For more information, the New York Times has a nice article. Here’s an excerpt:

“Tests of the new Web tool from Google.org, the company’s philanthropic unit, suggest that it may be able to detect regional outbreaks of the flu a week to 10 days before they are reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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“This seems like a really clever way of using data that is created unintentionally by the users of Google to see patterns in the world that would otherwise be invisible,” said Thomas W. Malone, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T. “I think we are just scratching the surface of what’s possible with collective intelligence.”

giovedì, novembre 13, 2008

Squarespace

Pretty slick CMS/Design service.

“Squarespace makes the complex simple. With more than 20 core modules and over 300 fully-integrated features, Squarespace can power sites ranging from a personal blog to a large corporate site.”

http://www.squarespace.com/

Forgetting Has Its Benefits

I knew I had a good reason. J From the WSJ:

Neuroscientists say forgetting is crucial to the efficient functioning of the mind, to learning, adapting and recalling more significant things.”

"’We focus so much on memory that forgetting has been maligned,’ says Gayatri Devi, a neuro-psychiatrist and memory expert in New York City. ‘But if you didn't forget, you'd recall all kinds of extraneous information from your life that would drown you in a sea of inefficiency.’”

Flash CS3 and AIR: Monitoring Network Connectivity

This bug was really annoying. Ever had this error?

“1172: Definition air.net could not be found.” Here’s the scenario where I encountered it.

Adobe AIR has the awesome capability to monitor network connectivity.

“Adobe® AIR™ provides the means to check for changes to the network connectivity of the computer on which an AIR application is installed. This information is useful if an application uses data obtained from the network. Also, an application can check the availability of a network service.”

So far, so good. This is the troublesome part:

“The service monitor framework, separate from the AIR framework, resides in the file servicemonitor.swc. In order to use the framework, the servicemonitor.swc file must be included in your build process.

Well, perhaps you’ve just decided to copy an example that monitors the network and received this error:

1172: Definition air.net could not be found.

The answer, if you’re running Flash CS3 and have downloaded AIR Integration Kit, is to add this directory to your classpath:

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Flash CS3\AIK\frameworks\libs\air

Nice. None of this is necessary in Flex, by the way.

Flickr and Free Images

Pandia Search Engine News has a nice article entitled “3 great ways to find free images.” Here are a few excerpts:

“More than 80 million photos on Flickr are tagged with a creative Commons license, …[but] Flickr’s own search engine may not be the best way to find the photo you want with the license that is right for you. Here are three great ways to search Flickr.”

mercoledì, novembre 12, 2008

Font Picker

Font Picker is a simple AIR application that “shows you all the fonts installed on your computer and helps you choose which one is most suitable for a particular project.” You can narrow your list, by clicking the “X” to the right of each font.

Smule Ocarina for iPhone

Matt F. was just pointing this out to me. Too fun! I had to ante up my $1.

http://ocarina.smule.com/

“The ocarina is an ancient family of instrument (believed to date some 12,000 years), and one of the easiest instruments to learn. The Smule Ocarina both preserves this instrument and extends/transforms it for your iPhone. Blow into the phone/instrument. Control pitch with different fingerings. Learn to play countless melodies.”

martedì, novembre 11, 2008

phplist

Um, wow.

phplist is an open-source newsletter manager. phplist is free to download, install and use, and is easy to integrate with any website.”

The 75 Hottest Business Card Designs

Well, according to Ever-Real Modern Marketing blog anyway. I have to say they are pretty stylish!

domenica, novembre 09, 2008

HOW TO: Instantly iPhone-ize Your Website

giovedì, novembre 06, 2008

Adobe AIR and the SQLite Local Database

Mihai Corlan has a great article “Storing data locally in AIR” that covers a lot of the principles on a single page.

If you have access to Lynda.com, there is a terrific tutorial covering this and many other AIR topics: AIR for Flash Developers. Highly recommended!

Adobe AIR Mime Type

Because everyone loves a mime?!

application/vnd.adobe.air-application-installer-package+zip

More information at David Tucker’s blog.

lunedì, novembre 03, 2008

Google Now Performs OCR on Any Scanned PDF Documents

I was just reading on the Google blog that Google now performs OCR on any scanned PDF documents.

“In the past, scanned documents were rarely included in search results as we couldn't be sure of their content. We had occasional clues from references to the document-- so you might get a search result with a title but no snippet highlighting your query. Today, that changes. We are now able to perform OCR on any scanned documents that we find stored in Adobe's PDF format. This Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology lets us convert a picture (of a thousand words) into a thousand words -- words that can be searched and indexed, so that these valuable documents are more easily found. This is a small but important step forward in our mission of making all the world's information accessible and useful.”