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0 comments | Tuesday, October 31, 2006

and having a hard time at it

When we look at what kind of applications Web 2.0 gave birth we can see there are no real ports of "usable" applications. They are just "one more" social networking site, social bookmaking site, social news site, social this, social that. When it comes to being productive there are just a small number of websites that offer such services.

One of them was LithaPaint.com. And I say “was” as it ran out of money. It was a new company that provided to users a vector based drawing tool. What is good to hear is that there are interested parties that would like to contact them for possible cooperation.

Another company that is trying to provide similar application is Mikons.com. I was very pleasantly suppressed. They are marketing it as Symbol or Logo creation with inescapable social component.

The Mikons drawing application requires more attention as it can easily become something more. Of course, don’t expect Corel Draw but someone has to show the way.

It is fair to say that more serious applications are just coming online but the technology exists today as LithaPaint and Mikons.com have demonstrated.

Digg!

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2 comments | Monday, October 30, 2006

Digg!

The most time consuming thing about writing and posting is generating the "Digg It" code to put on the page.
Digg Button Generator does this automatically and should be a integral part of Digg.

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0 comments | Friday, October 27, 2006

I was first drawn to idiagram by its visuals representation of complex problem solving mechanics, and basically this is the only function it does. Idiagram offers visualization of complex problems within organizations so they can be solved more efficiently and with higher quality of end solution.
A added value is that picture is laced with mouse hot spots. This mens that as you move your mouse around the image it displays additional info regarding specific step in problem solving diagram.

Digg!

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0 comments

While reading the Malcolm Gladwell book, Blink, I wondered if there is somewhere a visual dictionary of Facial Action Coding System or FACS.

ARTNATORY is a flash driven visual dictionary of all our facial muscles and what usage of those muscles means.
This website is small gold mine for information about muscles that govern our outward emotional appearance. It is well organized and design follows functionality, but at certain moments it is a bit restrictive. It would be nice to have an option to combine facial expressions and to have more insight into micro-expressions.

After selecting the Actions and Expressions tab together we get a meaning of certain muscle and a animated "preview" of the action itself.


Digg!

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0 comments

Online ASCII Art Generators

Ever since the early 90's and the start of the end of Bulletin Board Systems ASCII Art has become neglected unlike Pixel Art that is still doing fine. Coding, Demo scene have kept the tradition and continue to use ASCII codes extensively. One of best examples is cosmblop 4k demo. More about what is ASCII and for what it is used, and it is used ALL the time, can be found on Wiki.

The basic form of ASCII art is creating big letters out of special characters. There is a online ASCII Generator that does this function rather well. Also, there is ASCII Text Signature Generator,

A step from using ASCII just for creating large letters we can use them to create pictures. This started almost with the dawn of computers as they had no Graphic User Interface. When something graphic had to be shown it was done using combination of special characters from the ASCII set. They are still used today and the most famous is the smiley. Smiley is the most used ASCII art. :)
There are allot of archives online that organize and host tutorials on how to create ASCII art. Some of them are Chris.com and Ascii Art Dictionary. ASCII Art Dictionary also hosts tutorials on how to create animated ASCII graphics. ASCII Art doesn't has to be black and white. Wikipedia has surprisingly detailed entry about all kind of ASCII art.
One Web 2.0 application that can be found online is asciiomatic. Site also generates HTML code for your websites but can only take 60x50px image. This shouldn't be a problem as ASCII Art is not about detail.


Some other image2text conversation tools online that are wort checking are TextImage and ASCIImator. ASCIImator can also animate your ASCII Art, but it requires some work.

For more examples of ASCII Art go to Google ASCII Art Search

Digg!

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4 comments


It is really sad to see companies that have innovative technology and services running out of money.
One example is litha-paint.com. I first found litha-paint when I was searching for a drawing application online that could beat paint brush but did not require any bells and whistles. I found litha-paint. Litha provided, or did provided, a unique service of drawing online using vectors much like Corel Draw. Of course it wasn’t as powerful as Corel but it provided an application that was unique and different then the rest of Web 2.0 community.
Now it is out of business, hopefully not for long.

Update: It seems that Litha was offered free hosting and will continue to push the limits of what is possible with Web 2.0. More info later.

Digg!

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6 comments | Thursday, October 26, 2006

Digg!

The dawn of Web 2.0 saw a rise of graphical rethinking of how users use and see web pages.
From, what is now called "Web 1.0", Web 2.0 is more interactive, colors are more in tune and everything looks and feels more responsive, a synergy of design and functionality.
Flash, AJAX, Ruby and countless other web technologies that have spawned the birth of the New Web are now showing us something very interesting.
They are showing us how it is possible to manage and display data that would otherwise overwhelm us, or at least they show data in more manageable way.
With this said, we still have to address some issues in that design should lead the functionality but not if it impairs the functionality itself. No mater how nice the design is its function is not properly implemented.
Listed below are some interesting examples (not all) of what the ways data is presented on the Web today.


Digg Swarm

Digg needs no introduction, but it is a prime example of Web 2.0, user driven content website. Digg Swarm is currently just a part of Digg Lab. It is a first example of mismatch between design and function. It is nice, but just nice as it is plague by problems in the functionality. Design is very well made but Diggs popup to fast and fade to fast for anyone to follow. If there was just a list on left side with currently displaying stories it would increase the look and feel dramatically.



MappedUp


MappedUp together with Digg Swarm, is another example of News generated content. It has somewhat different approach than Digg Swarm. It does now show all of news at once but shows only the "hot" news. The problem here is that it is to slow, and some what to awkward to set up the feeds.


AmazoNode

This is an excellent example of how mapping tech can help up go trough massive amount of data from user generated content. It looks good and functions good. Amazonode shows relations between books and if you are into books this is a site for you to visit.


MusicMap

MusicMap does basically the same thing as AmazoNode but is more sophisticated in design and only searches music. An EXCELLENT example of design and functionality, its a shame the depth of information is limited.


LivePlasma

LivePlasma and MusicMap are one and the same but different. LivePlasma has more in depth information but its design and functionality is somewhat limited and harder to manipulate then MusicMap.



Breathing Earth

Breathing Earth is an interesting concept. It only function is to show current state of the Earth. Some shown data are CO2 emissions, birth and death rates. It is updated in "real time" but most probably it uses historical statistical methods.



Havaria

Havaria also an interesting concept. Well, its more then concept. It is exceptionally up to date map of disasters or potential disasters around the world. This site is an example where functionality takes a sidestep from design.
This site would benefit a lot from design overhaul.



WordNet

There are a lot of dictionaries out there but this one is different. WordNet uses connections to show relations between words.

MusicLens

MusicLens is another approach to music search. It enables a user to specify the preference in music and it will show the list of possible matches. It is also possible to listen to part of presented music.

This is just a part of interesting thing happening now in the way we see data.
We live in interesting times.

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