Tech at the speed of Warp

Labels: Design, OnLine, Visualisation

Labels: Design, GUI, Programing, Visualisation

Labels: GUI, OnLine, Open Source, Visualisation

Labels: Design, Programing, Visualisation

Labels: OnLine, Open Source, Visualisation, Web 2.0

Labels: Visualisation

Sometimes the surprising works come from surprising source. Nikon made a really smart web flash presentation.
Just like the video that is going around the internet depicting the sheer size of space using planets and stars, this flash application goes one step further. It shows us the comparison from really really small to really really huge.

Labels: Design, GUI, Visualisation

Image Mosaic Generator takes PNG, GIF, JPG files and creates a mosaic out of them.

Labels: Design, Visualisation

A collaboration between Microsoft and University of Washington produced a interesting concept of how a photo collection could be explored in 3D. This is one amazing piece of programing achievement.
Now, lets just hope it will make it to the mainstream sooner rather than latter.

Labels: Design, Programing, Visualisation

If you ever searched for royalty free stock photos, clipart, fonts or vector based images that you wanted to use in your own projects this is the place to visit. Blue Vertigo offers up to 1,000 links sorted by quality and quantity, not by alphabetical order so choosing the first 10 links from any category gets you instant satisfaction. I was extreamly surprised by the quality of yotophoto.com, a license free photo search.

Labels: Design, Visualisation

In the age of Wikis, Google Earth/Mars and after WikiMapia it was just a mater of time before someone creates a Wikimapia styled web service for the heavens. It is surprising that we had to wait so log to get such web application.
WikiSky has a database of more than half a billion (500,000,000) stellar objects. Thats one impressive database. One additional feature next to the shear size of the database is the SDSS mode. WikiSky uses Sloan Digital Sky Survey images to display real photographs of the sky you are looking at through WikiSky.
A couple of comments; search could be better, lists of available high-res images for selected object should show in tooltip on main map and not on separate page that is hard to navigate.

They are looking for people who are willing to code and improve their service, also they are publishing their API so all you MashUp junkies, start coding.

Labels: GUI, Programing, Space, Visualisation

NASA WorldWind is a direct competitor of Google Earth. It offers some interesting features that are still missing from Google Earth. One such feature is direct display to globe of climate data gathered by NASA. This video shows the formation of 27 storms in the Atlantic for 2005.

Labels: Visualisation

All who ever played around with Google Earth knows how addictive the application can become. The only drawback is that Google web based solution is not very user friendly.
Here comes Flash Earth. It not only provides Google Earth pictures but can also connect to Microsoft VE, Yahoo Maps, ask.com, NASA and OpenLayer.

Labels: Design, Visualisation

Musicovery is an online radio station that has some interesting features. The concept is so catchy that it borders on addiction. With this said it should also be said that it creates playlists without your input or preferences outside of the select era from which you can hear music from, or the selection of mood you want your music to be delivered to you. I find this amazing, simple but affective. Some may find this a little restrictive and would like to fashion their own playlists but then this wouldn't be a radio. It boasts itself as interactive radio and it does that exceptionally well.

The selection box for mood is presented as a matrix with Energetic, Calm and Dark, Positive.
One of biggest downside until now was that there was no way of pausing the playlist. Some other nuisance were that if you select the next song in the playlist it refurbishes the playlist according to some mysterious rule.

The pause and play are now added in 2.01 version which is a big plus.Along side the pause/play button a subtle indicator that displays from which era the current playing music is also a welcome addition.

Now they have to fix the skipping of songs when selected from the playlist or even add the ability to rearrange the songs in a playlist. Or, just leave it as is and just explain what is the point of the playlist path and why is it so wavy....

Labels: Design, GUI, Music, Visualisation

a video time-warping machine with a tangible deformable screen. Homepage

Online Demonstration Applet

Labels: Design, Visualisation

Labels: Design, Visualisation

TuneGlue is a service that in its intent is similar to LivePlasma or MusicMap but with one distinction. It is quite usable. Data used to produce results comes from Last FM and Amazon.

To start using TuneGlue just enter desired artist name into the search engine and the first node will appear shortly. By clicking on it you get additional options like to expand to similar, browse news related to the artists or to view their discography.

Unlike MusicMap it utilizes more data sources and unlike both MusicMap and LivePlasma it offers prettier eye candy. I also found it faster in discovery.

It is somewhat bare and minimalistic but with small improvements it could be a much better. Features missing or not easily accessible are such as album lists could be visible all the time as a sidebar and a track preview would be nice.

TuneGlue is a must see site for any music lover.

Labels: Design, Music, Visualisation

Thinking Machine 4

Ever since the dawn of computers man played chess with them and in 1997 IBM Big Blue was the first computer that won a match with a world champion, Garry Kasparov.

Chess programing algorithms are one of basic algorithms every programmer learns sooner or later. Along side the traveling salesman problem chess problems are usual problem posed to high school student on computer programing competitions.

One of interesting sites actually shows the generation of paths inside the algorithm or the "thinking" process of the computer, Thinking Machine 4.

Labels: Design, Visualisation

Baby Name Wizard

Some time now I been been playing with voice recognition shipped with Windows and how to interface with it and make a custom voice control application. This posed a slight problem, not with programming part but with something quite different.

After 16 years of owning a computer I was compelled to name my computer. Lame, but necessary. I didn't want computer to activate voice recognition every time someone yells "computer". So I decided to name it. should it be a girl or a boy. I choose a girly name.

First off, I had problems choosing a name so I checked the web for some page that could help me. The Baby Name Wizard - NameVoyager was the best I found.

It not only provides boy and girl name but also shows how popular was any given name in a span of over a century. There is also a search function and to spike things up its a Java app that is animated and nice to use.

Planing a family or just want to name a pet or a gadget check it out.

Labels: Design, Visualisation, Web 2.0

We can debate was the War in Iraq necessarily, did they have WMD etc. But, one thing is non debatable, people died. Iraq War Coalition Fatalities web site displays animated flash map of Iraq with one day per frame. Its fast and a scroll bar would be nice as you cant stop or rewind the animation which is a shame as it is really nicely done. Thous features would add whole different dimension to the animation making it a tool. Only thing you can control is which country's fatality's in Iraq you would like to see animated on the map.

Not only instant death on the battlefield is recorded and displayed but also death from injuries in hospitals. You will recognize these, they appear on different locations and sometimes even on sea, presumably a ship.

Data is gatherd from icasualties.org and geographical locations from www.globalsecurity.org. s
When this article was written the last update was 10/23/06.

Labels: Money, Visualisation