Entries from March 2008 ↓

tblake writes “Back in 1968, Modern Mechanix mused what life would be like in 40 years. Some things they came pretty close on: ‘Money has all but disappeared. Employers deposit salary checks directly into their employees’ accounts. Credit cards are used for paying all bills. Each time you buy something, the card’s number is fed into the store’s computer station. A master computer then deducts the charge from your bank balance.’ Some things are way off: ‘The car accelerates to 150 mph in the city’s suburbs, then hits 250 mph in less built-up areas, gliding over the smooth plastic road. You whiz past a string of cities, many of them covered by the new domes that keep them evenly climatized year round.’ And some things are sorta right: ‘TV screens cover an entire wall in most homes and show most subjects other than straight text matter in color and three dimensions. In addition to programmed TV and the multiplicity of commercial fare, you can see top Broadway shows, hit movies and current nightclub acts for a nominal charge.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last month we showed you some of the more popular and useful Adobe AIR applications (see "6 Adobe AIR Apps to Check Out"), but there are so many great Adobe AIR applications currently available, it would be a shame to stop at just those six. As we delved through he Adobe AIR directory, what became apparent to us is that there are a lot of AIR applications that will appeal to our fellow bloggers. So many, in fact, that it was worth putting together a list of our favorites. Here are the top ten AIR app that bloggers will love:

Tumbleweed: The Tumbleweed AIR application is a desktop application for posting to your Tumblr blog. With this app, you can quickly post text, photos, videos, links, audio, and chats from your desktop to your Tumblr blog, without ever having to open a web browser.

Flickr Flipper: Looking for an image to go with your post? The Flickr Flipper app lets you browse through Flickr for photos. You can also search for photos from a specific user by typing username: followed by a Flickr user’s username.

Digg RSS Reader: Did your post just hit front page? You’ll know right away with the Digg RSS Reader. You can keep tabs on all the top stories, or filter them by choosing to view only the News, Videos, or Images. Clicking the links will open the Digg story in your web browser so you can vote for your favorites.

FotoBooth: Ustreamers will like FotoBooth, an AIR app that lets you use your computer’s webcam to snap pictures of yourself, add filters or distort them, and then upload them to Flickr with just one click.

Websnapshot and WebKut: Let’s call it two for the price of one: Websnapshot lets you quickly take snapshots of a web site by entering in the URL or dragging-and-dropping it from your browser to the app. You can specify whether you want a thumbnail, a browser-sized pic, or a full page snapshot. An auto-save feature lets you save the pictures to the location of your choosing. Webkut goes a step further – you can enter the URL or you can Google for it right within the AIR application, a nice time-saving feature.

Color Browser: Get inspired to re-design your blog! With the Color Browser app, you can create and organize your favorite color palettes. If you’re a blog designer, this is a must-have app.

Joomedit: Are you using the open source content management system from Joomla? Then you need Joomedit, a desktop editor that lets you edit, upload, and publish to your Joomla CMS.

SHIFD: Doing research? The SHIFD desktop app lets you save notes, places, and links from the web into the SHIFD AIR application. This content is then available on any device with internet access – whether your desktop, laptop, or mobile phone.

Apprise: The Apprise application is a sample AIR app, which means you can download the source code too. Apprise is an online/offline RSS reader which features importing and exporting of feeds, search, and support for RSS and ATOM.

We would add Google Analytics to this list, but it was covered in our previous post (and besides, isn’t everyone running it by now, anyway?). We would have also loved to include AirPress, but sadly, this desktop blogging AIR app has not been kept up-to-date.

An honorable mention goes out to Userplane Desktop, a brandable Adobe AIR app for bloggers in the big leagues. This white label solution can keep your users informed as to your site’s news, keeping them engaged even when they’re not on the web site itself.

Wade Chambers / Yodel Anecdotal:
Announcing the OpenSocial Foundation  —  From our travels across cyberspace, it's pretty clear that the social part of the Internet is becoming more and more important to people.  From chat to games to messaging to sharing things like news, entertainment, pictures, maps, movies and other …

Sometimes simple is best: the ABC3D pop-up book is just wonderfully captivating, and does exactly what it says on its transforming cover. You may think more “coffee table, guest amusement” than “give to kids” but it’s only $19.95, so why not let the little tykes appreciate its good design too? By Marion Bataille, due out October 14th. [Amazon via Geek Dad]

Thomas Beattie lives in Oregon and is married to a woman named Nancy. He’s pregnant.

To our neighbors, my wife, Nancy, and I don’t appear in the least unusual. To those in the quiet Oregon community where we live, we are viewed just as we are — a happy couple deeply in love. Our desire to work hard, buy our first home, and start a family was nothing out of the ordinary. That is, until we decided that I would carry our child.

I am transgender, legally male, and legally married to Nancy. Unlike those in same-sex marriages, domestic partnerships, or civil unions, Nancy and I are afforded the more than 1,100 federal rights of marriage. Sterilization is not a requirement for sex reassignment, so I decided to have chest reconstruction and testosterone therapy but kept my reproductive rights. Wanting to have a biological child is neither a male nor female desire, but a human desire.

Link (Via YesButNoButYes)

The Ext JS user community has been extremely active producing some very cool user extensions to the framework. A new project that recently showed up is a Jabber client that includes:

• Full rostermanagment
• Instant notifications
• Desktop look and feel
• Tabbed chats
• Wysiwyg messages

You can test out the Jabber client here:

https://194.94.76.11/jame/
You can use your own jabber account or you can use the following login info:
username:tester
password:tester
server:jabber.har.fh-stralsund.de
port:5222

“What Will Life Be Like in the Year 2008?” first published in the November, 1968 issue Mechanix Illustrated, contains many exciting predictions for that far-off, futuristic date.

The car accelerates to 150 mph in the city’s suburbs, then hits 250 mph in less built-up areas, gliding over the smooth plastic road. You whizz past a string of cities, many of them covered by the new domes that keep them evenly climatized year round. Traffic is heavy, typically, but there’s no need to worry. The traffic computer, which feeds and receives signals to and from all cars in transit between cities, keeps vehicles at least 50 yds. apart. There hasn’t been an accident since the system was inaugurated. Suddenly your TV phone buzzes. A business associate wants a sketch of a new kind of impeller your firm is putting out for sports boats. You reach for your attache case and draw the diagram with a pencil-thin infrared flashlight on what looks like a TV screen lining the back of the case. The diagram is relayed to a similar screen in your associate’s office, 200 mi. away. He jabs a button and a fixed copy of the sketch rolls out of the device. He wishes you good luck at the coming meeting and signs off.

Link

Every week we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views. Well, actually six questions, since we also ask the start-up to who he or she is passing the mic to.

As I’ve promised you last week, I will interview the start-ups who participated in the start-up rally of PLUGG 2008. This time we’re interviewing Bertrand Bodson, co-Founder Bragster.com. He already got some coverage on this blog for some serious pie throwing. Yet he and his team can do more than getting attention in an unconventional way, since they run a rather popular start-up. It’s a service on which friends can dare each other to something incredibly stupid. How did they come up with that?

How did you come up with the idea of Bragster?

“It all started as a “coffee-machine” type of idea. Wim, while at Morgan Stanley, was going to the hairdresser before an important meeting. Some of his colleagues dared him to go bold. They would supposedly pay him £500 if he did it. They kind of agreed, but eventually it never really happened knowing that he wouldn’t probably get the reward. That was enough to get us thinking – I was still at Amazon.com at the time. The net was the ideal platform to make it official and record those dares, with no way back and even getting your friends to chip in by betting if you would do it or chicken out, adding the necessary and fun social pressure to it. Over time, lot of things have evolved of course, e.g.: we added a strong community dimension to it, a virtual currency, the ability to easily upload video evidence and so on. But one thing remained the same: we are simply bringing to the net what has been a natural human behaviour for centuries: there is a competitive spirit in all of us, and bragging with friends is part of the human nature… and fun.” (more…)

The Myka is what many Torrent fans have been waiting for—a device that makes it easy to download torrents and play them on your living room TV. You can connect to the internet via LAN or WiFi, it has HDMI, Composite, S-Video and SPDIF ports (nice), your choice of 80, 160 or 500 gigabytes (and USB expansion) and the Linux OS with pre-installed BitTorrent software. You can even transfer videos directly from your computer. Prices are going to fall between $299 and $459, which is more than the Apple TV, but something tells me that there is some built-in value there. Additional pic after the break.

[Myka]