Friday October 21, 2005

Mashup Mania

Finally. Someone's collecting all the different Google Mashups that have been built and they're rolling them all into one place: Google Maps Mania.

I stumbled into this mashup, for example, which merges Google tech with real-time awareness of England's autumn leaves...your chocolate and my peanut butter bring you this:

Not that I'll be headed to England this fall, but it's nice to know it's there.

Personally, I'd like to see a mashup that identifies hi-speed bandwidth customers in my neighborhood so we could pool our resources and build a "blocknet." (And that idea will be obsolete in a year or two once all of Portland has citywide wifi.) ( Oct 21 2005, 10:12:32 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Thursday May 26, 2005

Next killer app: comic-book software. (Pow!)

Every now and then you come across that magical app that keeps you up late, playing around when you should be sleeping as you tinker away in the den, studio or hotel room when you really should be sleeping. Maybe it's iMovie. Or Garage Band. Or whatever -- if you've got a drop of creativity in you, then you know what I'm talking about.

Well, I've found some new creative crack: it's called Comic Life. It's an honest-to-goodness WYSIWYG comic-book creation tool, and it's amazing. (Mac OS X only.) Snapshot below.

Comics, you say? Heck no. Business tool, foo. We all need to tell stories in our daily lives, some of them as scenarios, often with pictures. I can't think of an easier way to replace short-form video in a business environment (cognitive walkthrogh? customer feedback? product-requirements scenarios?) than with a simple tool like this. Granted, it's not something for reporting deep analysis, but rather for telling a summarized story quickly and easily in a narrative, visual form.

I've got to get some sleep. I mean play around some more. I mean get some sleep. Nonetheless, I'm looking forward to seeing what some of the more creative ones among ya do with this...

( May 26 2005, 12:51:23 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Monday May 16, 2005

Six georges and a fried cake.

Five dollars to anyone who can help me create my own custom theme here. Okay, make it six. Plus a donut. And Buffalo Sabres sweatshirt, circa 1988. Contact me for more details. ( May 16 2005, 10:10:58 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]