Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Here, have a 3D tarantula to play with....



It's an interesting Flash 3D demo, and someone's put a lot of work into building an interactive model of a spider.

It seems to make a good cat toy on a multi-monitor set up - and it's the first application I've seen the cats here pay attention to!

Seeing as it is eating my day I am compelled to share with the world this incredibly cute polar bear ice cube bursting game!

Hours of endless fun. Just remember to jump on the aeroplane...

Looking at the icons one can't help but wonder if Framestore did some of the CGI work for The Golden Compass

While researching a piece on Apollo I came across Adobe's Kuler.

Built to demonstrate the capabilities of the latest versions of Flash and Flex, it's a web-based version of the extremely useful colour space explorer tools in Illustrator CS3 - with an added dose of community. Use the colour space explorer to choose a set of colours, then use rules to find complementary sets, or the appropriate colour triads, or even related shades to a base colour. It's an excellent tool for building colour maps that you can use in your web sites or desktop applications - you can take the RGB values of the colours you choose, or the hex.

What's even neater though, is the community, where people are sharing the colour sets and themes they've defined. A voting system lets you say which themes you liked the most - I'm particularly fond of Japanese Garden...

There are also RSS feeds of the most popular colour themes - so you can stay updated without having to visit the site every day - and OS X users get a Kuler dashboard widget.

An excellent tool for web and graphic designers.

I've been playing with Scrapblog, a rather nifty tool for producing online scrapbooks.

It links to most popular web photohosting sites and imports your images ready for use, and uses a Flash UI to lay out your presentation pages, with custom photo frames and text - just like a scrapbook or a photo album. You can resize and rotate images. You can add extra pages to Scrapblogs as you go, so you're not limited by a single page - and of course published pages aren't locked down, so you can update and edit them any time you want.

The UI is impressive - it's currently built in Flex, so does a lot more than your average Flash application. There's an Apollo port out there too, so you won't be limited to working through web pages.

I wouldn't see this as a replacement for Flickr or any other site like that - this is more a way of quickly selecting a group of images, and then sharing them with friends and family who wouldn't normally spend time delving through a Flickr photostream...

Here's my Scrapblog

My one quibble: for some reason the application defaults to US keyboard settings

Here's my latest piece for El Reg, looking at Adobe's Apollo by actually installing and working with the development tools. A quick summary: it's definitely early beta, with lots of pieces missing, but rather promising.

There was a bit of a buzz in the air on Monday when Adobe rolled out the first public alpha release of its Apollo desktop internet application client – along with a whole truckload of developer tools and documentation.

Apollo is an interesting proposition, a platform that mixes Flash (though you do need to use code that's written to use ActionScript 3.0 and the new AVM 2.0 virtual machine), PDF, and HTML. The Apollo runtime is a host for .air applications and is built on code that mixes Adobe's Acrobat Reader, the Flash 9 Player, and a standards-compliant HTML rendering engine based on Apple's WebKit.

The main difference between the Apollo runtime and all these components running in, say, WebKit browsers like Safari or Swift, is that there's no browser window and that the application gets direct access to your hard disk. It can read and write files, as well as using persistent storage. It even gets access to some of your hardware – so you can use Apollo to work with images from a web cam. In fact, there's already a demonstration application that mimics Apple's Photo Booth webcam tool.

So what's the developer experience like?

The good news is that Adobe has learnt the lesson of Macromedia's Central, and has given developers several different routes to building applications – without locking you into someone else's business model.

Read More.

The budget 4GB CF cards I ordered from 7Dayshop.com have just arrived. Not the fastest I've had, but still a lot faster than the slowest - and as I usually take landscapes or macro shots rather than action, I'm not too worried about speed.

However, I am now flush with capacity.

My camera reports that it can now take nearly 900 full resolution low compression JPEGs, or over 200 RAW images. As I'm learning more about Photoshop (there are some lovely features in the CS3 beta) I'm taking more RAW images, so that amount of space should be quite useful.

Smile, now, please...

Dodge.

Touch the blue square with the blue circle. Avoid the red dots that are created with each touch.

Starts simple, but quickly gets very, very tricky. Oh, and addictive...

Totting up the capacities of the 15 or so flash drives we were handed at CES, we seem to have ended up with just under 12GB of flash in various shapes, sizes and colours.

The smallest was a little sliver of plastic which just slots into a USB slot, while the largest were two hefty metal Lexar drives that have built in encryption tools. The niftiest was a yellow lego-like device that allowed the top to click onto the body so you don't lose it when you plug the device into a USB slot...

A great way to distribute press releases. We'll suck the content off onto our server, and then donate the sticks we won't be using to local charities. It's also a lot less to carry back to the UK...

For your Friday afternoon delectations:

A rather delightful (if somewhat violent) little Flash animation showing just what goes on on your PC's screen when you're away.

The moral? Be careful just what games you install...

Today's download of the day is something I've been looking for for a long time now.

Now I can make sure I don't get blasted out of my chair by over-loud Flash movies and games with FlashMute (spotted on many many sites).

FlashMute is a tool which allows you to mute/unmute Flash Movies loaded in a browser exclusively, or alternatively all sounds produced by the browser.

Now that's what I call useful!