Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

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