Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

The first application at my Web 2.0 sandbox is now live.

Have a play with The Flickr UK Postcode Interestingness Weather Location Explorer. Give it a postcode, and it'll show you the weather at the location, along with the most "interesting" Flickr image it can find nearest the pinpoint on the map. I'm quite pleased by the self-expanding search area that expands each time it can't find an image...

(It's a mash-up of Google Maps, Google Local, WeatherBug, Yahoo! Pipes and Flickr written for a magazine article.)

Update: I left out one of the instructions: click on the pin to get the pop-up once the progress bar goes away...

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