The ‘almost new’ weekly round-up #2
…written by Will and has 1 comment so far
Is it time for another weekly round-up already?? Luckily we get to work in an industry where just a paltry 7 days can result in a whole load of neat ideas, apps and technologies popping up. Here are some of our latest picks.
1. A couple of search engines
The ultimate nerd engine.
This week we’ve noticed not one, but two new search engines. Firstly Wolfram Alpha launched the incredibly nerdy ‘computational knowledge engine’. It’s a bit like wikipedia on steroids. For scientists, mathematicians, data analysts and the like, it’s a dream come true. For the rest of us, it’s just confusing. Here are some interesting searches:
Today, I’m 8388 days old.
When I add the average uk male lifespan to my birthday you get my statistical death day!
Comparing Earth vs. Moon.
Apple vs. Microsoft.
Caffeine vs. Aspirin.
And finally, how much wood would a woodchuck chuck?
The other search engine I mentioned is a bit less exciting. Microsoft’s Bing. It’s a search engine, almost like Wolfram Alpha but a lot simpler. You wont find many websites, but you will find information. However, unlike Wolfram Alpha, Bing is designed to be for every day use, not just massive nerds. It’s not out yet, but Ars Technica has a pretty thorough write up.
2. Domain Pidgeon
Looking for a cool domain or twitter name? Domainpigeon has a useful search interface that lists available names based on the number of letters. You can then sort by popularity or alphabetical. We think it makes a nice change having a list of available suggestions with which to start with rather than trying to think of that elusive name with no help.
3. jQuery Fancy Gestures
Scribbles.
If you have ever used a palm, or pocket PC you’ve probably come across gesture based text input. Using simplified letter shapes you could write almost as fast as you would with a pen and paper. Anant Garg has taken that concept and ported it onto the web using javascript and jQuery. The results are pretty slick. The first idea that sprang to our minds was a captcha. It could pretty much stop spam bots in their annoying little tracks. Another useful implementation would be on a touch screen device where clicking links and typing isn’t quite as easy.
4. Youtube and HTML5
This is one of the first uses of HTML5 we’ve come across. At first glance not much is different, but looking at the underlying code you’ll notice there isn’t any object tags or javascript pulling the strings, it’s just a very simple video tag. All the controls are built in html rather than flash. This reduces the strain on your processor considerably. Really integrating video and the web. You will need a very up-to-date browser to see anything though, but it’s a good vision of the future.
5. Asaph micro-blogging system
Simple, but effective.
Asaph is a micro-blogging system, focusing on collecting links and images from other pages. It allows you to post content directly from any page you are on. Asaph is not a full blown blog and it does not aim to be one — it just does this one task, but it’s pretty good at it.
6. 80 Legs web crawling cloud
Web crawling comes to the cloud. Currently in Beta this service allows developers to crawl the web quickly using a 50,000+ node supercomputer. You can then use your own scripts to analyse the results. An API is due out soon so you’ll be able to get it on tap. Sounds impressive doesn’t it? Don’t worry – we are also trying to figure out what to use it for!
