noisylime

Max Kiesler has been doing some nice roundup posts recently. He just published Ajax Javascript Galleries, Slideshows and Effects Redux, a piece that goes through a large group of libraries and apps that show off image related functionality.

He ends up discussing:

• e2 AJAX Gallery
• FrogJS Javascript Gallery
• Highslide
• JonDesign’s SmoothGallery 2.0
• LightWindow v2.0
• Pyxy Gallery
• Phatfusion- Image Menu
• Phatfusion- Lightbox
• Slimbox, the Ultimate Lightweight Lightbox Clone
• dhtmlGoodies Image Slideshow Script
• Google AJAX Feed API
• jQuery Cycle Plugin
• Phatfusion- Slideshow
• Rich Ajax slide shows with DHTML and XML
• TripTracker - Customizable Javascript Image Viewer
• Slideshow - A Javascript Class for Mootools
• WebTwo Ajax SlideShow

[via Ajaxian]

Logo Envy… the curse of "Pinky and the Brain".

"It should span the width of the page. No, maybe the page is too small. No… turn the page sideways. Ah, what the heck, just make it a two page spread."

Clients want their logos BIG. The bigger, the better. In some cases, like one of my clients, they want a whole collection of logos… EVERYWHERE!!! Boohahaha! The problem is a basic one. Somewhere, someone let it fall that the logo makes the brand. If people get to recognise my logo, they'll love my product.

It's the average Joe way of achieving "Brand Awareness." Joe is saying; "If I make my logo really BIG, and put it everywhere, people will notice and start flocking to my business."

What clients fail to realise is that the logo in any part of advertising is like your signature at the bottom of a letter. It says, "sincerely Brand A". Make the whole letter your signature and people will go; "Sincerely WHAT?" It's the WHAT that matters. The WHAT makes or breaks you.

Your logo can be hot pink and in Comic Sans, if the WHAT hits the mark, your clients won't care about the hot pink. As long as you don't stick it on their rear window.

And then there's branded clothing…

[via creativebits - Apple oriented design community]

When I heard that Flickr was making announcements this evening, I assumed it was the long awaited integration of video into the service. That isn’t happening (it will soon, though), but they are making significant upgrades soon around geotagging and a new area of the site will launch called “Places Pages.”

GeoTagging Updates

a year ago - to date 29 million public photos have been geotagged, with 150,000 new ones coming in each day. They aren’t making any changes to the way photos are geotagged (using Yahoo maps), but they are updating the results pages for searches.

The existing pages don’t show large numbers of geotagged photos effectively; the new pages will do a better job by placing actual tags from photos on a world map. Users can quickly find photos based on tags and geotagged information. Enhancements to navigation are also being introduced.

Overall, the enhancements are good, but the real win here comes when devices auto tag photos via GPS devices. Until then, most users can’t be bothered with taking the time to add the appropriate meta data.

Flickr is giving a preview of the new features at Web 2.0 and will launch them in a few weeks.

Places Pages

Now this is more interesting. Flickr is announcing “Places Pages,” which are dedicated pages that provide users with specific information about places. We’ve uploaded an overview PDF to Scribd, here.

Pages will be built around the Flickr concept of “interestingness,” but based on places and tags. So China/bicycle shows popular photos of bicycles taken in China. Paris/architecture is another example. Any of 70,000 places can be viewed, optionally followed by any tag. Flickr is also adding in additional information on the place, such as weather and local time, as well as relevant Flickr groups.

The product will get better over time, too. Eventually users will be able to adjust pages by time or season, so pictures from New York in the Fall can be viewed, for example. Or pictures from a specific event that happened in a city.

Flickr now has over 1 billion photos and 37.7 million unique monthly visitors. 2.5 million news photos are uploaded daily by 15 million registered users. I wonder if founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield ever wish they hadn’t sold out to Yahoo so quickly, for just a rumored $30 million or so in 2005…

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

[via TechCrunch]

Fotoflexer may be my personal favorite among the many online photo editing tools, but Flickr has chosen Seattle-based Picnik (profile) to handle the long requested photo editing feature for Flickr users.

Currently, you can rotate photos on Flickr, but the editing stops there. When the new tools launch, users will be able to edit photos more extensively using the Picnik Flash based tools (see our review here).

The deal has been signed and implementation will occur sometime in the next few months, Flickr told me yesterday. Flickr users will have an edit button on their photo pages. Clicking on it will import the image into Picnik for editing; when finished, it can be sent back to Flickr.

Basically, the integration is not much different than most of Picnik’s competitors who use Flickr’s API. But the crucial difference is that the edit feature will be highlighted on Flickr itself, pushing Flickr’s 15 million registered users towards Picnik.

CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

[via TechCrunch]

This may be the most useful website you ever read about on TechCrunch.

New La Jolla, California startup ProQuo launches this evening to help you battle all the evil that is being perpetually perpetrated against your personal information. Get countless credit card offers, catalogs and other junk in your mailbox everyday? ProQuo intends to do what the NoCall list did for telesales calls for all that stuff, too. Which means, kill it off.

ProQuo users not only save the hassle of dealing with junk mail (and the resulting identity theft risk), but also benefit the environment by cutting down on the amount of paper that’s shoved in their face.

After registration you are presented with a dozen or so types of mailing lists (coupons, credit cards, catalogs, etc.). You can stop most of them with a single click. Others require printing out a form or going to another website. But at the end of the process, you can kill off a ton of unwanted mail.

The company was founded in July 2006 and has raised $5 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson. In the future, they plan to expand to give users more control over other types of personal information, including financial and medical records.

Note that we’ve also recently written about CatalogChoice, which focuses on stopping unwanted catalogs. Services we’ve covered which focus on stopping identity theft include TrustedID and LifeLock.

As an aside, in my interview with CEO Steven Gal, he mentioned that the five year anniversary of the Do Not Call Registry is coming up this January. Anyone who registered at the site when it first went live is in for a nasty surprise - the opt out is valid for only five years. If you wait until January to do it again, you’ll have to put up with thirty days of telesales calls while the request goes active. And telesales companies are gearing up to make your life a living hell for those thirty days.

[via TechCrunch]

Mephisto is a kick ass web publishing system. It’s a blog engine with some simple CMS-ish concepts (sections, pages), a very flexible templating system, and an aggressive caching scheme that takes advantage of your web server’s best traits.

New York Magazine has compiled a set of links to the ten most incomprehensible Bob Dylan interviews of all time. Man, when Dylan rambles, he really rambles. It must be that all his articulateness neurons have been given over to writing some of the greatest poetry in living memory, leaving none left over for pointless little TV interviews. Link (Thanks, Danny!)

[via Boing Boing]

Awhile back we discussed Dreamweaver as a potential Ajax IDE.

Here's the press release:

Nitobi"s Complete UI is a powerful set of components that will give Dreamweaver users the ability to present data in an engaging format in a fraction of the time," states Michael Lekse, Vice President of Sales and Services at WebAssist. "Dreamweaver professionals looking to enhance their user interface functionality should turn to Nitobi with confidence."

The easy drag and drop feature for Dreamweaver reflects Nitobi"s philosophy of fast, easy web application development–a key selling point of Complete UI. Complete UI components are designed to be easy to implement and to help create web applications with intuitive and graceful user interfaces. The Complete UI suite includes:

• Grid — A cross-browser spreadsheet with Excel "copy/paste", LiveScrolling, and more.
• ComboBox — A drop-down menu with autocomplete functionality, similar to Google Suggest.
• Calendar — A high-performance calendar picker that can be used with Nitobi Grid or in standalone web applications.
• Callout — A rich, skinnable tool-tip that prompts users with real-time feedback and helpful instructions as they navigate through an application.
• Fisheye — A tool bar menu featuring fisheye magnification, similar to Apple OS X tool bar.
• Spotlight — A tool for creating stylish guided tours of websites and applications.
• Tabstrip — Folder tabs for navigating to different sections of a web application via Ajax or iFrame requests.
• Tree — A hierarchical data view, similar to the folder view in Windows Explorer.
• Ajax Toolkit — A library of fully-documented tools used in Nitobi components that can be re-used in your own applications, or to build your own components.

In addition to Dreamweaver support, Complete UI includes enhancements to Nitobi Grid, including expanding spreadsheet-style rows and even better performance.

What better way to check this out than a set of screencasts?

• Using Grid in Dreamweaver: This is a great look at things.
• Using Calendar in Dreamweaver
• Using ComboBox in Dreamweaver
• Using Tree in Dreamweaver
• Using Spotlight in Dreamweaver
• Using Tabstrip in Dreamweaver
• Using Fisheye in Dreamweaver
• Using Callout in Dreamweaver

What do you think of Dreamweaver now?

[via Ajaxian]

Sébastien Gruhier (Mr. Proto) has created a JavaScript layout framework using Prototype 1.6. The Simple Layout Manager lets you create simple layouts using simple CSS and also let you dynamically add to the manager:

You can see some simple demos.

We have see a slew of CSS frameworks coming out there, and now we are starting to see people go past the pure CSS frameworks, and using JavaScript to take things to the next level.

Download the Simple Layout Manager code.

[via Ajaxian]

Dustin Diaz is on a roll He has posted about Roll out your own JavaScript Interfaces in which he discusses the desire to use style from libraries such as prototype, jquery and friends, yet in a small bit of code where you don't want to use the library:

There are times when using a JavaScript library is called for. Building large web applications that use a wide array of utility functions that help aid in developing multi-tiered class systems, advanced UI components, complex event models, and heavy use of DOM scripting helpers. Yep. Those are all great.
However, there are other times when you don’t need all that. And often what we end up doing is just importing a few of our favorite functions as globals, and work off those. But what ends up happening in this case is that we lose the particular style that these libraries offer. For instance, I’d still like to be able to do something like this without a library.

Dustin would like to write something like this:

And to implement the magic he takes Prototypes $() and makes it a special object that can do much more:

You can see a demonstration at work.

[via Ajaxian]