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13 Oct 2006Media-Convert.com is a great online tool that claims to be a "Document, Compressed archive, sound and video converter" - a swiss army knife of file format conversion no less.
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12 Oct 2006OmniDazzle, The Omni Group's latest product, allows you to animate your cursor on your machine. Imagine you are in the middle of a presentation. With a quick keystroke you activate OmniDazzle's Zoom effect, you select a portion of the screen and immediately a box pops up with that area magnified on your screen. Choose from 11 effects. The kids are going to love Pixiedust, which showers your screen with thousands of little stars as you move your cursor. Unlike those annoying sites where...
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12 Oct 2006I'm a fan of Edelman's Steve Rubel's blog. Earlier this month, I linked from it to the Web 2.0 Toolbar, an aggregator of user-generated content in various forms. The site describes the tool as a way to 'save time and keep up on the latest Web 2.0 news right from one browser toolbar. The Free Web 2.0 Toolbar aggregates the best of Social Search, Social Bookmarking, Social Pics, Social Video and Social News websites.' With the introduction of social media, we've been so inundated with data...
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11 Oct 2006I was reminded by Dan Brown during a recent meeting how rich in data Minard's map of Napoleon's march to Moscow is (published in 1861). I once attended a Tufte seminar where he stated that this might be the best statistical graphic ever drawn. You be the judge (click on the map). The tan line shows Napoleon's troops traveling from Paris to Moscow, the black line shows their return to Paris. The width of the lines represents the size of the troops. You will also see the actual number of...
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10 Oct 2006We, at Forum One, are intimately familiar with the various diagramming tools out there. We also regularly discuss which tools work best cross-platform (our company is split between PC & Mac users). There are many out there, most IAs and UI designers are partial to their tool. I'm a Visio and Omnigraffle user myself and while I like the tools, I see opportunities in both. My colleagues have dabbled in other applications including InDesign and ConceptDraw. A few not-so-new newbies I...
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10 Oct 2006For once I will not be ranting about Microsoft. Today it's about Adobe. Let me start by stating a simple fact. It should be easier to install software you pay $350 for than to pirate it. It takes less than an hour to search for, download and install a pirated version of any Adobe software packing. Installation of a version you've paid for should be even simpler. The fact that it has taken me almost 5 hours to install the latest version of Adobe Creative Suite CS2 is an insult. I feel the...
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9 Oct 2006NPR's Interactive Election Map makes the elections easy to digest with clean visuals, photos and brief descriptions. The only improvement I would make is allowing users to view more than one state at the same time. And maybe someday Alaska will be to scale (sigh). This map also made me wonder about the origin of the election color scheme. Here's the answer.
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7 Oct 2006Color Palette Generator is a handy web-based tool for generating a color palette from an image. I tried it out on WebJunction's logo.
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6 Oct 2006As I was working on a project for a client to redesign a login-protected site for their members, we discovered that members were often confused as to when they are on the member-only site, or on a part of the client's public site. We recommended that the member-only site have strong branding (or banner) to indicate that the member is logged in and on the member-only site. I found myself wondering whether we should recommend little symbols next to links that indicate when the member is leaving...
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4 Oct 2006When people come up with creative ideas like moo.com, I can only assume that print photos still have a lot of life left in them. Moo.com provides businesscard size prints for your Flickr photos. Not so with film cameras. They are definitely a dying breed, with digital camera sales surpassing film as of 2004. I sold my last 35mm camera 2 years ago on eBay.
