This is very good and bloomin useful! New from google maps. They have produced 360 degree views of streets in a few US cities to begin with. Try the link below for New York:
http://tinyurl.com/3bm34n (or go to google maps NY and select street view)
Click on a blue street or drag the little yellow dude onto one and get a nice panorama of the street itself. You can drag it around or follow the arrows to the next street. Pretty awesome…
Thanks to the excellent Googlemapsmania blog where I found this info this morning and am exploring many many other google maps functions and mash-ups. Go there yourself as it’s an amazing source of information.
http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com
Popularity: 24% [?]
The Cutty Sark was (and hopefully will be again) a majestic ship and very much part of the British maritime history. Not to mention a big draw for people visited Greenwich. I loved going there as a kid and still find joy walking past it on my way to the pub!
The fire is a bit of a tragedy but looks like it can still be saved. Show your support on the Cutty Sark website. It is worth saving.
http://www.cuttysark.org.uk/
Popularity: 35% [?]
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1937
This is neat and simple. I prefer macs but have to use a pc because of MS Project and Visio – but this adds a button to your firefox that onmouseover shows you all your open websites in a mac f8 (?) type of way. Pretty handy.
Popularity: 10% [?]
Blue Organizer (I’ll forgive the US spelling!)
http://www.adaptiveblue.com/
This is very interesting and pretty powerful. At the basic level, it understands the context of web page you are viewing and then (upon right-click) gives you access to related links on google, flickr, wikipedia, delicious etc. Also does some very nice stuff for you bloggers out there that I haven’t quite investigated yet.
“What is BlueOrganizer?
BlueOrganizer is the new smart-browsing technology for Firefox. It automatically recognizes things like books, wine, travel destinations and offers contextual shortcuts between your favorite sites. With BlueOrganizer you can instantly send books to your Amazon Wishlist, find wines with similar taste on Wine.com, lookup maps on Google – all from one simple, personalized menu.”
Popularity: 12% [?]
This is a very interesting way of searching for Amazon products.
Amaznode: “Amazon related product search” that lets you type in any word, then creates a web of Amazon products that are in some way related to that word. The process is similar to what Amazon does when it recommends products for its users, except instead of basing the search on prior purchases (which could have been gifts for very boring people, thereby throwing off the whole system), Amaznode bases the search off of any one keyword.
It displays the results in a good visual fashion. So if you searched for ‘Rome’ it show you related books and DVDs etc but all grouped together nicely and you can check out the ifo before you click through.
http://amaznode.fladdict.net/
Popularity: 10% [?]
The Pierces are a fantastic band from across the pond whose album ‘Thirteen tales of love and revenge‘ came out fairly recently. So I bought it the other week without having heard too much of the sisters work. And I have to say I was pleasantly surprised!
The song writing is top notch and the tunes themselves draw you in nicely and generally keep you bobbing along. I’m a big fan of ‘Turn on Billie’ and ‘Kill Kill Kill’ and the first album track ‘Secret’ is beautiful in a slightly dark and scary manner!
Go and check them out as you will like it and they do come across as intelligent downright nice lasses; who you probably wouldn’t want to hack off!
http://www.thepiercesmusic.com/
Popularity: 14% [?]
Whilst I’m on the subject of useful web design tools I thought I’d share the Gemini issue tracker from Countersoft with you.
A lot of agencies tend to treat the whole testing and quality assurance process far too lightly but that is a major issue for another day. At the very least you should have somewhere to flag and track bugs and issues, assign priorities and actually assign the issues to someone to deal with. Gemini does all this and much more. I’ve used it at DNA and LIDA and the Head of QA at DNA, Peter Lewis-Dale, recommends it highly.
And he knows his onions.
Popularity: 83% [?]
I’ve been working in the web world for about ten years now and haven’t ever really seen a decent off the shelf content management system for flash based sites. But the guys at 10cms showed me a demo of their new-ish flash cms when I was working at LIDA . This looks like a top tool and the technical director at LIDA (my good friend Jon Chandler) has seen the updated version and says it looks like a good bet if you want to content manage small flash campaign sites.
http://www.10cms.com/
Popularity: 17% [?]
