Whomwah.com

This is really nice. I’ve had a quick play today and it has better functionality that some dedicated apps I’ve used. There’s lots of JavaScript cleverness going on behind the scenes as per normal with the latest batch of google tools. Go have a play.

Typetester is a great new web app that allows you to compare screen fonts at different settings. It is still in beta but as far as I can see (I’ve only checked it out using Safari) it seems to work fine.

What a great idea too, I will be using this myself as well as passing it onto friends.

I have been checking out a newly launched Web 2.0 site named www.blinksale.com. As the sales pitch says: It’s the easiest way to send invoices online, and I think I might just agree with them. I find sending invoices a real pain in the butt, and keeping track of them and making sure people pay on time etc even more of a pain. This Site makes it all so simple and it looks just great. I don’t think I send enough invoices to warrant the monthly charge so I am sticking with the Free option for the time being.

I advise people to go give it a try and see what you think yourselves.

In honor of the first manned Moon landing, which took place on July 20, 1969, Google added some NASA imagery to the Google Maps interface to help you pay your own visit to our celestial neighbor. Try a full zoom for the comedy effect.

So I have been I had been using Odeo for a good few weeks and still like it a lot. I love the idea, but I guess on a personal level I actually liked the whole interface and web experience more. It is so well thought out and clean. It’s a joy to use and proves how cool web applications can be.

There’s obviously a lot of DHTML (I’m trying to stop using the A the word), which gives it that very functional pretty layer. I also love the touches of Flash, only where needed. This is something I talked to people a lot back in the early Flash 5 days when I was much more into using the medium. Back then it was trying to get across that making Flash intros is bad as is making a predominantly text based site Flash only.

Getting back to Pod-casting, I have also just downloaded the new version of itunes (4.9) and have been trying the Pod-casting functionality in that. I have to say I am preferring the itunes way right now just because it is all integrated and therefore much simpler to manage. They still have some work to do though. Like my friend Jamie was telling me, it would be good it you could choose to just keep the last X downloads of a subscription. You can only do this globally at the moment. This would be useful because sometimes I want to keep every download in the case of Mixes, but in other cases I just want the latest to be kept in the case of things like latest film reviews.

One of the little things I like about Odeo is that they produce an RSS feed of the items you are subscribed to and have not downloaded. I have this in the right hand side of whomwah homepage and it is useful for me to see when I need to go back to Odeo and download the latest stuff. I know I could just keep the odeo app running all the time but I try to keep the amount of apps I have running down to the important ones.

This is a quick post just to say that Google Maps have started to provide close satellite shots of the UK. So far personally speaking, I can only see my own flat in London, oh and check out the fact the shot was taken when a plane was flying over head. Also, because the shot is taken at a slight angle the actual position of our flat is slighly out on the satellite view. I can’t yet see my mums house down in Dorset, but hey they getting there. Man Google so rule the world right now.

Update: They have also released their API to the public at last. You can get an API key here. The documentation is here.

This must have only just happened, but when I posted a link to del.icio.us this evening they have changed the screen I’m greeted with. They have joined the *buzz word alert* DHTML revolution and added the Google Suggest like functionality when you come to add keywords for that entry. I say like as I don’t think they are actually getting the information from the sever but are just looking through the list of tags displayed on the page already and are using that information to decide which tags to suggest you use. This is a feature I have wished for for a while and will make tagging links much easier and more accurate.

It actually looks like a lot of work has been going on behind the scenes at del.icio.us, I will hunt further and post about it if I find anything of use.

Have you checked out Amazon’s use of AJAX, which comes in the form of their Diamond Search. Looks very nice with little sliders an all. Just a shame it won’t work in Safari. Now it’s all well and good having these funky apps with there clever functionality, but surely if you’re not gonna bother making it work at all, in one of the more Standards Compliant browsers then is all the hard work really worth it.

I have only just seen this. These guys have hacked google maps and are using it to show flickr photo locations in. This process is known as GeoTagging and this is the cleverest version I have seen; and I might add, is apparently ok with google (so far). I also read whilst snooping that one of the google maps engineers hinted that google may well realease an API for google maps so people would no longer need to hack it. I look forward to this.

I have been using Ta-da Lists for a couple of months to keep track of the list to things I need to do, read, watch extra. It is such a simple idea. If you have never heard of it, it is a simple online way to keep track of all the little things you need to get done. It’s free and well worth checking out.