Whomwah.com

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.

[UPDATE] Hurrah, just got back from stage one of my holidays and I’ve just found out that we’re on the Apple site now.

After what seems like an age, we have managed to get the BBC Listen Live Widget live. This is a Dashboard Widget requiring MAC OSX Tiger and the Real Player Plugin.

I finished it around 2 months ago and had been close to bursting as I saw the stream of other radio player type widgets appearing every week. With a big help from Tom who provided the graphics and decided the feel of the player, we have a great little utility thats sits in the background and allows you to listen to BBC national radio stations on your desktop computer as if it had a built-in radio.

You can download it here: BBC Listen Live Widget and I guess via Apple’s site if they decide to stick it up there. We would also appreciate any feedback, as this will allow us to go forward and improve it in the future.

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.

Got back from @Media 2005 today. This was a 2 day conference held in a College near Waterloo, London. There were presentations from Jeffery Zeldman, Douglas Bowman, Andy Budd, Molly E. Holzschlag and Jeremy Keith. There were more, of which you can find via the link above.

The first day was not as good as the second; A lot of speaker back slapping and product placement. I couldn’t believe Douglas Bowman spoke about Wired.com. I know it was a very important site when it came out, but it came out 3 years ago and he must have done much cooler and advanced sites since. He made up for it on the second day with his walk through the design and development of Blogger site. Everyone who spoke have their presentations available online which I will link to once I find the URL.

Final point. This conference had all the big names in CSS and Web Standards, and was full of internet geeks and nerds. But the venue had NO internet connection !!

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.

I see that flickr (after much badgering from users) have changed the way they display individuals images. They used to show the image inside a flash wrapper. Their Ajax guru Eric Costello has now converted it all over to DHTML. It works really well and loads images faster. It’s a really clever use of DHTML, and does many other tricks to boot. You can get a link to a presentation they did on the subject via the link above.

A friend of mine Mike at Do Not Remove had a link to this great JavaScript photo gallery on his site. It seems a lot of hard work has gone into this by Scott Upton and Travis Beckham. But blimey it’s paid off, it just works so smoothly.

Good work guys.