It was bound to happen sooner or later, given the iPhone’s popularity. Yesterday, Microsoft quietly added the photo displaying app SeaDragon Mobile, its first-ever iPhone application, to the App Store. Some think that Microsoft Office for iPhone can’t be far behind. SeaDragon Mobile is basically a demo of Microsoft Live Labs’ photo display platform. Users can use the app to do such things as zoom in on photos with incredible resolution. The app does this by storing different resolutions, and shows you only the portions requested at a given time. Why release an iPhone version of an MS product? Alex...
Today, Microsoft released an alpha version of its own open source content management system, Oxite. The source code for the software is available under the Microsoft Public License. While Microsoft mostly describes Oxite as a blogging platform, the Oxite team also points out that you could use it as a content management system to develop more or less any type of site. Oxite currently powers Microsoft's own Mix Online and also uses some recycled parts from Channel 9 . Sponsor Some of the major features of the software include support for Gravatars, pingbacks, trackbacks, RSS feeds, commenting, and the MetaWebLog...
This is a really interesting project that uses an AVR micro-controller to crate a 1-key keyboard. I can think of a thousand uses for this type of device. The idea for a 1-key keyboard comes from the need as an interaction designer to make "cheap, quick and dirty prototypes." When creating a quick screen-based demo in e.g. Adobe Flash, a common way of quickly prototyping physical actions is to assign actions to certain key presses on a keyboard. In more advanced prototypes, physical hacks to the circuit board from a keyboard are also often used to interface custom buttons...
Social entertainment center Boxee has been one of Beet's favorite start-ups since its alpha launch this summer. It's been improving steadily since then, and today it announced that Netflix subscribers can now stream movie's through the site's Watch Instantly feature and that is has expanded its television content to include shows like Buffy The Vampire Slayer from thewb.com. I interviewed Boxee CEO Avner Ronen in July and he gave me a demo of its sleek interface. You can read my previous post here. In October, Boxee introduced a patch to jailbreak AppleTV, but the new Netflix access unfortunately doesn't work...
We’ve just seen a live demo of a favourite location being added to Ovi maps, where a local is added on the web version then updated over the air to a series 60 device. Here’s the proof. Posted by email from MIR Live (posterous)...
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Nintendo really hit the mark with the Wii. Now all they have to do is sit back and laugh at every lame attempt by others to capitalize on their motion controller. Take this thing for instance. 3DiJoy has unveiled its FlingPC motion controller that is basically an accelerometer-equipped Bluetooth remote and a USB dongle. For your $99 you’ll get ten custom (and rest assured crappy) 3D games. Just look at the image above. Asian babies love Wii knock-offs. They are a cheap gateway to the overpriced highs they’ll get from higher quality game systems once they reach puberty. This thing...
Zoho on Tuesday is rolling out CloudSQL, a layer of code that allows corporate developers to access their Zoho application data through a number of different dialects of the SQL database access language. Data stored in Zoho services--so far, only Zoho DB & Reports--can be accessed now not just via APIs, but from standard SQL drivers like JDBC and ODBC. Support for these traditional client/server technologies should make it easier for developers to transition to cloud-based data, should they be moving in that direction. (Credit: Zoho) I have not tested the performance of this new middleware layer into Zoho's...
Filed under: Web services, Open Source, Social Software, BrowsersOpenID is a really great concept. The ability to use a single digital identity across the web and avoid having to sign up for yet another user account is a real productivity boon. More and more high profile sites and services are adopting OpenID, but the project still hasn't gained the traction that many of us think it deserves. This is partially because it still isn't easy to use OpenID -- or even find out if a site supports OpenID -- on all services. MySpace, Flock and Vidoop think they've come across...
We released a couple of Wordpress themes over the last months. Some of them were praised, the others were torn apart, but we always tried to always offer a variety of different styles. And today is no exception. Today we are glad to release ASCII One — a free professional Wordpress-theme created by Piotr Godek. This theme was designed with the main focus being on typography — all graphical elements are made only of characters, and it holds for visuals, too. The theme is released with and via Smashing Magazine and is released as a gift to its readers....
