Tools
Transparent App Development – the Panic Board
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 | API, Business, Mashup, Project Management, Tools, Tracking, Utilities, WebApps, computer graphics, visual effects | No Comments
While there are probably a good number of apps that I use on a daily basis, there are only a few dvelopement companies behind these tools that I actually have a strong admiration/nerd-crush for. One of these companies is Panic, creator of my all-time favorite FTP client and Web Development tools Transmit & Coda. On their blog they typically show-off upcoming features, status updates on various projects and just all-around random shit that they find interesting online. Trust me, while it’s definitely a company blog they’ve got a loyal following thanks to the interesting posts that pepper the typical product/marketing dev. updates. This is a prime example. They just posted a pic/feature-list on a new project that they’ve been working on that’s an easy-to-digest project status-board, or as they’ve called it “the panic board.” Primarily using AJAX this status board will give any team member privy to their internal network a one-screen update on where in the development cycles any number of projects might be in. Not only that but according to the blog it also incorporates streaming twitter updates, email announcements, the company calendar and even the local Tri-Met Bus Arrival calendar for employees who rely on the bus to get to and from work (hey, they’ve got an API, why not use it?!). The blog post then goes on to make any data nerd squeal with the admission that they’re using a 46″ Samsung LCD Video Wall Display to keep the team within eyeshot of the status board. Very cool.
Now by no means is this the first or even one of the first examples of global ’status board’ type pages that have been setup for both internal and external use. One of my favorite examples of a public project status page is the one featured on the right in the header image, found over on the Culture Code company website. These are the guys behind the OSX & iPhone to-do application called “Things.” They’ve created a project status page in the form of an airport arrival/departure screen. What’s cool about this is as the user you’re able to see not only the status on various product updates, but also see who in the company is working on that particular issue and when they last updated the sheet.
Other notable one-page project update tools is one recently put in place by the Boulder office of ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky, shown below.
It’s a quick way of seeing how far along any given project is in the office, sorting by account, due date, job-type, Creative Director or Producer assigned to the piece. It’s also got a status bar so if you’re across the room you can see at a glance whether or not something has already started (or is about to be finished). They apparently have this sucker projected on the main wall in the inner-depths of the office. Having been forced to deal with so many archiac ways of managing projects at advertising agencies, this is definitely a step in the right direction (if you’re a project manager/producer/in the traffic dept.). I’m sure the creatives will hate this visual reminder of what work they haven’t done yet….so bonus points are awarded there. What it needs though is some color, maybe even little avatars/graphics to help people find specific types of projects without having to scan the entire board…just a thought.
A Twitter Power Users Top Tricks
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 | API, Hack, Tools, Twitter, Unusual, Utilities | No Comments
Here are some twitter tools/tricks that you’ll probably never see in 99% of those ‘twitter lists’ out there. When you have so many applications that do either the same thing but with a different face or don’t really do anything at all, these are some tricks/tools that will actually help you stay productive…especially if you’re a Twitter/data junkie.
TweepML
Before there was twitter lists, there was TweepML. The funny thing is I still use this more than twitter lists because you can easily import/export your lists in csv format. Essentially its simple format designed to help share lists of twitter users. Plus you can auto-follow part or all of TweepML lists directly from within the site. two thumbs up.
TwitPic JSON API
This app was released upon the world by Remy Sharp when he wanted an easier way to pull out all of his uploaded photos from TwitPic (Their API only allows you to upload to the site, not download from your account).Source is available on GitHub.
Twavatar
If you’ve ever developed a twitter app that pulls a users profile picture you’ve undoubtedly run into the problem that occurs every time that they change it, all of a sudden the link doesn’t work and the photo’s gone! Well, fret no more because Damon Cortesi (@dacort) put out an appspot hosted permalink to be able to grab anyone’s updated twitter profile picture. Very useful.
Amy Iris – An AI chat bot for twitter. This one’s a very easily adaptable AI chat bot for twitter. The possibilities are endless for adaption into your projects. Check it out, it’s really a cool framework that they give you.
Now the last one isn’t a tool but rather a Twitter trick:
Want to download ANYONE’s previous 3,200 tweets? Easy! Just fire off the following curl command replacing where it says username with the desired tweeter’s name and you’ll soon have the last 3,200 tweets of theirs all to yourself. This one is also courtesy of @dacort.
curl -O “http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/username.xml?count=100&page=[1-32]“
The Giant List of 120+ Google Wave Bots
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 | Tools, google | No Comments
Here’s a giant list of over 120 Google Wave Robots that you can add to your account! Enjoy!
Read Onlie readonliebot@appspot.com – Records the original wave content. Whenever it’s edited, the content is replaced with the original. Simple as that.
Seekdroid – seekdroid@appspot.com – You can list Robots, add them and find them out, easy to use. In continuous development. Website with all the information seekdroid.appspot.com.
Taggy – taggy-wave@appspot.com – Recognize #hashtags and add them as tags to the wave.
BingyBot – Bingybot@appspot.com – Answers your questions using the Bing.com search engine
Dr Maps – dr-maps@appspot.com – Updates a wave by inserting a map associated to an address.
Dr Weather – shiny-sky@appspot.com – Gives the weather for a City
Embedded Search Results – wave-sandbox@appspot.com – Web and Image searches inline.
FML Blipper – fmlblipper@appspot.com – displays random FML story from www.fmylife.com
Grauniady – grauniady@appspot.com – Searches the latest items from The Guardian for a given phrase.
Stocky – stocky-wave@appspot.com – Detects stock symbols from a wave and updates it with the live stock price.
Wavedirectory – wavedirectory@appspot.com – a bot for public waves, which adds the wave to a directory and lets it be evaluated.
Wavethingy – wavethingy@appspot.com – Searches Amazon for DVDs and books, and gives the author a cut of any purchases made off the links.
WorldCat-Bot – worldcat-bot@appspot.com – Provides links to www.worldcat.org searches, based on user-defined queries.
Tocgen – tocgen@appspot.com – Table of Contents auto-generated and updated based on the h1,h2,h3,h4 in a wave.
Polly the Pollster ( polly-wave@appspot.com ): Creates and distributes multiple choice poll questions.
Yelpful ( yelpful@appspot.com ): Adds an in-wave interface to Yelp.com
RSSyBot ( rssybot@appspot.com ): Adds an RSS feed to Wave.
TwitUsernames ( twitusernames@appspot.com ): Links @usernames to Twitter.com.
Blog bot ( blog-bot@appspot.com ): Publishes waves to blog posts.
Aesthetic Bots Emoticony ( emoticonbot@appspot.com ): Turns smiley faces into images.
Sweepy ( sweepy-wave@appspot.com ): Removes empty blips.
Silly Bots Eliza the Robot Shrink ( elizarobot@appspot.com ): Talks to you when no one else will.
Swedish Chef ( borkforceone@appspot.com ): Bork bork bork!
Flippy ( flippy-wave@appspot.com ): Flips text upside down.
Bouncy – ( bouncy-wave@appspot.com ) – Bounces users (bots only for now) out of the wave
Public – public@a.gwave.com – gives a wave the public feature
blog-wave@appspot.com – posts the wave to your Blogger blog
Emoticony – emoticonbot@appspot.com – Turns smiley faces into images.
Flippy – flippy-wave@appspot.com – flips text upsidedown
Kanye West – imma-let-u-finish@appspot.com – Kanye West bot… much lulz: Kanye West Public Wave
last-robot@appspot.com – shows a user’s last played song on last.fm
Polly – polly-wave@appspot.com – Poll bot
Sweepy – sweepy-wave@appspot.com – Cleans out empty “blips” from your wave
Twitusernames – twitusernames@appspot.com – Converts @usernames into Twitter.com urls
Eliza – elizarobot@appspot.com – The Google Wave Psychologist
Hangman – wavehangman@appspot.com – Play hangman with a bot
BotURL – boturl@appspot.com – Converts full urls into hyperlinks (which wave seems to do)
Yelpful – yelpful@appspot.com – Adds an in-wave interface to Yelp.com
RSSyBot – rssybot@appspot.com – Adds an RSS feed to Wave.
Blog bot – blog-bot@appspot.com – Publishes waves to blog posts.
Swedish Chef – borkforceone@appspot.com – Bork bork bork!
Wave Alpha – py-robot@appspot.com – Uses Wolfram Alpha to calculate clever stuff and query Wolfram Alpha.
WaveGroupy – wavegroupy@appspot.com – A browsable group aggregator for public waves
WaveVotely – wavevotely@appspot.com – With a tiny gadget, votely allows you to vote public waves up/down; enabling high-quality content to float up.
Wikify – wikifier@appspot.com – Adds Wikipedia links for topics
MPP – wave-xmpp@appspot.com – Allows you to subscribe to waves so that your receive notifications via XMPP when users modify them (Confirmed that this works outside the sandbox!)
Tweety – tweety-wave@appspot.com – Displays your twitter feed in a Wave
Skimmy – wave-skimmy@appspot.com – Similar to Emoticony, but it turns faces into animated images.
FML – fmylifey@appspot.com – Upon being added to Wave, it will announce its presence by posting a random FML
Piratify – piratify@appspot.com – Converts wave text into pirate-speak
RickRolley – rickrolley@appspot.com – Rick Roll a wave (please do not use this one in public, god will kill a kitten)
Rosy Etta – rosy@appspot.com – Translation bot
Woot – woot@appspot.com -
Wave Moderator – wave-moderator@appspot.com
ICUBots – icubots@appspot.com – Googlewavebots.info’s bot spider
Wave Archive – wavearchive@appspot.com
Embeddy – embeddy@appspot.com
SlashChuck – slashchuckbot@appspot.com
WP Bot – wp-bot@appspot.com
Verse Seeker – verseseeker@appspot.com
Wave Email Notifications – wave-email-notifications@appspot.com
Quran Wave – quranwave@appspot.com
My Wave ID – mywaveid@appspot.com – Creates a blip at the end of the wave, containing the current wave ID, both in “wave” and full url formats. Can just be taken out of the wave afterwards (only works upon being added).
Easy Public – easypublic@appspot.com
ComicSans Killer – comic-sans-killer@appspot.com
BaaS – buddyasaservice@appspot.com
Wavy – wavy-robot@appspot.com
Board Game Geeky – boardgamegeeky@appspot.com – Adds links for capitalised boardgame titles to the appropriate page on http://boardgamegeek.com
Contrepwave – contrepwaverobot@appspot.com – French robot that diplays all the spoonerisms containing the longest word of a blip (if size >5) / Robot listant les contrepeteries contenant le mot le plus long du blip, si ce mot est plus long que 5 lettres.
Eliza – ogenex@appspot.com – An implementation of the Eliza chatbot borrowed from the NLTK.
Rude chatbot – notatory@appspot.com – An obnoxious chatbot borrowed from the Natural Language Processing Toolkit.
TooAngel Wave – wave@appspot.com – A self learning robot, that will respond to a reply in a more humanoid way
Converty – converty-bot@appspot.com – This bot will do in place unit conversions for simple units. Abbreviations not yet supported.
Calcbot – calcbot@appspot.com – This bot will do in place calculations for simple mathematical expressions and allow you to use user defined variables.
Cartoony – cartoonybot@appspot.com – Replaces the text of every submitted blip with a cartoon balloon that contains the text instead. Colors the balloons based on username.
Dice Bot – dice-bot@appspot.com – Dice-rolling bot. Dice Bot will replace XdY (X is the number of dice; Y is the number of sides) with the results of those rolls.
Fnordlinky – fnordlinks@appspot.com – Replaces “PMID ” with article information from PubMed.
Hearty Emobot – hearty-emobot@appspot.com – Replaces ASCII art with wingding characters.
i-cron – i-cron@appspot.com – Evaluates Python expressions. Looks at blips in event, searches for CALC() macros and executes Python code using exec().
IMDbotty – imdbotty@appspot.com – Replaces links to movies/TV shows on IMDb with a gadget that displays basic information (cover, title, rating, etc…).
Inbeddable – inbeddable@appspot.com – Converts links to embedded objects
Insulty – megabytemb123@appspot.com – Information Needed
IPA Bot – ipa-bot@appspot.com – Changes normal letters into special characters used for phonetics.
Plotzie – plotzie@appspot.com – Plots sparklines from your data.
Simlerbot – simlerbot@appspot.com – Does www.simler.com link formatting (@ links to twitter profiles, # links to twitter searches, ~ links to simler profiles, [] links to simler tag page.)
Smiley – Smiley_wave@appspot.com – Replaces common ascii smileys with image emoticons.
Syntaxy – kasyntaxy@appspot.com – Syntaxy does blip-by-blip syntax highlighting for a variety of languages including Python, Java, C, C++, html, css and javascript.
Watexy – watexy@appspot.com – Use LaTeX mathematical language in your Waves!
Bard Bot – bardbot@appspot.com – Play many text adventure games.
Roshambo – roshambowave@appspot.com – Play Roshambo (Rock / Paper / Scissors).
Groupy – groupy-robot@appspot.com – Robot to manage groups.
Groupy2 – groupy-the-bot@appspot.com – Robot to manage groups.
drop.io – mikeswaverobot@appspot.com – Creates a drop and puts the info into the wave whenever the robot is added as a participant.
PlonieBot – ploniebot@appspot.com – Brings wave document editing capabilities to the Plone CMS
Poppy – poppywave@appspot.com – Helps bridge Google Wave conversations to email users outside the Wave.
Starify – starifybot@appspot.com – Lets you star waves, in sort of bookmarking style.
Twiliobot – twiliobot@appspot.com – Transforms phone numbers into click-to-call links. If user clicks a link, a call is placed to his phone and to the number in the link. The call can be transcribed and inserted into the wave as text with a link to the audio.
Wave Live Messenger – wavelivemessenger@appspot.com – Allows you to chat to your windows live messenger contacts from inside a wave.
Rosy Etta – rosy@wavesandbox.com – Translator (40 Languages).
Aunt Rosie – aunt-rosie@appspot.com – Translator bot
Dr Maps – dr-maps@appspot.com – Updates a wave by inserting a map associated to an address.
Dr Weather – shiny-sky@appspot.com – Gives the weather for a City
Embedded Search Results – wave-sandbox@appspot.com – Web and Image searches inline.
FML Blipper – fmlblipper@appspot.com – displays random FML story from www.fmylife.com
Grauniady – grauniady@appspot.com – Searches the latest items from The Guardian for a given phrase.
Stocky – stocky-wave@appspot.com – Detects stock symbols from a wave and updates it with the live stock price.
Wavethingy – wavethingy@appspot.com – Searches Amazon for DVDs and books, and gives the author a cut of any purchases made off the links.
11 Free Sets of Awesome eCommerce Icons For Your Store
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 | Marketing, Tools, computer graphics, design, eCommerce | No Comments
Here are 11 FREE awesomely amazing icon sets to help out your eCommerce/Store design.
These are all free for both commercial and personal use (so have at ‘em!).
Glossy eCommerce icons
Shopping Cart Icons
css Globe Icons
Shopping Basket Icon
Milky – A ‘green’ themed vector set.
Credit Card Logos
Credit Card 3D Icon Set
Chalkwork Payments
Weby Icon Set
e-Shop Icons
Sienna Icons
TweepML – Share Lists Of Twitter Users
Thursday, September 10th, 2009 | Open Source, Tools, Twitter, Utilities | No Comments
Just came across a new service that’s been officially approved by Twitter.com: introducing TweepML, an XML based format for sharing lists of twitter user accounts. If you know what OPML is then you already know the concept behind TweepML, it provides a free universal framework for importing, exporting and creating twitter ‘groups’ that can be shared or even stored as a backup of important accounts. The main website, www.tweepml.org, also includes a free follow tool that helps streamline following lists of users via your twitter account.
On the site it has various libraries and examples available to aid developers in implementing TweepML into new or existing apps. Currently the most popular lists seem to be the ones with the largest number of followers. I’d be willing to bet good money that this is already being used by spammers and/or marketers to cultivate their own twitter accounts targeting various ‘groups’ featured on the site…but then again, almost every tool or platform that is useful has the potential for grey/blackhat usage.
Interesting new format, it’s definitely going to make twitter account sharing (not to mention account duplication) a lot easier!
found via mashable
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