PicLens is the most spectacular add-on for Firefox I happened to try in a while. It adds a cool and usable “3D wall interface” for navigating pictures from Flickr, Google Images, MySpace, deviantART, Facebook, Yahoo and other sites. You have to try it for understanding how much it can change your browsing experience, but I recorded a video demo that might give you an idea.
Finally I tried Seam carving (friendly called “Liquid resize”, “content aware scaling” or “intelligent image resizing”), the currently most buzzed technique for image post-production. It allows you to resize a picture “non uniformly while preserving their features, i.e. avoiding distortion of the important parts“. It fascinates you immediately, it seems magic, but it’s true and it works!
I just joined another social network that cached my attention thanks to my guru-colleague Marco Casario. SlideShare is the world’s largest community for sharing presentations on the web, and basically it’s like YouTube but with slides instead of video. Recently they added also a feature called Slidecast, which allows you to sync slides with an mp3, for example your comment.
I remember a day in late 2004 when I almost cried for the happiness when I discovered a standalone utility for playing Flash Video files (FLV). It saved me a lot of time because it allowed me to playback immediately videos in FLV format, without even opening the Flash editor: it was just a double click on the file name or a drag-and-drop over the utility. That could have been somehow handy for a common user, but for a developer involved in Flash projects with video was super useful: it became immediately one of my most used Flash companions.
Not long ago I was tempted to abandon MT (Mediatemple) in favour of Site5 and actually I did it. Even if I had been happy with MediaTemple for about 4 years, I was concerned by the negative experience that a friend of mine had with them. Forums and blogs made me discover that some serious problems were appearing in their (GS) Grid Service Hosting.
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