Structure in the flow

I’ve gone through many posts along the lines of “oh I haven’t got time for this blog”, here’s another. Well in fact it’s the last one, as I won’t see this as a “blog” anymore. Let’s call this a “website”, like in the good old days when everything was edited manually and the concept of “timeline” wasn’t as important (Why would content like this be ordered chronologically anyway? It was trendy, I guess…). I’ve thought about doing this for a while, found a few hours to do it this morning, so here we go!

I’m still using WordPress, as it’s a good content management system anyway. Also, it’ll still allow for changes to be tracked in the sidebar.

I also changed the theme to something slightly more traditional; I find it easier on the eyes. It’s my first blog’s theme, in fact.

Just a note concerning two small new features I added to my Javascript speed reading (RSVP) app:

• You can now change the speed using your keyboard’s up/down arrows keys
• Text and background colors may now be selected using a color picker (based on JsColor)

These were features some users asked for either on the blog or in the comment form in the app. Thanks for the feedback!

Just a quick post to underline a Google Reader feature which, though simple, may come in handy: creating a feed for “feed-less” sites. It basically tracks updates on pages by periodically checking the pages you choose.

I need to mention that for table-based pages (or any page with recurring pattern but no feed) there are existing services such as Dapper which will allow you to create a more sophisticated and precise feed by creating a page scrapper on-the-fly.

It’s the kind of feature for which I tend to find more and more uses as time goes on. One significant example I’m thinking of is personal homepages of friends and people who haven’t yet integrated a feed: it’d be nice to be alerted when they change.

Update the next day: there seems to be plenty other similar services. ChangeDetection.com is an old one, sending updates via email. For others, just Google for “monitor page changes”.

(To be perfectly honest, from a programmer’s point of view, I guess you could do the same by having a list of URLs and setting up a script to periodically check whether significant changes have been made (i.e. using a “diff”). Yet I never took the time to do it, and now that’s it’s easily available…)

(Via this LifeHacker article)

Here’s a little memory game I just finished, using jQuery. It’s very bare bones, and I might add features to it, but it works, doesn’t have a bunch of ads floating around (like most do on the Web), and the board size can be changed (up to 60 total cards for the moment).

For the context: when we launched Clusterify, one of the early projects I proposed was a simple “matching pairs” game. Some almost-complete code I wrote up has been sitting on my computer ever since, just needing a few last fixes, and the addition of actual pictures. So I did those last fixes, adapted stock photos for it, and now here’s the game.

Changelog

• 2010.02.22: as per a commenter’s (Jebadiah’s) suggestion, added a score and a timer. Also, images are now shuffled so the last ones (cats and birds) show up in the smaller grid.

Augmented reality is the concept of adding information to the stream your senses already provide about the surrounding scene. Concretely, these last few months, a lot of software has appeared for smartphones, taking advantage of the integration of a camera with a good-enough screen. Here are a few examples:

• The recent Google Goggles and Google Shopper. Goggles adds information to objects you take a picture of, or uses GPS to retrieve information about shops you walk by and add it to the picture (most AR apps I’ve seen focus on this). Shopper adds information about the current product.
  • Another feature of Goggles is the instant translation of text in a picture. This could be quite handy when travelling.
• There are augmented reality “browsers” which provide a platform to add features to. For example, Layar lets you select “Layers” of information to add to the scene.
  • There’s also Junaio, a browser which allows the addition of 3D animations to the image, with lots of potential for entertainment apps.
• Wikitude uses augmented reality to add traveller’s guide type information to the scene.
• TAT augmented ID: use the cam to get a good image of someone to identify, and this uses an online face recognition service to provide public information they want to share if they’ve set up their “public ID card” (Twitter profile etc.).

Augmented reality appears a lot in science fiction. For the most part, though, it involves directly augmenting the field of view of a person. If you’ve ever seen Ghost in the shell (the movie, especially the second one), you’ll know what I mean. I remember being quite excited when I read about the possibility of added information through semi-transparent head-mounted displays (this video demonstrates, though in this case it’s not transparent at all, and obviously not something you’d walk with in your everyday life ). Cam-and-screen is more reachable for the moment, I guess, and a lot less cumbersome.