SSBs? Site-Specific Browsers, courtesy of Fluid.app.

Fluid is a slick little app that allows you to create unique browsers for a particular website. These new browsers appear as regular applications that you can leave in your Dock, or Applications folder. In the screenshot above, you can see the Unfuddle app that I made in about five minutes earlier today.

Pretty handy for those sites you tend to visit a lot, and leave open all day long. Plus, if a site supports it, you can get some fancy Coverflow browsing of the links in the page as well.

FluidApp.com

I seem to have an addiction when it comes to finding the best bug tracker out there - I’ve never been really been satisfied with the ones I’ve used in the past, and I’m just too lazy to write my own. As a result, I’ve ended up playing and installing a bunch of different apps, trying to find the bug tracker I like the most.

Read the rest of this entry »

Because all my friends are on Twitter.

Read the rest of this entry »

The last project I had the privilege of working on while at Footnote.com launched earlier today.

Interactive Vietnam Veterans Memorial

You can view the entire wall, and do more than just view the names of the men killed in the war - you learn about these men.

Initially, the info provided about these guys is just the basics - birth/death, military info, etc., however, as time goes on, and more content is added, you’ll be able to see photos, and read histories of these men. Much of this content will be user-contributed, by the friends and family of the men memorialized by this monument.

Working on this project was great - it was a chance to stretch my talents, and see what I could do as a Flash developer, but it also gave me a greater appreciation for the lives these men gave. I wasn’t alive during this time period, and so I can’t pretend to understand the full impact of the Vietnam War, or the impact that had on the lives of the people that lived it, but working on this project at least made a bit of history feel a bit more “real” to me.

With the recent release of Safari 3.1, I was curious to see a before and after comparison of how Safari 3.0 and 3.1 would render the Acid 3 test. For those who don’t know, the Acid tests are designed to determine how well a browser follows various web standards. Currently, no browsers pass the Acid3 test with 100%, but they are getting closer.

Once I checked out the two versions of Safari, I got curious to see how well some other browsers performed. And so here are the results of my completely unscientific testing, sorted by the respective scores of each browser. Now, on to the results!

Read the rest of this entry »

(This may be old news, but I was away from the intarwebs all day yesterday, so it’s news to me.)

The Pownce team released version 1 of the Pownce API yesterday

Hopefully we should start seeing some all-in-one Pownce/Twitter apps in the near future.

A while back I received an invite to try out reinvigorate - a service which aims to deliver real-time web stats for your sites, and I finally installed it on my blog.

As part of the service, they offer Snoop, which is a small application that you can run in the background, and will notify you whenever a new visitor arrives on your site. You can also setup custom notifications for more specific events if you like. It’s actually kinda fun to hear a little noise every time someone visits a post on my blog.

I’ve only been running it for about 20 minutes now, but so far it seems pretty slick. One thing I’ve noticed though is that they don’t seem to track is Flash Player version, but they do track Microsoft .NET installs. Personally, I’d think that the Flash info would be a little more useful.

reinvigorate is currently in a closed beta, but you can register for an invite, which they apparently are giving out on a “week(ish)” basis.

I just noticed this new feature of Google Maps over the weekend - you can now customize the directions Google provides, simply by dragging the provided route.

Last weekend, my wife & I decided to take our daughter to the zoo. The last time I’ve been to the zoo being a field trip back in elementary school, I needed some directions, so of course I went to Google. Just by tracing my cursor over the route, I noticed this slick little feature.
Read the rest of this entry »

Twitter Blocks is a kind of interesting way to visualize Twitter. It’s a Flash app that loads a timeline of tweets and arranges them in a 3D grid. It looks like it was launched about two weeks ago, and is a joint project between the folks at Twitter and Stamen Design.
Read the rest of this entry »

Saw this linked in a mailing list, and just had to share it:

Original: http://www.pauljamesdesign.com.au/breakdown.png