Filed under: Fun, News, Microsoft
Spectra Visual Newsreader: get your news in bright rainbow colors
Are you bored of reading news sites that all look the same, or staring at rows and rows of headlines in your RSS reader? MSNBC has something you might want to see. The new Spectra Visual Newsreader grabs MSNBC stories, color-coded by category, and sends them flying around your screen like index cards in a wind tunnel. Maybe you don't want to get your news this way all the time, but it's fun to play with.
Spectra has three modes: you can put it on automatic and let the camera fly around your floating news stories, or you can leave the camera in place, watching the stories spin. The third mode is the most interesting: it lets you use a webcam to manipulate the stories with "human interaction." Unfortunately, it didn't want to cooperate with a MacBook's built-in iSight.
We don't want to completely write off Spectra, because it's a lot of fun, but it seems like MSNBC put a lot of work into a cool toy that doesn't do too much. Webcam integration in browsing is definitely an interesting trend to explore, so it would be great to see that feature working on more platforms. For now, though, we'll just get our news via RSS.
[via Josh Spear]
Spectra has three modes: you can put it on automatic and let the camera fly around your floating news stories, or you can leave the camera in place, watching the stories spin. The third mode is the most interesting: it lets you use a webcam to manipulate the stories with "human interaction." Unfortunately, it didn't want to cooperate with a MacBook's built-in iSight.
We don't want to completely write off Spectra, because it's a lot of fun, but it seems like MSNBC put a lot of work into a cool toy that doesn't do too much. Webcam integration in browsing is definitely an interesting trend to explore, so it would be great to see that feature working on more platforms. For now, though, we'll just get our news via RSS.
[via Josh Spear]
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
