Flashforward2008 is going to be in San Francisco this August. This annual conference is directed at Flash designers and developers and those who aspire to be called a designer or developer. Every year Flashforward features a Film Festival with open nominations of the best Flash content out there. In 2008 the categories have changed to the following:
Application
Cartoon/Story/Narrative
Code
Experimental/Art
Game
Motion Graphics
Navigation/Experience
Sound
Typography
Video
Anyone can submit links to Flash based works in all categories that are 'innovative and compelling.' Previous winners include Paper Vision 3d, the MoMA Contemporary Voice exhibition, and the amazing Tokyo Plastic. If you do submit a nomination to Flashforward2008 via the official film festival page, please let us know in the comments below with a link. The deadline for nominations is Father's Day, June 15, 2008.
Ever wish that Derek Zoolander had decided to open a night school? Or maybe opened a secondary school, so that once those kids that couldn't read good or do other stuff too well got better at it, they could go on to learn to do other things? What if Zoolander teamed up with the University of Phoenix, and offered online courses?
Your prayers have been answered, sort of. Gramlee is an online service for grammar checking and proofreading (and yes, there are definitely differences between the two). The idea behind Gramlee is fairly simple. You just cut and paste your writing into the Gramlee submission form, supply your email address, and an editor (yes, a live person) will proofread it for you and make revisions.
There's no word on what the Gramlee submission form does with smart quotes, but they do seem to heavily recommend a text editor (like Notepad) for document creation. There's no reason why you couldn't use Word, but we're having a lot of fun imagining editors using some colorful language when they get certain document formats.
To get you hooked, the first hundred words are free. You can buy additional words (up to 2,625) for varying amounts, or email a longer document for a price quote. Turn around time is allegedly about twenty-four hours on most documents.
The disclaimer here is that we didn't submit a piece to Gramlee. The "Examples" page shows some nicely edited pieces, complete with red ink mark ups. It would be endlessly cool if documents were revised with the revisions somehow marked. We fear they aren't marked, and that makes our linguistic spidey-senses tingle. So if you use the service, proofread the proofreaders, please. Even people who write good well make mistakes.
And of course, we needn't tell you that it's really not a good thing to submit your term paper to Gramlee for editing, right? Um. Right?
If you like yourself some BitTorrent downloading action, we recommend you help Azureus fight BitTorrent throttling ISPs like Comcast, Adelphia, SusCom, and others by installing the Network Status Monitor plug-in for Azureus / Vuze. The plug-in monitors your network traffic for anything that might prohibit your computer from utilizing its broadband connection to the fullest.
Lately, some ISPs have been using BitTorrent throttling techniques to prevent BitTorrent programs from working properly. It is understandable that ISPs need to manage their networks in order to ensure that every customer gets a fair share of the bandwidth pie, but as individuals, traffic throttling techniques take away from the service we were promised when signing up.
If you choose to share the data collected via the Network Status Monitor, the Azureus team may analyze and compare it with the data collected from other users in order to develop ways of circumventing BitTorrent throttling. The plug-in only works on Windows machines for now, but Mac support is coming.
There are plenty of comparison tools for site traffic. Given a few minutes, we're willing to bet our readers could create a graph of a site's popularity over time. But what about graphing an artist's plays on MySpace or YouTube, how often people write blog posts about each presidential candidate, or how many people are seeding a file on BitTorrent? Trendrr lets you graph, compare, and mash up this kind of data with ease.
Trendrr makes graphing simple by including a drag-and-drop scratchpad that lets you edit and compare graphs with a minumum of effort. The system is based on the RESTful api, which means advanced users can hack together their own trends - there's an example on the site of graphing your computer's CPU usage over time. For everyone else, though, the list of built-in data sources includes popular sites like eBay and YouTube. Don't miss the gallery of popular graphs, which are sometimes informative and sometimes just funny.
Back in prehistory (or January, thereabouts) we talked a bit about webOSes, and the migration of Ewedrive to Desktop on Demand. This week we got a chance to play around with Desktop on Demand in more depth.
Desktop on Demand (DOD) is a true networked OS. It's a Linux based system, with a clean, clear GNOME interface. There is online storage, and a good mix of open source apps. Our little issue about using a browser to access a webOS to surf the web in its browser has been addressed in an innovative way: launcher clients.
Yes, DOD offers clients to launch the service. Truthfully, we heard this and got a little annoyed. But trust us when we say that this is actually a freakin' huge advantage over the old time webOS set ups. The clients are available for Windows, OS X, and Linux. They are small, and can be installed on a flash drive. If you want to keep one on a hard drive on a given computer, it runs from the downloaded location. Very easy, very unoffensive -- very personal, and very secure.
When the desktop opens, it doesn't open in a browser. Maybe this shouldn't sit better with us, but for some strange reason, it just does. It feels much more natural. There is less clutter and we could forget that we were using a completely different operating system underneath it all.
Wobzip is a new startup service that allows you to uncompress a wide variety of compressed files directly online. Not sure why you'd want to do that? Read on, friend.
Wobzip offers a simple, clean interface, with a paucity of buttons: you've got the browse button (we know what that does by now, don't we?) and the uncompress button. Once you've selected a file from your machine, set Wobzip to work by hitting the uncompress button. After a short period of activity, which includes a quick virus scan, Wobzip displays the uncompressed files for you to pick and choose from.
Not impressed yet? We were just holding back.
Wobzip's main strength (and usefulness) comes from the ability to uncompress files directly from a URL. Rather than having to download a file in order to uncompress it, you can paste in a URL, and Wobzip will uncompress the file and show you its contents. This is especially useful for users with slow internet connections: you can pick and choose which piece of the compressed file to download rather than having to download the entire file.
At this time, Wobzip supports 7z, ZIP, GZIP, TAR, RAR, CAB, ISO, and more, with a maximum file size of 100 MB.
Mac users who like Transmission for their bittorrent-ing may have been jealous of uTorrent users for being able to control their transfers via a web browser. However, Clutch offers a web interface for Transmission so you can leave your Mac torrents active and control them from anywhere.
Clutch runs in your menubar on whatever port you choose in the settings (this port will need to be opened on your router/firewall of course). You can enable authentication so some wayward soul can't stop your download of "So You Think You Can Dance?" When you visit your Clutch URL (in the form of http://your-ip-address:port), you'll see a familiar interface that looks identical to the Transmission GUI.
Clutch lets you upload torrents remotely to your Mac, and you get most of the same functionality of Transmission via the web browser (stop torrents, pause torrents, view the inspector, etc.). It also supports SSL.
Sharing your portfolio or a gallery can be done a number of ways, from building an HTML or Flash version to hosting a presentation gallery online at Google Docs. ViewBook makes it easy to create professional looking web presentations.
ViewBook's presentation toolprovides a photo album and slideshow at a custom domain. Users can create galleries and portfolios with images, titles, descriptions and custom background colors. Works can be then embedded on a website and viewed at full screen. ViewBook offers a public page with a listing of the presentations you have available, with a bio or profile. As for uploading imagery to use, there are a few different options, from a batch upload tool to a drag and drop feature with a minimal toolset for editing.
If you have a portfolio or presentation that is constantly changing, or want an easy way to make and share one and you aren't too comfortable fiddling with HTML or Flash files, this could be the tool to check out. The embedding feature makes it easy to embed display your works on the comfort of your personal website in a clean and professional manner. The free beta account does have some limitations: 250 images and five portfolios. Check out a sample of what you can do.
The wait is over, DocSyncer is out of beta and open for all to use. This downloadable application allows PC based users of Microsoft Office and Google Docs to seamlessly sync documents.
DocSyncer is a downloadable application that sits on your computer and automatically finds and syncs all of your document files to your Google Docs account. When it's running, it checks all of your documents and syncs them as they are updated to create a solid backup and work anywhere system. Word and Excel based files can be opened directly from the web interface, and there is support for TXT, CSV and RTF formats.
Perhaps one of the coolest features is the 'disconnected' mode. If you are disconnected from the internet, DocSyncer will auto recognize it and load the document locally in the default application without trying to connect to the internet.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project just posted its findings on teens and the web, and it seems to have uncovered much of what we already know about the internet. Here's a bullet point summary of the major findings. With each point, we'll try to name site/service who's users would stereotypically match.
AIM: 93% of American teens (ages 12-17) use the web. Many of them use the web to interact with others.
YouTube: 64% of online teens create online content, up from 57% in 2004.
Livejournal (bad poetry): 39% of online teens share their artistic creations online.
MySpace: 27% of online teens keep a personal web page.
LOLcats?: 26% of online teens "remix" content they find online.
WoW: 49% of online teens play games online.
America: Teens are more likely to own desktop computers over any other type of "gadget." This one was almost surprising.
Facebook: Social network communicators are more "intense" communicators.
Facebook: Girls eclipse boys in photo posting.
Nintendo Wii: 31% of teens spend time time with friends outside of school every day.
High School: 34% of teens spend time with friends outside of school several times a week
To be honest, a lot of this is pretty obvious. We shouldn't need a study to find out chat rooms suck, teens tend to own computers, and girls are more likely than guys to post photos online. Regardless, there's a lot more information where that came from, so if you'd like to learn more about the online habits of today's teenagers, make sure to check out the full study.
Last year Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7, next year (or the year after) the company will launch Internet Explorer 8. Seriously, how do those creative folks in Redmond keep coming up with these clever names?
We can't tell you what IE8 will look like, or what improvements it will have over IE7. All we know is that it's got a name. Apparently the IE developer team has been referring to the next version of Internet Explorer as IE8 for a while, and when Bill Gates recently dropped that name, it kind of sealed the fate.
According to the Internet Explorer blog, some other possible names included IE VIII, IE1000 (eight in binary), IE Desktop Online Web Browser Live Professional Ultimate Edition for the Internet. Honestly, we were a bit surprised they didn't go with the last one, but then we realized that it might have been a joke.
With more and more users building documents in web based applications, we were starting to think the market belonged to a handful of new companies like Zoho, ThinkFree, and a little upstart called Google. But it looks like there's another serious contender in the online Office space.
Live Documents has a strong pedigree. The service comes from the guy who created Hotmail before Microsoft purchased the webmail service. Live Documents are flash based office applications that have the ability for collaboration and online and offline syncing in a MS Office based environment. Applications are similar to Microsoft's traditional Word, Excel and Powerpoint, but are built using Flash and Flex so that any user on any system can view and edit at will in a richer multimedia environment. If the web portion doesn't do anything for you, the desktop client might with its offline abilities. It wraps up MS Office through a plug-in and embeds collaboration options into them as well, making it possible for multiple people to edit documents at the same time keeping them secure and allowing for revision controls.
Live Documents is not currently live, but you can request to try out their office solution on their website. We are awaiting an invite, and will report back if it's a worthwhile contender when we actually see it in action.
When Jammie Thomas got slapped with a $220,000 judgment by a jury friendly to the recording industry, the entrepreneurs at a little company called ChipIn had no idea how much free publicity they were going to receive. That's because Jammie is using their donation-tracking widget to raise money for her legal defense.
ChipIn lets you park their widget in your web site, MySpace page, and so on, in order to collect money for any cause you choose. ChipIn will handle the credit card transactions needed to bring in the funds. The more money you collect, the higher your 'progress meter' indicates on your widget, until you've hit your goal.
Put those thinking hats on and grab those browser based ideas you have been storing in your head, the Firefox add-on contest is open.
Firefox's annual Firefox Extension Contest, Extend Firefox, will give developers the chance to win the Ultimate Firefox Developer Kit which will include a trip to anywhere in the world, a Macbook Pro, bags and tshirts. Judges are looking for the next great web innovation that can really affect the live of many people and their online experience through a Firefox Add-on.
The contest runs up until December 31st 2007, after which a panel of judges will base their decisions on user experience, creativity, innovativeness and use of open standards to award 3 grand prizes, and 21 runner up prices. Winners will be announced on January 15th 2008. So fuel up, and get going! And don't forget to drop Download Squad some info on your Firefox Add-on creation! Check out the rules and criteria on the official website.
If you blog, or use web-based discussion forums, or use any sort of web mail app, then you know just how frustrating it can be to compose rich content with the limited tools provided for word processing on the web . To go from writing in a feature-rich word processor like Word to composing in a stripped-down text box with very little formatting functionality. Forget about embedding pictures, and definitely forget about embedding YouTube videos.
But Wysiwyg Pro from ViziMetrics, now at version 3, makes life a little easier for those of us who spend plenty of time composing content for the web. This tool is a rich, web-based graphical editor that's compatible with Joomla, Wordpress, and Mambo, among other web content management systems. The editor provides full formatting capability, even allowing you to pre-program HTML code blocks as dockable toolbar buttons. This way, if you need to perform a repetitive task (say, put a blank floating table with room for a picture and caption in your posting), you needn't waste time typing code over and over. Wysiwyg Pro includes an editable, color-coded HTML source view as well as a draft preview.
Flashforward2008 is going to be in San Francisco this August. This annual conference is directed at Flash designers and developers and those who aspire to be called a designer or developer. Every year Flashforward features a Film Festival with open nominations of the best Flash content out there. In 2008 the categories have changed to the following:
Back in prehistory (or January, thereabouts) we talked a bit about webOSes, and the migration of 
