Fairly+UselessBETA.png "Web 2.0 image")
Here is “THE” list of Web 2.0 webapps. What’s nice is that someone gaggled them all together on one site. Very comprehensive, I could spend all weekend checking them out.
What makes a webapp a Web 2.0?
I have my MediaBox (linux box running KnoppMyth) serving up all our music using MT-DAAPD or NFS automounts depending on the device for three years now. I have converted all of our CD’s to mp3’s which by far is the most universal format. One of the problems we had at first was constantly getting up and adjusting the volume. Until I found MacMP3Gain and converted/normalized all of our music to the same volume.
MacMP3Gain is an AppleScript Studio application which brings an Aqua GUI to the command line version of mp3gain, a utility that performs statistical analysis to determine how loud the MP3 file actually sounds to the human ear and performs lossless volume adjustments. MacMP3Gain is free and open source. You may download either the application itself or the entire project including the source code.
Recently spotted on engadget a MythTV media center for $650. Not a bad deal, I spent $600 building my own using a Shuttle case, add $150 for a dvd burner and $125 for a video card. That was 3 years ago and the software wasn’t as polished as it is now. I have now added a RF remote, mediaMVP, and upgraded the hard drive to 300 GB. If you don’t mind tinkering or hacking those old computers into something useful, then I recommend rolling your own with KnoppMyth. Otherwise the Monolith Media Center is a great deal.
Mycroft Holmes. That was the name of the famous detective’s older brother. It is also the name a project that provides a collection of Sherlock & OpenSearch plugins. I found it by accident when I was looking for a extension to lookups on selected text. I saw the demo of Zimbra and they had a real cool feature. You could create javascript behaviors the scan the page for items to make into links. They call them Zimlets now.
I thought it would be nice to create a custom one for us at work. We do not use Zimbra, I use Thunderbird, and if I could get this working, maybe I could get some converts at work too. I started to search for extensions for Thunderbird and found ConQuery it was for both Thunderbird and Firefox.
From my favorite extensions list… (article)
Best extension you never heard of. You can perform a search by selecting the text and right click to search different search pages. No need to copy and paste. OK, big deal… but have a look at Mycroft take your time (there are over 8,000), I’ll wait. My favorites are wikipedia, IMDB, Digg, Google images, and Amazon.
Once you get the hang of it, you will love it.
One of the worst things for a graphic designer is to see a design go unused. I was looking through some old files and came across some old logos and mockups. Some I look back and can’t believe I actually showed to a client. Here is one that the picked, but never used. Went out of business? I really don’t know. You can see the full color logo after the jump.
I was looking at my Feedburner stats and it made me think about this blogs RSS feeds and how much I like having the little icon show in my menu. I totally forgot about my own favicon for the site. So I fired-up Fireworks and whipped up an image. You should see it in to the right of the url (it looks better small). If you need to create your own for your site, head on over to FavIcon from Pics converts and sizes the image for you.
Here a quick little function for ordinal numbers using actionscript. I didn’t even know they were called ordinal numbers! I found some snippet of perl and converted it to AS for Flash.
function ordinal(number) {
if (number%100>10 && number%100<14) {
suffix = "th";
} else {
switch (number%10) {
case 0 :
suffix = "th";
break;
case 1 :
suffix = "st";
break;
case 2 :
suffix = "nd";
break;
case 3 :
suffix = "rd";
break;
default :
suffix = "th";
break;
}
}
return number+suffix;
}
// usage
trace (ordinal(25));
Produces: 25th
Useful for pretty dates.
I spend a lot of time checking my favorite sites for new articles, constantly refreshing and switch from tab to tab. I tried RSS before; (builtin Safari, FeedBlitz, Google Reader, Sage, etc…) nothing really did it for me. Until RSS Menu, its super simple. It justs sits in your menu and updates the count when there are new articles. You can click the item and go directly to it, or hover over it to see a short description. What I like the most is I can just click the url title and got to the main page, helpful for sites that have a lot of articles I want to read.
To make it perfect you have to have GROWL installed. I currently have it setup to notify me with sticky notifications. That way I can see any new posts that appear when I have been away. Now I spend less time surfing and more time working.
PocketMod is a small handheld booklet that you print out and fold. A very handy disposable organizer. It is a flash program that allows you to print mini pages on a piece of paper, so that you can refer to it later. You can make of book of Sudoku to keep you busy in line at the DMV, or a weekly calendar for appointments.
Here is list of some PocketMod Modules that I have made.
The forums are down so there is not a good way to distribute these. I had fun making them. Just download the offline player and copy the downloads into the folder. I hope someone can make use of these.
Here is my current list of must have Firefox extensions. Some are only there for evaulation and get replaced by better ones. For example, I have switched to BetterSearch from GooglePreview, because BetterSearch support del.icio.us.
