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Dillinger: the last Markdown editor, ever.
I write all my blog posts in Markdown and may consider using this to do so. But beyond that, this is just a really great (and open source!) example of how modern web apps are written. Built on node.js, you can run it remotely at this URL, or install your own, local copy.
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Transloadit
Handy-looking file upload/conversion API
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BarStar - A a real-world social game for karaoke fiends
Just realized I hadn’t linked to the personal project Scott Phelps and I have been working on lately. It’s in beta now. It’s a mobile, social game intended to be played by people who are out at bars doing karaoke. If you like to sing, check it out!
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On Twitshirt
On Thursday, my friends at Airbag launched Twitshirt, a simple but awesome service that lets you print the text of a Twitter posting on a tee-shirt. On Friday, the app was gone, replaced by a message stating, “we’re reversing the polarity.”
Why? Because some people — and notably some people who turn out to be very influential in the Twitter community — had a problem with Twitshirt. Apparently, they felt like it was “stealing their intellectual property.”
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NYTimes: Represent
Cool new app from The New York Times that lets New Yorkers keep tabs on what their elected officials are doing. It’s built on GeoDjango. Nice to see Django continue its massive penetration into the news and journalism worlds.
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Sifter
We’ve been beta testing Garrett’s terrific bug tracking app for a few months, and I have to say: nothing compares, from a user interface perspective. It’s now available to the public. Garrett Dimon continues to be one of the best dudes going today when it comes to overall user experience, usability, and information architecture. He’s also a badass Rails developer and solid graphic designer, too, which doesn’t hurt. Congrats on the launch, buddy!
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Brightkite: Sneak Peek At Our iPhone App at Brightkite
Took them long enough, but I gotta say: it looks damn sweet. The place snapping is killer.
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Readernaut
Not a lot to see here yet, but the logo alone is worth a visit. Nathan’s new site is going to be sweet. Sign up for an invite.
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Carsonified: Matt
My good friends at Carsonified are building a web app in a week, and live-blogging the process. Ryan says:
> Keir recently came up with a really fun web app idea … so the whole team is taking a week off to build it. It’s going to be called ‘Matt’ and it’ll be built in Django on a popular API, include a desktop AIR app, and will be hosted on an elastic computing cloud (probably Flexiscale, but yet to be determined).
Sounds like fun. Should be entertaining to watch the blog as they do this. Good luck, guys!
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Google Maps’ Street View now available in 37 more cities…
…and Seattle, the 12th biggest metro in the USA and the area that houses America’s second-largest population of Google employees, still isn’t one of them. WTF?!
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How much do you make?
Bret Walker’s simple Django-powered web app related to salaries. Its data is user-generated: you put in your job title, location, and salary. Hopefully this build a nice database of salary info, which is incredibly useful for many, many reasons.
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Goodlatte: Platform Atop a Platform
Dan, Justin, and Rob roll out a big new feature for StrawPoll—the ability to run your own Twitter polls. Clever stuff, using the Summize API. Nice job, guys!
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django-syncr: Syncs Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Delicious, etc. with your local database
Nice looking project, here. This is very much the same as what I do on jeffcroft.com, but it’d a bit more lightweight and the importers are probably better-written (I’m still not a great programer!). My stuff will be open-sourced at some point — but it’s good to have options, and this is available now.
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Subway Crush
Oh man. Great idea. This is going to be huge in NYC, I’m sure.
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brightkite.com
A modern-day Dodgeball that doesn’t suck and hasn’t been purchased by Google and abandoned. Looks awesome, so far. Mark my words: within a week, every web nerd will be all aflutter about this service.
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Video on Flickr?
Haha. Cute video by Heather and the folks at Flickr, soft-announcing the addition of video. I’ve been waiting for this! Flip video, here I come!
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Quotably.com
Attempt to thread Twitter conversations. Works well, but not perfect (I’m not sure it’d be possible for it to work perfectly). Pretty cool idea. Hmmm, maybe jeffcroft.com needs this… ;)
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sk*rt
It’s been called “Digg for chicks.” Looks great.
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SCHED: SXSW 2008 Scheduler with iCal support
An all-inclusive calendar featuring official and non-official events around SXSW. I’ve just used this tool to plan my week at Southby, and then subscribed to its iCalendar feed in iCal. Nice.
Advice to SXSW newbs: do plan out your schedule in advance, but don’t be too married to it. If you have no plan, you’ll be lost and you’ll find yourself ducking into panels at the last minute and not being able to find a decent seat. But, if you try to hard to stick to your plan, you’re going to miss out on a lot of the fun that comes with just going with the flow.
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StrawPoll: tiny polls in 140 characters or less
Rob Goodlatte and Dan Romero use Twitter to conduct brief online polls. Fun idea, fun site, and nice implementation. Word of warning to would-be parallaxers: I believe think effect is this close to jumping the shark, and I’ve only seen it on like four sites. Rob and Dan do it really well, but still…
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Beanstalk — Version Control with a Human Face
I love that these guys are putting a design face on top of Subversion. There’s a tendency amongst designers, it seems, to think, “version control is just for coders,” when in reality version control is something everyone ought to be using for all sorts of files. Beanstalk looks like they’re making it easy to do just that.
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Flickr Places
Sweet! Compare, for fun:
Flickr: Seattle JeffCroft.com Seattle
It shouldn’t be a surprise that I really like this idea!
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Semantify, for Blueprint
A really useful tool for anyone who finds “making Jeremy Keith feel warm and fuzzy inside” on their web site’s priority list. By Christian Montoya.
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YouTube: Twitter jumps the shark
Twitter was featured on CSI. Weird. And yet, cool. Kinda.
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Cumul.us: The wisdom of clouds
Ben Tesch, one of several great web designers and developers just across the lake at MSNBC.com, is about to launch Cumul.us, a site which will aggregate weather data and use crowdsourcing to try to make better weather predictions than the experts. Who knows if it’ll work, but it sounds like a killer idea to me, and I can’t wait to see it in action.
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Leah Culver: Pownce Lessons Learned
Leah has posted her slides from the recent Future of Web Apps conference in London, detailing her lessons learned in developing Pownce, the popular Django-based social web app.
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37s: Lessons on shutting down a service from Yahoo! Photos
Couldn’t agree more with 37signals on this one: the Yahoo! Photos shutdown has been extremely well-handled. Well done, Yahoo!
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Brian Fling at the Blue Flavor blog: Why we made Leaflets
Brian explains our thinking behind the decision to make Leaflets. And I say “we” as if I was there. I wasn’t, really. Most of Leaflets was already done before I started! But there is a lot more to come, and I’m excited to be part of it!
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Walk Score - How walkable is your house?
This is a very cool little Google maps mashup. Walk Score calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc. and then tallies the whole thing up into an out-of-100 score.
My Lawrence house: 22 out of 100. My Seattle house: 77 out of 100.
w00t.
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Phone Number Geolocator
This is awesome. From an area code and prefix (i.e. 206-545-xxxx), returns a geo-location. Seems to even work really well with cell phone numbers. Badass.
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Macworld: iPhone ‘Leaflets’ access Flickr, del.icio.us
MacWorld has picked up the story of our Leaflets launch.
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Yahoo! Finance: Blue Flavor Launches Mobile Web 2.0 Application Portal for iPhone
Our Leaflets press release has hit the wire and is making the rounds.
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Jeremy Keith on Pownce
Jeremy has a nice review of Pownce, the new Django-powered social tool for “sharing stuff with your friends” by Leah Culver, Kevin Rose, Daniel Burka, and ShawnAllen
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iPhone Only: reader.mac.com
Looks like Apple has developed an RSS reader for iPhone at reader.mac.com. Who wants to spoof their user agent string and see if they can get into this bad boy?
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Fluther: Tap the Collective
Yet another new Django-powered social web app. Looks interesting!
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Pownce: New startup, powered by Django
This hot-looking new tool, the baby of Leah Culver, Kevin Rose, Daniel Burka, and Shawn Allen, looks like it could be something worth tracking. And with those people behind it, you know it has a chance. And yes, it’s Django-powered. Hells yeah!
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Joyent Connector to be Open Sourced
Wow, definitely didn’t expect this. Connector is an amazing web app that I’d definitely love to be able to run a local version of and extend for myself. Awesome news. Huge boon to the Ruby and Rails communities.
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Yahoo To Shut Down Y! Photos In Favor Of Flickr
I’m a bit surprised at this, but I absolutely think it’s the right decision.
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IE NetRenderer: Shows screenshots of your sites in IE
Free online HTML tool that shows instantly how your website looks like in Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, 6 and 5.5. Handy indeed. Could be better, though — it doesn’t show full page screenshots (only like 1024x768 windows) and it’s only a screenshot, not anything you can test interactivity with. But still — pretty useful for CSS authors.
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Scrapblog: Create a world for your pictures
A beautiful personal expression site based around the idea of scrapbooking, with a gorgeous Flash-based UI and set of wonderfully feminine default templates by the likes of Veerle Pieters and Cindy Li (and others, too). Includes spport for pulling your photos from Flickr, and several other services.
This is what happens when people take decidedly geeky things (blogs, open APIs, wizzy Flash UIs, and so forth) and mash them up with things real (as in non-geeky) people want. Congrats to everyone involved with this — it looks like a really, really impressive web application.
Sidenote: between this and Picnik, the Flash developers are kind of kicking our ass on the web app front. Where are the web standards-based apps that work this well?
Sidenote #2: Anyone know what backend technologies are used in Scrapblog?
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Jeff Croft
I’m a digital product designer and developer in Seattle, WA. I currently work with nGen Works, and recently co-founded Lendle, a Kindle book sharing service.
Some of my clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Copious, The New York Review of Books, The Lawrence Journal-World, and the University of Washington.
I’ve authored two books on web and interactive design and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.
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