Flame – an abstract Java painting program
Ever wonder how those neat abstract desktop backgrounds are created? Well one way to try making one yourself is with a webpage-embedded Java application called Flame. Flame allows you to use different brushes, colors and various other tricks to create abstract brushes to paint with. The interface is fun to play with and will yield some interesting results. Just a hint: the faster you move your mouse, the more random and wide your brush gets.
Try it out for yourself: Flame.
A Very Small Contribution to LastPass
Woot! We got to make a small – very small – contribution to the latest version of the LastPass plug-in. A couple of the new icons were made by me including the Safari-themed ones to match the look and feel of Apple’s Safari web browser.
If you don’t know what LastPass is, well, you should. It’s a hugely helpful password manager that has all sorts of plug-ins for different web browsers and mobile platforms. If you still use “PASSWORD123” for every login you have then you should probably consider getting this plug-in and making your life a little less hackable. I’ve used competing products and I have found LastPass to be the most feature-complete and easiest solution.
Seesmic acquires Ping.fm
Seesmic, maker of popular desktop and mobile Twitter clients, has just acquired Ping.fm — a service that lets users post to 50 social networks with a single status update — for an undisclosed sum.
The acquisition includes both talent and technology, so Ping.fm co-founders Adam Duffy and Sean McCullough are now Seesmic shareholders and key members of the management team. They will begin immediately integrating Ping.fm technology into Seesmic applications.
Sometime in January you can expect updates to Seesmic’s Blackberry, Android, web, Windows and OSX (via Air) apps. Each will add advanced Ping.fm integration, supporting the ability to post to 50 social networks with a single update, special Ping.fm triggers to specify posting to specific social sites, and the option of using Ping.fm’s e-mail, SMS and chat functionality.
Ping.fm currently boasts 200,000 updates a day from its 500,000 registered members. More than 100 applications already use the Ping.fm API for cross-posting purposes, and although Seesmic will assume full control of the platform, they’re committed to maintaining it and supporting the developer community.
The maneuver no doubt means that Seesmic is now infringing upon TweetDeck’s territory and mission with ambitions to be much more than just a Twitter client. Ultimately, Seesmic aims to be your primary gateway to the social web and to serve 1,000,000 updates per day in 2010.
Voyeurism in the Twitter age
Often when people tweet or post a Facebook status update from the road they accompany it with a picture or two. These photos can range form the mundane to the fascinating with a bit of everything in between. While you may not be viewing the status updates yourself, the pictures are usually posted to a publically available service like Twitpic, yFrog, TwitrPix and others.
A site called PicFog grabs the links to these photos in real-time and presents them in a constantly updated webpage (see the photo). If you want to kill a few minutes just open up the site and let photos scroll by. Each photos has additional information associated with it, and clicking on the photo opens up a larger photo.
It’s all public although it tends to be a little creepy sometimes. That said, it’s definitely worth a look for a few minutes of mindless entertainment.
Play some classic Nintendo (NES) games in Javascript
The idea that somebody could program a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) emulator completely in Javascript just blows my mind.
For those that don’t know, Javascript is a language of sorts that’s built into your browser. It’s usually used for doing such mundane tasks as button roll-overs, making simple screen transitions, verifying that you entered a valid e-mail address, etc. I don’t think that using it as a full-blown processor environment was ever part of the original conception.
You’ll want to use Google Chrome for this – competitor browsers aren’t quite fast enough to play this yet.
Yeah, there’s no sound on this emulator but for a quick arcade fix it’s pretty good. There are lots of other ways to play games like this, just use Google or Bing to find them.
Try the emulator here.
