Posted on Thursday, January 29th, 2009
Trying to plan my next road trip, I turned to the ever powerful Google Maps. I picked a destination (New York City), and asked Google Maps how I would go about driving there. It responded with some absolutely brilliant advice:
I just have to drive through three countries, with three short kayaking trips across the Pacific ocean. Sounds great! And, it will only take fifty-five days.
Posted on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008
I whipped together a quick little application which counts down until Christmas tonight – but it is quite unlike most that you see around the place. I’ve dispensed with the needless and imprecise method of showing the number of days, hours, minutes and seconds, and just display the important stuff – the exact number of seconds until 12:00 AM on Christmas morning.
Download ChristmasCountdown
Requires .Net Framework 2.0 or Mono
Posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008
I have been taking a look at Adobe’s new Buzzword word processor. Basically, Buzzword is a flash based web application, and I have to say, it is very nice. As you can see from the screenshot above, the text rendering absolutely brilliant, with access to real typefaces like Myriad and Minion, as opposed to the boring Arial you generally see in normal web based word processors.
Being written in Flash, it has quite a few other advantages apart from nice typefaces too – nice image wrapping for one; better tables another. The interface is also a lot more dynamic than most word processors – whether they be applications or web based. It’s certainly nicer than the new Microsoft Office look, and is very nice to use.
The application can export to a range of different file formats, like rich text, Microsoft Word formats, plain text, HTML and also Adobe PDF – although Evince wouldn’t open the PDF that I exported… It also boasts good collaboration features (like most other internet word processor), but that’s not much use to me, so I haven’t tried any of that.
All in all, it looks like a word processor that I might actually consider using in the future. It’s certainly a project to keep an eye on. Check it out at Acrobat.com – you have to sign up to use it first.
Posted on Friday, October 19th, 2007
A version of WINE (0.9.46), a free implementation of the Windows API for other operating systems released quite recently featured support for all versions of Photoshop up to CS2 to “just work”, so I decided to give it a spin. I’ve been using Wine mainly for games for a while now, and have found the support for DirectX very good. Still, I was very impressed with how well Photoshop ran – all the filters and operations I tried worked flawlessly.
Of course, there still are a few issues (like not being able to type into the serial number box in the installer, and a small issue with window focus), but for the most part, it was very impressive. The Wine developers have done an amazingly well, and I wish them luck with future versions.
You can see my testing report here. My screenshot is there too – with a slight spelling mistake…
Posted on Wednesday, September 12th, 2007
Here’s a review of the new Compiz Fusion 0.5.2 that will be included in many major upcoming Linux releases. The Screenshots look fantastic, and the configuration tool looks greatly improved.
Posted on Saturday, May 19th, 2007
You are a cat, with a bow and arrow, and you have to hit the target…. Starts easy, but gets difficult quickly!
A truly unique game…
Posted on Monday, February 12th, 2007
I found a cool CSS speech bubble script, and I think I might use it for my comments. It works in all browsers, and is made with XHTML, CSS and Javascript. I removed the link, because the guy was link baiting, so I didn’t want to improve his page-rank. You can get them at http://www.willmayo.com/2007/02/10/css-speech-bubbles/
-Stephen
Posted on Wednesday, January 17th, 2007
Here’s an interesting article about ZFS (the Zettabyte file system), discussing its advantages. It looks like an interesting file system, and has a lot of great features like storage pooling and revisions of files and so on.
-Stephen
read more | digg story
Posted on Friday, December 15th, 2006
Adobe is releasing a beta of the new version of Photoshop tomorrow. It will be available as a universal binary for Macs, which can be used with both the PowerPC and Intel Macs. Here are some screenshots and new features.
Posted on Monday, October 30th, 2006
I found this great Javascript colour picker today. It’s only 23kb, and looks great. You can check out a demo and download it at http://www.acko.net/dev/farbtastic.
-Stephen
