I randomly happened upon this little technology demo from Last.fm. It’s called Boffin, and, using Last.fm’s metadata, it generates a tag cloud out of your music collection. You click a couple of tags, click play and it provides yet another way to slice and dice one’s sprawling music archives. Here’s what mine looks like:
The top half of the cloud is more accurate than the bottom half. I’m not sure how much of my music is “hair metal approved”, and I’m pretty sure it’s over-representing the fraction of my collection that is Norwegian.
But that’s not really what I want to talk about. When you install and first run Boffin, it needs to scan your music collection. I have about 10,000 songs, so that took quite a while. During this process, however, Boffin displayed this lovely visualization of my music:
The YouTube-hosted screencast video is a bit sketchy, but you get the idea. It’s a totally unnecessary feature–actually useless, as it happens. But I found the cascading images of bands kind of hypnotizing. I really appreciated that the app designer when that extra step to make a very ordinary process–scanning your hard drive for music–a little remarkable.
Friends Todd and Larry (along with Cindy Li) have just launched Thmbnl, a utility for web developers. What does it do?
Thmbnl is a compact utility for showing thumbnail-style images of pages linked from your website or application. Developers can sign in, grab our code libraries and samples, write some code and you’ve got thmbnl in your app!
That’s a great idea, and will no doubt prove handy to people building web apps that require thumbnail functionality. I see it as a kind of purpose-built tiny chunk of Flickr’s functionality. Where I manually upload a screenshot to Flickr so that I can grab a screenshot, they’re doing it automatically. And, obviously, marketing it to web app builders. It’s not super-exciting, but in my experience, it’s often the Internet plumbing concepts that really take off.
Designers and developers will be interested in Todd’s comprehensive and enlightening discussion of the development process for Thmbnl. Here’s an excerpt in which he discusses their choice to rely on OpenID as their user management system:
The most concrete benefit of the OpenID-only strategy in its impact on feature design is that it’s allowed us to support webmaster and enterprise teams who need to work from the same thmbnl account without adding weight to the account management features. Although we don’t have the permissions gradient that corporate software often provides, we have a simple, one-field interface for attaching OpenIDs to an account. OpenIDs for those people who leave the team or no longer need access are removed from the same place. Under a traditional user name+password approach, we would have had at least one or two more pages to manage multiple users on the same account.
Good luck to the Thmbnl team. Or should I say Gdlck?
Pixish is a new site where you can create image contests. Artists will find assignments from people who need visual art for all kinds of projects. Each Assignment will have different requirements and rewards. If one inspires you, you can submit. The Pixish community can then vote up the best submissions. In the end, the Publisher who started the Assignment will choose a winner and give out any listed rewards.
I’m looking for source art. It’ll be used in creating a new blog header, and as inspiration for the site’s new colour scheme and other design elements. I’ve got a web designer who will build a template based on your work. You don’t have to meet exactly parameters in terms of pixel size.
I’d like the image to integrate two elements:
A movie set sign with my initials (”DB”). You can see a photo of such a sign here. These movie set signs are ubiquitous in my home town of Vancouver.
You can combine these two elements as you see fit.
As a ‘reward’, I’m offering:
I’ll pay CAN $200 (US $198.63) and include a permanent link to your portfolio on my About page. I’ve referred work on several occasions based on queries about my current site’s design.
