portenkirchner.net » MischMasch

MischMasch 2010-05-08

Georg Portenkirchner — Sat, 08 May 2010 21:41:30 +0000

Matt McKeon’s infographic on The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook is great visualisation of the article Facebook’s Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline by the EFF.

Fluid, a software application for Mac that lets you create Site Specific Browsers, is entirely Open Source now and is avaiable on GitHub. (Via Fluid Blog)

Google’s Steve Lee said at the Web 2.0 Expo that Google Latitude has three Million active users. At the same time Foursquare has more than one million users and MyTown two million users. (Via TechCrunch)

According to Advertising Age Facebook will roll out location-based features very soon and it will compete with other location-based services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and Google Latitude. (Via Mashable)

There are rumours that gaming network Zynga is going to leave Facebook and start its own Zynga Live service. (Via The Next Web)

MischMasch 2010-05-06

Georg Portenkirchner — Thu, 06 May 2010 20:40:04 +0000

Social publishing and reading web site Scribd will abandon Flash and will convert uploaded documents to HTML5 web pages. (Via TechCrunch)

The new version of Google Goggles can now recognize and translate text and has improved barcode recognition. (Via Official Google Mobile Blog)

After introducing a new look for search on the computer Google announces similar changes to search for mobile. (Via Official Google Mobile Blog)

MischMasch 2010-05-04

Georg Portenkirchner — Tue, 04 May 2010 21:13:41 +0000

HTML5 For Web Designers by Jeremy Keith is out for pre-order from A Book Apart. HTML5 spec is 900 pages and hard to read. HTML5 for Web Designers is 85 pages and fun to read. Easy choice. (Via Adactio, Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report, Jason Santa Maria)

Veer joins Typekit. Veer typefaces include Corner Store, Hooligan, Adage Script, Peachy Keen, Annabelle, Baroque Text, Bookman, Buena Park, Hellenic Wide, and Tamarillo. (Via The Typekit Blog)

With the Google Map Custom Marker Maker you can create your own custom marker for Google Maps. (Via Twitter / Christian Heilmann)

A new Google Chrome beta is out, with some nice new features like more synchronising options, Geolocation API, web sockets, native Flash support and more. (Via Google Chrome Blog)

Matt Cutts posted a list of Andorid Apps that he loves.

MischMasch 2010-05-03

Georg Portenkirchner — Mon, 03 May 2010 21:14:08 +0000

28 days after its introduction Apple sells 1 million iPads, more than 12 million applications and more than 1.5 million e-books. (Via Macworld, Apple Press Release)

Google acquired BumpTop, an application that changes the way to use the desktop by transforming it into a 3D interface. (Via Mashable)

Google invests $38.8 million into wind farms in the North Dakota to promote renewable energy. (Via Official Google Blog)

MischMasch 2010-03-04

Georg Portenkirchner — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:41:33 +0000

Google announced starring search results as a new feature in search to make it easier to mark and rediscover sites. Starred items show up at the top of the search page and sync with Google Bookmarks. (Via The Official Google Blog)

Personalized start page Netvibes is partnering with Orange to deliver widgets to 130 million mobile users. (Via VentureBeat)

Gowalla got a new and nice redesign by Belgian designer Tim Van Damme. (Via Jeffrey Zeldman)

Google introduced Gesture Search for Android 2.0 or above to search on the phone by drawing alphabet gestures on the touch screen. (Via Google Mobile Blog)

John Gruber wrote an interesting post on the Apple – HTC patent dispute and software patents in general.

MischMasch 2009-09-06

Georg Portenkirchner — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 21:13:06 +0000

Google App Engine will support XMPP to allow communication in real-time. (Via Google App Engine Blog)

Some readings on HTML5 from last week: Jeremy Keith writes about his thoughts on HTML5, and so does Jeffrey Zeldman in his article Loving HTML5. The HTML5 Super Friends have significant concerns about some aspects of the HTML5 specification.

O’Reilly’s ETech Conference will be discontinued. (Via Tom Coates on Twitter)

MischMasch 2009-08-24

Georg Portenkirchner — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:29:07 +0000

Apple will release Snow Leopard, the latest version of the Mac OS X, on August 28th. Most important seems to be the transition to 64-bit applications. The upgrade will cost only $29 or 29 €.

Jason Santa Maria announced the launch of Typedia, a shared encyclopedia of typefaces. Typedia makes it easy to classify, categorise, and connect typefaces. (Via Jason Santa Maria)

The new edition of Jeffrey Zeldman’s book Designing with Web Standards can be preordered. The author wrote a blog post about what is new in the third edition of DWWS.

Nokia announced a netbook today. The Nokia Booklet 3G will be Windows based. A first video can be found on YouTube. (Via Fee Beyer on Twitter)

MischMasch 2009-08-17

Georg Portenkirchner — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 21:01:05 +0000

Local review site Qype launched Qype Italia. The Hamburg based company is now present in the UK, Ireland, Germany, France, Spain, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Brazil and Italy. Currently reviews are written in English, French, Spanish, Portuese, Polish and Italian. (Via Blonde 2.0)

The Panel Picker for SXSW 2010 is live. Now you can browse through all the programming proposals and you can vote for your favourties.

Microsoft will continue to support IE6 until 2014. There are a lot of online campaigns aiming to kill the 8 year-old browser, but it seems this will be a very slow death. (Via BBC NEWS | Technology)

URL shortener tr.im, that announced to shut down and then re-opened again, will become public domain, 100% community-owned, operated, and developed. (Via tr.im URLs)

37signals are working on a global namespace that users will have a single username and password for all 37signals products. This will be more userfriendly and will make it easier to implement tighter integration between their products. (Via Signal vs. Noise)

EveryBlock, a hyperlocal news site, has been acquired by MSNBC.com. (Via The Everyblock Blog)

The Los Angeles Times web site was redesigned. But now it is quite hard to distinguish the links from the rest of the text. (Via Jens Meiert on Twitter)

MischMasch 2009-08-14

Georg Portenkirchner — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 21:57:44 +0000

Twitter started Project Retweet to implement retweeting. It will be a bit different from what is retweeting now. There will be no RT, but the original tweet will show up in the timeline with the line retweeted by @name added to the date/time stamp. I agree with Eric Meyer’s tweet that Twitter should fix replies above adding retweet features. (Via Twitter Blog)

Google Reader got some new features. It is possible to send blog posts to various sites like Delicious, Twitter, Facebook, Blogger and others. More sites can be added manually. There is the new feature to discover the feeds of people one is following. (Via Official Google Reader Blog)

Creative Commons licensed books can now be distributed on Google Books. More on CC and Google Books can be found on the Inside Google Books blog. (Via Joi Ito on Twitter)

YouTube’s redesign went live. The site looks now cleaner, the masthead looks different and some functions were moved or eliminated. (Via Mashable)

Facebook is testing Facebook Lite, a simpler design for the site. Currently only a few selected users are able to access the Facebook Lite site. (Via Mashable)

Microsoft announced that they will launch a Zune HD on September 25th 2009. It will be thinner and and not as ugly as it’s predecessor. (Via Mashable)

Google introduced social gadgets for iGoogle, so everyone can share, collaborate and play games on iGoogle. (Via Official Google Blog)

My Opera lets you push updates to Twitter and Facebook. (Via My Opera news)

MischMasch 2009-08-11

Georg Portenkirchner — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 21:53:42 +0000

Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed I mentioned yesterday received a lot of response. Robert Scoble thinks about leaving FriendFeed, Khoi Vinh tweeted that he deleted his FriendFeed accounts, Leo Laporte wants Facebook to open source the Friendfeed codebase and Steve Rubel hopes that FriendFeed should become Facebook Labs. It seems that a lot of people doubt that FriendFeed will continue as an own platform.

Google released a preview of the new version of their search engine. It’s codename is Caffeine and it is faster and more accurate. More information on Caffeine can be found on Matt Cutts‘ blog and the preview can be accessed at www2.sandbox.google.com. (Via Mashable)

Facebook already rolled out a new search that crawls the last 30 days of news feed activity. (Via Mashable)

Doug Cutting is leaving Yahoo! and will be joining Cloudera. (Via Free Search)

Evan Williams‘ wife Sara gave birth to a 8 pounds 21 inch baby boy. (Via Evan Williams (ev) on Twitter)

Yesterday’s MischMasch dealt with Nambu’s announcement to shut down the URL shortening service tr.im. Today they re-opened the website and state in a blog post that tr.im will continue to operate. They still criticise Twitter to create a short URL monopoly. (Via Mashable)