Don't be frightened, but evil and frustration lurks in your web browser. Yeah, that same seemingly benign and ultra flexible tool that you're using to read these words has a dark side. Something you probably don't think about much, because you're numb to it. It's hidden in plain sight, so hard to see because it's everywhere, filling your day on the web with a nameless angst. Lest you write me off as a nutty zealot, I cease my babble and reveal the little bugger:
Looks innocent, doesn't he? Melodrama aside, it's really a terrible experience using browse boxes to upload 20 pictures. My pictures are usually named IMG_4087.JPG or something equally descriptive, and furthermore they're usually tucked away in one or more places that I'm not used to browsing -- but often I can click over to them pretty fast. It's even worse when they stack these guys 10 deep and expect us to spend more time finding the photos than it takes to upload them!
About a week ago Yahoo! proposed a solution to this mess. The PhotoDrop application lets you upload pictures to Flickr by dragging and dropping them into your web browser. You can drag any number of pictures at once, and without any delays you get a preview of the pictures you've selected. Furthermore you can rotate, scale, crop, and apply filters to these pictures all right on your desktop without talking to any servers or watching a spinning beachball (or rotating hourglass, if you're so inclined).
This solution is based on a new technology released by Yahoo! called BrowserPlus™. The cool thing about the technology is that it will soon be open for anyone to use, so that regardless of where you spend your time on the net, the folks who build the websites that you use will be able to make your uploads faster, and let you do a whole lot more right there in your browser.
Finally, BrowserPlus is a piece of software that you have to download and install, and a lot of us are weary about installing plug-ins. That's the bad news. The good news is that you only have to install it once. Having done so any number of sites that use it can run without interrupting your browsing. We're focused on making this first time install as painless as possible, and at the same time keeping BrowserPlus lightweight and secure. So check out the prototype and let us know what you think! till the next, lloyd
Popularity: 42% [?]
The times they are a changing. This year the politics of fear go head to head with the audacity of hope. Democrats have come out in record numbers to vote in the presidential primaries and caucuses to date. The current Democratic front runner, Barack Obama, has inspired a new generation of young and independent voters. Both he and Hillary Clinton are promoting plans which would help create a more fair and equitable United States.
But the race between Obama and Hillary Clinton is very close. No matter what happens in Pennsylvania or any of the other remaining states, neither candidate will have clinched the nomination when all the voting is finished in June. The next presidential candidate will be determined by the remaining Democratic superdelegates.
No matter who is chosen, it will be a proud and groundbreaking moment for the United States. If a Democrat is elected, the next US president will be either a woman or a black man.
If you were a superdelegate, how would you vote? The Yahoo! Media Innovation Group has built an app called Be a Superdelegate, which runs on both Facebook and MySpace. It lets you cast your own superdelegate vote and show support for your presidential pick by putting a virtual campaign button on your Facebook or MySpace profile page. What’s especially fun about the Superdelegate app is that a vote you cast on MySpace will appear on Facebook and vice versa. Like the Texas prima-caucus, you can even vote twice – once on each network.
Earlier this month, MySpace went live with their application platform, which supports OpenSocial. Now we’re starting to see the emergence of cross platform social apps – a pretty cool development. Could it be that leading Internet companies large and small can work together and share content and data to make the Web a better place for everyone? Yes we can. Yes we can.
Be a Superdelegate today!
Hillary Obama battle by mr_magoo
Popularity: 61% [?]
William White, March 21st, 2008 on 4:34 pm
Superdelegates have enormous power in the 2008 US Presidential election. Voters have already cast millions of votes for the Democratic nominee, but neither candidate will have enough votes to win outright. It looks like a few hundred superdelegate votes will determine whether Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton faces off against John McCain in the US election later this year.
Be a Superdelegate is an app that runs on either Facebook or MySpace and lets you cast your own superdelegate vote. Follow the results of all superdelegate voting in real time on our interactive map and show support for your favorite candidate by displaying their badge on your profile page.
Don't let your candidate lose this all important superdelegate race! Add this app today and get your friends to vote too!
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Popularity: 66% [?]
Built for the most recent Yahoo! Hack Day, NewsGlobe is a fun new way to browse Yahoo! News Top Stories. It pulls together two existing Yahoo! services and takes advantage of the performance enhancements in the latest Adobe Flash Player.
The NewsGlobe consists of three basic pieces: a Yahoo! News Top Stories RSS feed, a geo-encoding web service from Yahoo! Maps, and a free, open-source library of 3D classes for ActionScript 3 called Papervision3D. The application loads the Yahoo! News RSS feed every few minutes and extracts the dateline for each story. It sends this descriptive textual information to the Maps service to find a matching location and thereby return a latitude/longitude coordinate. Then it's simply a matter of using the 3D classes in ActionScript to create a visually engaging experience that's either automated or interactive.
Papervision3D makes it incredibly easy to create a 3D scene, add 3D objects to it, and specify where the camera (i.e., the user's viewpoint) should be located. For each story location where we could discern a lat-long coordinate, we draw a marker object and place it in the proper position on a sphere representing the Earth. The display is calculated and drawn in real time. This allows us to animate the view over time and even let the user change the view by interacting with the objects in the scene.
Since the final product itself is a SWF file, NewsGlobe works online as a web application or off -network as a scaled-down, embedded customizable badge. It could easily be integrated into a Yahoo! Widget or packaged as an Adobe AIR application to run locally on the desktop. By passing in different RSS feeds or search terms, it'd be possible to filter the news and watch stories occurring in a specific part of the world, from a particular category, or matching other keywords.
Who built it
Popularity: 30% [?]
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