Real or not? Take a look for yourself.

Content-awareness demo 1

Content-awareness demo 2

I’m actually glad things like this don’t exist or any regular person could mess around with these things… kind of like what cheap digital cameras does with photography and blogs do to website content…:)

Ever wanted to let a friend look through your iTunes music library remotely?   Dusty Tunes provides a quick and easy way to index and list your library online.  An easy alphabetical listing by Author allows anyone with the proper link to peruse your music collection.  Once there, guests can browse, search, and then preview or purchase  from iTunes individual songs in your collection.

The owner of the library creates a quick account and then points the site to the file iTunes Music Library.xml (typically located at My documents > My music > Itunes > iTunes Music Library.xml)

The owner can then point friends to the url (http://www.dustytunes.com/user/<owner_username>.php).  Mine is located here: http://www.dustytunes.com/user/nmeierpolys.php

I’m pretty sick of facebook’s mess of a website as they’ve added on more and more complex features.  I use Pidgin with this plugin to chat with Facebook friends without the hassle of navigating their site.

Facebook Chat Plugin for Pidgin

Autodesk Project Dragonfly provides a really nice way to lay things out and move them around spacially.  It gives you the same control to physically move things around the room without the hassle of physically doing so.

It’s not the fastest web application since there’s a lot of JavaScript updating to do in the background.  The options for furniture and customization are also somewhat limited at this early stage.  Nevertheless, Dragonfly gives some fantastic 3D views and layout tools for designing a room.

A cool Adobe Air application designed to display Google Reader posts in a clean 0SX-themed desktop client.  It’s not perfect yet (glitches, disappearing scrollbars on occasion) but it’s a project worth keeping an eye on.

Download at: http://code.google.com/p/readair/

(note: requires installation of Adobe Air)

…Providing a full range of services with Design of Experiment, including

• Six Sigma DMAIC Methodology
• Continuous Quality Improvement Team Facilitation
• Statistical Tools and Measurement
• Data Acquisition and Presentation 

Backup Magic automates and simplifies the process by allowing you to select certain folders to mirror on an external drive somewhere. I can set things up once and then periodically (or automatically on a cron job) run these backups. Just as easily, I can create another job to restore the backed up files/directories to their original location after a format (dead hard drive, sibling abuse, virus infestation, etc.).

Free to use. Pay if you really like it. Backup Magic

The age of Web 2.0 has been dominating more clearly with every successfully integrated web app out there. Facebook apps dominate hours of time in the lives of people from all walks of life. The iPhone’s webapp integration is familiar to way more people than it should be, and high-speed internet has steadily grown in accessibility allowing more and more powerful web projects that are more application than web site.

Bungee Connect aims to provide a powerful portal to the design of highly integrated and exciting applications on the web. Now, I’ve just recently started an internship with the company Bungee Lab so I’m somewhat biased. That bias comes, however, in the form only of one who has had the opportunity to really see what this is all about.

The builder requires no downloaded software, relying on a browser-based interface. Developers can build AJAX-driven applications without the complicated and unpleasant detail management of the low-level message-passing involved.

In my opinion, however, the biggest feature offered by this development environment is its focus on integration with existing web services. Bungee Connect provides interfaces for handling the low-level communication between a Bungee app and other information sources on the web. This allows developers to automate the integrate of information like Google Calendar events, local weather details, RSS feeds or Facebook friend details without sorting through the nasty details of coding these connections by hand.

This is an entirely new way of approaching web design that opens doors to powerful applications. The novelty comes with a relatively steep learning curve, but the Bungee Connect team is committed to helping developers overcome difficulties along the way. Anyone is welcome to register and try out the service and I highly recommend taking advantage of this opportunity. The internet is an exciting place to be these days.

Bungee Connect

At any rate, I’ve been tinkering with a variety of things during my two weeks of break before starting work in DC. First, I’ve been tweaking my photo gallery website (ThansCorner Gallery). Check it out – it’s nothing too incredibly special but it combines my interests in web design and photography and gives people a chance to keep in touch and see what I”m up to. Comment on pages if you’ve got something to say!

Beyond that, I’ve taken full advantage of one of my favorite summer activities – Spending an afternoon at a coffee shop. Lately the preference has been for a Caribou bundled with Brueggers bagels and I’ve made some good progress with my poetry collection. There is truly nothing better or more rewarding than sitting at a coffee shop, surrounded by interesting people, whilst pouring thoughts into words and plowing through work to be done. The $3.15 cost of beverage and $2.70 cost of lunch is made back in the first 5 minutes there…the rest is just bonus. Give it a shot – it’ll be well worth your while. At the very least it’s a way out of the house.