Interesting scroll clock created Toki Woki, with Javascript /Mootools. Hey it’s Friday geeks, have some fun.
Via DaringFireball.

I’ve been using MacSpeech Dictate for a week now and I have two things to report that I didn’t know when I did my initial review of this voice activated typing software.

On about day three I was sitting while holding the headset that is included with the Dictate software as I spoke into it. (I wore the headset on my head for about a day until I got tired of the way it felt and simply started holding it like a microphone.) I had read reviews of dictate that warned that the MacBook Air default microphone was not of high enough quality to run voice recognition software, so I had not even tried to use it without the headset.

Well lo and behold I removed the headset from the USB port and started talking again and I saw no difference at all in my results. It was a quiet afternoon in my room with only the sound of the air conditioner as ambient noise. Still I was surprised: I spoke no louder and at the same speed.

So what difference does this make? Well since I’m using this voice recognition typing software in conjunction with an ultra-portable laptop, my little content creation machine just got a little more portable. Less to carry, faster to set up. The whole experience is cleaner. If the computer is sleeping I simply open it, hit one button and start talking. As rarely as I’m hit by inspiration I can’t afford to fool around.

By the way I haven’t changed any of the default microphone settings to try and improve the performance of the software. Indoors, when it’s quiet, I haven’t really had to. Now that I don’t have to wear an obnoxious headset while I’m dictating I feel more inclined than I did before to see how this works in public, in a reasonably quiet place I assume.

Is this such a big victory when the end product is no more than I could create by typing? It’s probably too early for me to really judge whether writing this way produces content that is of a different quality than I create when I’m typing, good or bad. But my initial feeling is that it is a lot less effort to write this way, and I don’t just mean physically. On some subjects it’s very easy to just talk and talk quite easily, and I have never had so little barrier between thinking and getting words down as I do now. As someone who does not touch type I can’t say that the ease of speaking isn’t matched by the quick competence of a touch typist for whom typing is akin to breathing. I can say that not having to sweat over getting a thought down before I forget it is a huge improvement, for me. The process of getting it all down feels practically unmediated, with no pen, keyboard or anything else involved.

With voice typing software I suppose I am seeing the actual speed at which I can create, as the process now happens via an entirely unobtrusive technology. It’s the speed at which I can talk. If the keyboard has always been a bottleneck for my thoughts, I am pretty sure I don’t think any faster than I can speak. For me there is something that feels like liberation in all this.

As basic as images are to the Internet it’s no surprise that Google’s approach to image search, born back in 2001, continues to evolve. Good thing too because it was always pretty slow going, plodding through pages of images results that didn’t really have what you wanted. Recently they added a link to “similar images” beneath some image results which will take you to an entire page of photos of the same place or subject. It’s better, but only incrementally so.

Today Google Labs launched Google Image Swirl, which uses new technology to gather images with common characteristics into groups, with an interesting interface that should greatly reduce the time it takes to find an image if you are looking for something specific. Now this is a leap.

The search will take you to a page of thumbnails as usual, except that you’ll see receding edges of photos underneath the top thumbnail. (The effect reminds me of Apple’s Time Machine interface.) Click on the thumbnail and you’ll be presented with a set or group of related photos or images. Interestingly, by clicking on peripheral images in the group, a whole new group of images will open up. Eventually clicking on an image will take you to the web page upon which the image resides, rather than drilling down further into new groups. I’ve probably made it sound really complicated, but it’s extremely intuitive and fast. It’s much, much faster this way to look through a lot of photos to find something good or exactly what you’re looking for.

Another smart feature is that at any time you can click on an earlier group or the results of your original image search. There is an echo of Google’s Wonder Wheel here. The technology is derived from Google Similar Images and Picassa face recognition that determines or discovers the relationships between all these images and sorts them into groups.

At the moment it only works for about 200,000 queries but it’s a fun taste of what’s to come. It’s experimental, you know the drill, but aside from the rather limited number of queries it can handle right now I found Google Image Swirl to be extremely usable and fairly comprehensive already.

Have you ever played around with random business name generators? I used half an hour that I’ll never get back today looking for a company name or a graphic design company that my wife may or may not create. “Advanced Depictions” anyone? The key to creating brandable names is a word combination that is memorable, and if you can’t squeeze any more out, an automated generator might save the day. Product name generators function in much the same way, throwing together nouns and adjectives in permutations that you would probably never think of yourself. This is a great way to dream up brandable domain names also if you’re not looking for company names.

Here’s a nice overview of Google’s new language, Go, by Scott Gilbertson over at Webmonkey. Includes a 1-hr video on Go developer Rob Pike.

From the Chromium blog Google announces that it has an early-stage research project for something they call SPDY (“speedy!”), the purpose of which might be to replace the HTTP protocol.

Techchrunch claims to have heard that Google’s Chrome OS (that would be OS, not Chrome browser) is close to launch.

Programming language improvements. Make the web faster. Build a better OS.

Ultimately Google’s biggest strength might not be any one particular offering, possibly not even its search engine. It has systematized methods to encourage its developers to aggressively innovate while not losing focus on improving the core, revenue-producing businesses. If an enterprise involves itself in as many frontiers as Google does, it does not have to find success in everything that it tries (and it does not). In an environment changing as fast as the internet is today, failure lies in not extending yourself. Try everything, because no one can know where it’s all going.

For years, some naysayers in the investment community disparaged Google for being a one trick pony revenue-wise. Between acquisitions like YouTube, which is now making a profit, and a culture of tech disruption the likes of which can be found nowhere else on the planet including Apple, Google wins by keeping everybody else on their toes. Note how often new Google offerings are not incremental improvements, but instead meta re-imaginings of the current techscape. What comes after HTTP?

With enormous companies the danger is rarely trying something new and failing at it. The danger is not staying ambitious enough. By segmenting its collective efforts so that individuals or small groups are also allowed to pursue interests about which they are passionate, Google may have hit upon a way to weave vibrant small-scale ambition into its enormity.

OK so I was playing around with Google toolbar preferences and realized that there is a much easier way to access lot of Google functionality that I use very regularly, without necessarily having to have Gmail open all the time so that I could hit the links in the upper left corner, or much worse, the ‘more’ pulldown. (Hey, I knew it was possible, I was just busy earning a living and stuff like that.)

Anyway, just in case I’m not the last person in the universe to have done this already:

Assuming you have the Google toolbar already installed, (remember the days before you could put Google toolbar on Firefox?) just go to ‘options’ under the little blue wrench icon, then hit the button tab, then add whatever you need. Google Documents, Maps, Picassa Web Album, Groups and Calendar were inexplicably not on for me by default.

This won’t change the catbox for me or anything, but make enough of these positive incremental changes and I should find myself saving some time, right? Especially as this is a great way to save some of my Google preferences across multiple computers, when I use other machines. (Assuming the toolbar is installed, and that the ‘Access your Google Toolbar Settings everywhere ‘ option is turned on.)

We hear a lot of complaints about how difficult it is to navigate the app store and distinguish quality applications from mediocre ones. There are amusing statistics on how few times lots of iPhone applications are actually used after they are downloaded, and anecdotes on how everybody and his cousin has a great idea and wants to build an iPhone app. But with the number of applications in the app store having recently hit 100,000, it’s hard to argue against the idea that introducing third-party applications for iPhone was a prescient business decision of historical proportions. Remember, letting applications developers outside Apple build iPhone apps was not always a foregone conclusion. With the insane explosive growth of the app store the real surprise might be that Apple hasn’t had more problems with it along the way.

Hey does anyone remember back in January 2007, how Steve Jobs proclaimed that Apple had no intention of opening up iPhone to third-party developers? I have my own theory as to whether that was a colossal head fake (it was), designed to keep potential competition unfocused on the dawn of handheld devices as full-fledged computing platforms, while Apple ironed out kinks. Even if it wasn’t, it’s clear that now in November 2009 the app store is almost an embarrassment of variety, redundancy and utterly, beautifully comprehensive availability. The momentum of its growth makes it hard to imagine how sellers of applications created for other mobile platforms will ever have the variety and number of applications that the app store offers, especially for non-enterprise applications. But who knows? As of August 2009 Nokia and Research In Motion still have larger smartphone market shares than Apple does.

For what it’s worth, neither of them can claim to have inspired as many people with no programming background to try and turn their ideas into applications.

Digital Media Minute has written before about building iPhone applications. I thought it might be helpful to list a few of the newer resources that have become available, this time with a slant toward non-programmers who aren’t really inclined to learn how to create the app themselves. Send your cousin with the crazy idea the link to this post.

Building iPhone Apps- Background

Brian LeRoux has a nice overview on getting started building your app, including the pros and cons of building the app in the browser, making a native app, or taking a hybrid approach. Not nuts and bolts, but a good starting point.

An absolutely outstanding, very detailed look at the iPhone development process from the very early stages, from Ten23 Software, the guys who created Photocast. Geared toward social networking applications, but generally applicable too. Nothing regarding coding, instead it all about approach, from deciding on what kind of app you’ll create, what user motivations you will target to entice people to actually buy the app, to features you don’t want to leave out.

iPhone Apps-Hands-Off Implementation

For non-tech-oriented designers or agencies, NewsGator’s Taplynx offers a way to quickly build an application around your great idea and monetize it. It’s also being marketed to developers as a way to build apps quickly, then add custom features. The SDK is free, then purchase a license key when you want to push to production (one license key per app). They are touting it as a way to syndicate content, though for the $3,500 entry you’d better have some high-quality content. Taplynx intro video:

If you only have ‘as little as five minutes’, and you think you can live with a pretty simple interface and functionality, take a look at Sweb Apps. They offer you a CMS for adding buttons and simple features, though it’s easy enough to add your own designs for backgrounds and buttons, etc. A menu tells you how much each added feature costs. There are monthly charges for hosting and App Tracker.

The App Incubator, from Medl gets points for originality in their meta-approach: it’s an iPhone app that helps you get your idea produced, needing nothing at all except the idea. That means you need no money… If you have money and want to keep more than the 25% that they will pay you for the profits from your idea (assuming they choose to run with it), you can also hire them. It’s hard to encapsulate better than this copy, from their site:

You never know where inspiration will strike. Download the App Incubator to your iPhone and you’ll be ready whenever it does.
Using the simple interface, you can submit your ideas directly to the incubator. If it passes a series of tests and reviews, we’ll pay one of our development teams to build it. Then we’ll promote and market the application. And we’ll share the profits with you.
We make our decisions based upon five factors: Originality. Functionality. Simplicity. Revenue Opportunity. And Fun.
You can also upload ideas via our website – where you’re free to type with a full keyboard. Once you’ve received a submission number for your app, you can use the storyboard tool found on our site to give us even more details of how you see the app working.
The only question is, do you have a great idea?

AppBreeder gives you a choice of having an iPhone Web App built for you for free that is supported by ads, an iPhone web app with no ads for ~$10-$15/mo., a native iPhone app for ~$30-$50/mo., or a multi-platform app for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android & a web app for iPhone for between $40-$60/mo. They have packages available reminiscent of blog themes geared toward certain types of users/commercial entities: lawyers, realtors, restaurants, bands, and many more.

There is no shortage of help available for you to see an idea for an app through to production, depending on how much money, time, and involvement in the process you are willing to assume. Even if you aren’t inclined to learn to do it yourself, it’s till true that choosing how to build an iPhone app is ultimately up to you.

You have an idea for building an iPhone app but you’re stuck because you don’t know where to begin? Carla White was too, but then she created Gratitude Journal, one of the top apps in the entire App Store! Read more here.

Dmitry Baranovskiy is not impressed. Via Sitepoint and Kevin Yank, we get this scathing review of Google Closure tools from the creator of the Raphaël and gRaphaël JavaScript libraries. His contention is that Closure, Google’s new javascript library, was written by Java developers who don’t really ‘get’ Javascript, and he gives us plenty of examples. Memory leaks, data-type confusion, API-design indictment, it’s all here.
Well, if you put the wrong people on a project you’ll get suboptimal results. To the extent that Baranovskiy arguments have merit, this looks like a failure within Google to really check what they are producing before they release. And that would be a big surprise.

If there’s one thing we expect from Google it’s a focus on performance. Heck, Google released its own browser, Google Chrome, primarily to take JavaScript performance to the next level!
Seeing code like this, one has to wonder if Google could have achieved the same thing by teaching its engineers to write better JavaScript code.

How did I miss this? AIR evangelist Christian Cantrell has created a comprehensive list of new features that are planned for inclusion in AIR 2.0. Multi-touch, gestures…check it out.

This tutorial will walk you through the basics of skinning your Flex or Air app from the very beginning. Very well done with plenty of code illustrations.