Just came across this thread on Tufte's discussion board. It quite old but it is still getting new posts. Very interesting...
I had a wonderful meeting yesterday with Rajesh Jain who is running Netcore these days. Most of the talk revolved around what Netcore was up to. Which is a lot. After all, Rajesh is a person brimming with ideas.
Affordable computing is a wonderful idea that Netcore is focusing upon, and it has a lot of potential in a country like India. The concept is a simple extension of Moore’s Law. Given that processor speeds are expected to double every 18 to 24 months, you can gain access to old computers for almost throw away prices (the monitor costing the bigger portion.) Now this relatively slow computer is used as a thin client while a much better computer acts as the thick server, and does all the number crunching. This is a bit like of combining Larry Ellison’s ‘Network Computer’ with Jeff Raskin's original dream of the Macintosh. And what Ellison will really like about this, is that it runs a non-Microsoft OS.
In fact, the entire system leverages Open Source technologies to the maximum. It runs on Linux, uses openOffice and similar open source applications. So for around Rs. 20,000 ($400) Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) can have an completely integrated solution.
But Rajesh sees the main potential in delivering this technology to India's large rural population. There have been a number of initiatives aimed at rural India (a lot of them conducted by Media Lab Asia) but none have really made the difference. Could this be the one to?
The other thing that Rajesh is passionate about is blogging. We talked a bit about developments at sixapart and shared our favorite blogs. Rajesh also runs blogstreet, a site that keeps a track of blogs and links to and from it. It uses this information to rank blogs and create blog neighborhood information. So when you search for a blog on blogstreet, you’ll also get information on all the people who blog-roll it. There is also a visual view to all this information, which is really cool.
And finally there was the Linux based, blog aggregator. Very cool stuff. I’ve put Rajesh’s Blog on my must read list, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what he’s up to next…
Get a ‘God’s eye view' on the world of blogging. The ‘World as a blog’ is a Flash app that scans the world for updates and displays new posts neat little dots, located exactly where the post originated…
How does it do it? As a blogger, there are three things you need to do on your end to make it work: First make your blog geoURL enabled by adding geoTags. Then makes sure you have the RSS tags. And finally make sure you ping weblogs.com every time you post a new entry.
Once you done that, Weblogs.com updates its server up to a minute after you've pinged it, then geo-blog poller checks that, and the flash map finally checks in with the server about once per minute. It could take up to three minutes for your entry to show…
I’ll let you know how long this one took ;)
Wanadu, the company I used to work with was recently acquired by Latitude Communications. Which, means iCreate, the PowerPoint to Flash conversion tool will now form a part of MeetingPlace, the Latitude product. There has been no indication as to the future of iConference which is/was a FlashComm based conferencing solution.
There recently has been some interest on this topic even from .Net evangelist, Jesse Ezell. And there are some nice comments about it on his blog.
I’d definitely like to wish the entire Wanadu team the very best. Hope that this new partnership works out well and the 'Richmedia for the rest of us' dream comes true...
Once upon a time, there was only a tricky JavaScript workaround to do this. Today, there is a component...
Cool...
(Wish it was built into the Flash Player though...)
Considering that travel is not high on anybody's minds these days, very few people would have had the opportunity to make it to Canada for Flash in the Can.
You might have missed the event, but you need not miss the content. Here are links to some of the presentations made during the event. Thanks to the Toronto Flash users group.
Colin just started a petition on his blog asking Macromedia to support a better API for preloading MovieClips. Anybody who has tried building pre-loaders will have inevitably run into these issues, so it would be great if Macromedia will be able to fix these issues... right?
While I'm still waiting for my copy of ASDG2 to arrive, Colin Moock has been busy setting up his new blog. Expect some cool stuff there in the future (he's already busy posting).
Meanwhile you can dig into his SF FF2003 presentation. Excellent place to whet you appetite for Design Patterns and Flash OOP
Ever wanted the Flash HTML text-field to be able to parse an <img> tag? Well, Peter Elst is working on something that can do just that. Check this sample It still has issues with scrolling by selecting the text etc, but this is a great beiginning... good work!
Were-here.com is in my opinion one of the best Flash community sites around, but unfortunately they have been facing some issues lately and the site has been down for a while. They recently posted a note on their site saying that they will be back, this post is just to say that I'll be there when they are back...
This article has been on the joelonsoftware.com site for quite some time and makes an excellent read for those who are coming into Interface Design from a programming background, or even an HCI background. Definitely a must read...
