The Jing Project allows you to take screen shots (png) or video captures (flash with audio) on your computer and quickly share them. I used Jing for all of the images you see in this post by simply going to each site, clicking on Jing’s little sunshine in the corner of my screen, selecting image capture, and then highlighting what I wanted to capture on the screen. It was 60 seconds of work and included the upload to Wordpress. What’s great is that it works just as well on Windows as it does on a Mac. They also have a pro version that allows you to export smaller video files (flash files can get big) and much more. Jing is a top 10 application for me. Oh yeah, did I mention it was free?
The folks over at IKEA Hacker take Ikea’s modular design to a new level and create really cool and functional mashups that anyone can replicate. As someone who used Ikea to renovate and furnish my first condo, I can truly appreciate what the hackers do with this stuff. I wish Ikea and the hackers existed when I was in my 20’s. I would have had the phattest pad.
I Love Photos’ wants to make your digital photos more functional. Their first free product launch (for mac only) runs a face recognition process against your photos and allows you to assign each face it finds to a tag or set of tags via a nice drag and drop interface. When I tested it out, the product found my big head pretty easily. I tagged all of the photos that included my face in them as “Huge Noggin” and now all I have to do is click on that tag to see all of the pictures that contain me. I am interested to see how this product evolves over time. I wonder if they will start to identify landmarks and other non-facial targets as well. I am not a huge fan of having to use more than one application to manage one subject area (i.e. photos) but at least I Love Photos offers bi-directional syncing with iPhoto, my main photo management system.
I am always on the lookout for Wordpress plugins that can make my blog better. Meet Your Commenters plugin adds a new screen to your Dashboard and leverages Google Social Graph API to deliver enhanced information about the folks who comment on your site. It is a great way to learn more about your readers and find other social networks on which you can interact with them. As the Social Graph becomes more robust, I expect this plugin to become an even better way to get to know your peeps.
The other day I was looking for an iPhone application that would let me stream Woxy.com internet radio over my iPhone. FStream for the iPhone is offically my favorite for iPhone internet radio streaming application. Based on the open source Mac version, this simple app allows you to add radio stations easily and quickly become a portable, streaming radio superstar. I can now get in my car, plug my iPhone into the auxiliary jack, open FStream, and flip between my internet radio stations like it was my car stereo. You can also use it as a voice recorder but until my online brain, Evernote, lets me down, I will probably never use that feature. FYI, some other internet radio stations I enjoy are Seattle’s juggernaut KEXP.org and LA’s NPR station KCRW.
Enjoy
