Flickr rolled out three new features today… three features that I’m extremely excited about. They go into detail on The Flickr Blog.
First up is the new Guest Pass, which allows you to e-mail a special link to people that will let them look at specified private photos without having to sign up for a Flickr account and get added to your contacts list. This makes sharing photos with family and friends a TON easier.
Guest passes work with secret links so you can send the link yourself or have us send it for you. When you want to reign things in a bit, you can expire the guest pass at any time.
Second is a new Flickr Mobile site at m.flickr.com. I’ve been using the old Flickr Mobile ever since I got a data plan on my Treo, but it wasn’t nearly as robust as the full site. It was also restricted to old-school Flickr users with non-Yahoo logins. Quite a few new features have been added, but the tables have been turned… old-school users cannot use the new mobile site, as it’s restricted to Yahoo IDs only. Flickr Mobile was the only reason I was holding off on converting my account to a Yahoo login, so now I guess I don’t have any reason to hold out any longer. In fact, I have quite a bit on incentive to switch it.
Third is Camera Finder, a tool to show who’s shooting with what cameras. Graphs show what cameras are getting the most uploads on Flickr, and links send you to the best pictures taken with different models. I see this as an excellent tool for people researching a new camera purchase. (Right now the XT is completely killing it in the popularity category!)
This rock-hard display consists of not-so-average concrete with “embedded optical fibers, arranged as pixels, capable of transmitting natural as well as artificial light.” When light is projected from the rear, the pixels illuminate to display imagery
It’s a fairly simple concept, but a very solid execution. How could this be used in interior/exterior architecture to make surroundings more interactive, immersing, and representational?
Vista has turned into a huge letdown for me personally. I think a few other people probably share that feeling. Longhorn promised revolutionary things for the Windows platform, such as a completely new file system. Weren’t there mentions of eliminating the registry?
The video above shows the concepts that Microsoft was pushing for its next-generation Windows. Looks pretty slick doesn’t it? Shouldn’t a 3 year old video be disappointing compared to the product that will ship in a couple months? Instead, I feel the complete opposite, what’s shipping seems to completely lack the vision of the original concepts.
I understand that things happen in development, and technical limitations and kill a few ideas… but I think this is a case of initially overselling a product that doesn’t exist, leaving reality to be a disappointment three years later.
I installed Tivo’s Desktop software on my iMac a few nights ago. It lets you stream music from iTunes to the Tivo, but the interface lacks polish and features.
Tonight I ran across Audiofaucet, a third party program to stream/control music from iTunes or a folder from both Windows and OS X machines. The program has gotten a lot of recognition from the Tivo programming community, and is currently in public beta. I downloading the app and had it running on my Powerbook and iMac in seconds. The interface on the Tivo side of things is very slick, with the polished look of a modern application. Audiofaucet also lets you play audio from your Tivo, or play audio from the source computer. If you have your computer setup to a massive system already, the Tivo can serve as a controller for the computer… pretty slick.
If you’ve got a Series 2 Tivo setup on your network, I highly recommend you check out Audiofaucet at digitaldroplet.net. I’m looking forward to progress from this app, and will gladly pay for it when it gets out of beta.
