Over at The Open Planning Project, we’ve always had a bit of a hard time explaining what we do. That job just got a little bit easier, with the launch of the new-and-improved TOPP website last Friday. Reactions from within the staff have been remarkably similar: something along the lines of “Phew, now I can finally tell people what the heck it is we do here!’.
Kudos to Vanessa, Jackie and Cholmes for distilling a lot of information about our various projects and goals into something remarkably coherent. I’m proud to work at TOPP, and now I have somewhere to point people when I want to show it off :)
A few months ago, I wrote up a simple javascript photo gallery viewer for a side project, so I thought I’d offer it up to the world. It’s unobtrusive javascript, and it takes a simple list of photos and turns it into a slidey slide show. It’s built on top of the Ext Javascript Framework, but could easily be adapted to work with others.
Now, after all that, not only do I have a new Favorite Web App, but I have a new bank. My friends know that I’m a bit of a Web App Slut, willing to give away my most personal information for a chance to try out a shiny new web app (here’s looking at you, Wesabe). Well, I’m not doing anything to dispel that notion today.
Here’s the gist of it: Smarty Pig is a social savings bank, where you create personal savings goals and then set up automated deposits to reach them. They have a noble goal: to get people back in the habit of saving, by making it fun. And I must say, I think it’s a great idea.
I haven’t gotten into the social side of it yet, but the idea there is that you can create public goals that your friends and others can contribute to. So far, I’ve just been experimenting with creating private goals; for example, saving a little $$ for our federal income taxes (for which we always seem to come up a bit short):
As you can see, your personal savings goals are tracked using a cute little piggy bank, which you can watch fill up and feel good about your progress (I already do, with my measly 10%). More importantly, the money is actually in a completely separate account, making it that much more difficult to spend in a moment of weakness. Meanwhile, you’re earning 3.9%.
I’m going to give this one a shot and see how it goes, but I have a feeling I’m going to like it
I came across a post this morning about a new service called Sendible. The basic idea is this: create messages of various types (email, sms, twitter tweets, facebook messages, etc) in advance, then sit back and relax as they get sent out right on schedule. Interesting idea — apparently there are a few otherservices out there who do something similar — not something I knew I needed, but intriguing enough that I decided to give it the old college try.
This isn’t a post about how Sendible works; I wasn’t even able to get that far. This is a post about inspiration and, dare I say, plagiaration. What struck me from my first interaction with sendible was the remarkable likeness it bore to Facebook, in terms of visual design. Take, for example, the login screen:
I thought: “Wow, those look a lot like the Facebook blue buttons. Interesting… perhaps Facebook is inspiring some sort of standardization in UI elements”. Then, I thought: “Wow, look at the sidebar over on the right side; that kinda looks like Facebook too. Lemme take a look”:
That was enough to get me thinking, and mentally prepare this blog post. But I waited and decided to give Sendible a little more time. Next stop: my homepage:
Maybe it’s just me, but I was again really blown away by the near exact likeness this (albeit in reverse) that this bears to Facebook:
Of course, I’m all for “fake it till you make it” and “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” but this seems to take it perhaps just a step too far. At least make it green or orange! Thoughts?
Now, time to me to get back to the real business of deciding whether or not I need a message scheduler in my life…
In addition to being the first day of summer, yesterday was the second annual Make Music New York festival. It’s really an incredible event — musicians of all abilities and genres take to the streets to play free mini-concerts. The event came to NYC for the first time last year, and we had a great time playing, but it’s been going on across the world for over 25 years:
Make Music New York is based on France’s Fete de la Musique, which has been a great success for 25 years. Since it was inaugurated, the festival has become an international phenomenon, celebrated on the same day in more than 300 cities in 108 countries, including Germany, Italy, Egypt, Syria, Morocco, Australia, Vietnam, Congo, Cameroon, Togo, Columbia, Chile, Mongolia, and Japan.
We didn’t get to spend as much time as we would have liked exploring the event, but we saw a few nice moments. Sax on the Brooklyn Bridge, above, and this accordion concert (!) at Houston & 1st:
