Following Ian’s distillation of our internal blog a few weeks ago, here are some more delicacies we wanted to share with the wider world. A useful forum for ideas, observations and mind-boggling curiosities, our internal blog is sometimes just too good to keep to ourselves…

Here’s a peek; and expect more soon.

Zoomable Interfaces
Spotted by Joe
Does the Internet take advantage of how humans best process information? An interesting article in Newsweek suggests that scrolling and linking are inferior methods of taking in information when compared to zooming, which comes far more naturally. This observation has not been lost on technology giants and forward-thinking entrepreneurs, who are rapidly trying to develop effective zoomable interfaces. The obvious example is the iPhone, but also look at Deep Fish, and more importantly Seadragon (demonstrated at a 2007 TED talk by Blaise Aguera).

Explore the whole universe!
Spotted by Tim
Talking of TED, the highly regarded Technology, Entertainment, Design conferences, Tim spotted a recent talk by Ray Gould on Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope, which combines feeds from satellites and telescopes and weaves them together into a ‘media-rich, immersive experience.’ Not dissimilar to Google Sky in effect, it’s an interesting example of a zoomable interface as discussed above.

Read all about it
Spotted by Sam
PDFs, while undoubtedly a useful format, seem increasingly incompatible with the modern web surfing experience. The Safari browser allows you to view them without having to open another application, yet the memory-hogging bulky approach is not terribly effective. So where to now? Enter iPaper, a Scribd Platform development, that converts a range of document types into an embedded flash object, much like YouTube converts videos and allows them to be distributed across the internet. It’s lightweight, accessible, and may be an effective solution for organisations looking to make large amounts of text available online.

And finally…
Instead of combining element from two or more sources to create something new, let’s try removing one of the elements from a single source and see what we get. It’s the reverse of a mash-up. Garfield minus Garfield. Spotted by Ian

And how can fashion and technology live in harmony? Meet the iPod suit. Spotted by Gavin.

Digest over; we’ll be back soon with another online stew, cooked to perfection in the Cogapp kitchens.

No, it’s not something your stomach does - it’s a round-up of interesting posts from our internal blog.

We use our internal blog to communicate everything online that we find thought-provoking, surprising - or hilarious - and we thought it was time we shared some of the more juicy titbits with the rest of the world.
 

Instapaper
Spotted by Ian.
A neat little personal news/article aggregator which lets you bookmark articles online, then retrieve them at your leisure, via any browsable device. Not the most earth-shattering idea, but a neat execution and simple interface - which is all you need.

http://www.instapaper.com/

Interactive travel maps and more
Spotted by Pete.
MySociety have been doing some really interesting things with heatmaps of various things. These are now interactive, and well worth a look.

http://www.mysociety.org/2007/more-travel-maps/

You might also be interested in FixMyStreet and theyworkforyou, which are both extending the ideas of social networking by trying to give users a voice in the real world. A worthy cause and definitely something worth investigating.

Videotrace
Spotted by Joe.
Videotrace uses a combination of a Sketchup-a-like tool and computer vision techniques. Users can outine objects in video frames, correct their shape over a number of frames, and generate texture mapped 3d objects from the sketched wireframes.

There’s some work still to do, but the demonstration on YouTube is pretty persuasive:

And finally…
Games in which you can draw your own environment are very big at the moment. Here are a few of Tim’s favourites for you to try in your lunch hour.

Line golfer
Tower of goo

That’s all for this round-up; we’ll be back soon with more shoals of online fun trawled from the Cogapp nets.