YouTube Time allows you to link to a specific part of a YouTube video. Neat.
(via shoeboxdwelling)
Selected Data Visualization Tools
The fine folks of data visualization.ch put together a selection of data visualization tools that they use the most and that they enjoy working with. It includes libraries for plotting data on maps, frameworks for creating charts, graphs and diagrams and tools to simplify the handling of data. Even if you’re not into programming, you’ll find applications that can be used without writing one single line of code. They will keep this list as a living repository and add / remove things as technology develops. YES!
Organized Wonder
Organized Wonder is a new way to share and discover the best talks, documentaries, interviews, short films and various other videos scattered across the web. Fantastic!
You can follow my collection here.
Holy Blogging Zen
I just discovered the fullscreen button on my WordPress blogging interface. Holy blogging zen!
diagram.ly
Diagram.ly is a new favorite. Ideal for quickly sketching an idea or just to spending time playing with shapes. My 6 year old approves.
(via @papermuse)
WebbyGram
Yay! Finally a way to access your Instagram photos on the web: Brenden Mulligan was tired of waiting for Instagram to build a web view, so he did it himself: Webbygram.
(via @trincia)
Just re-launched: Collabfinder
My friend Saha just relaunched Collabfiner, a site that makes it easy to find a collaborator for your next big project. What makes it different is that no recruiters or business-types are allowed.
Use Collabfinder to find people interested in building the sames things you are: A programmer to help you with the education startup you’ve been thinking about. Or illustrators who might want to help you write your new kids book. Or chat with designers who are interested in working on a magazine project.
Want to do a new startup? Tag yourself with “Summer Camp,” “Techstars,” or “Y Combinator” and get pitched by smarties like you. Want to work on an mobile app about comic books? Tag yourself with “comics” and “mobile app.” Easy.
Congrats Saha and Team. This is fantastic!
Cobook | The smart address book for Mac
Last week I sent out a desperate and slightly frustrated tweet about the the most recent Mac OS Address book app. It’s cumbersome to use, and flat out doesn’t work on one of my Macs. I asked about an alternative and @MaxFenton pointed me to Cobook App.
It’s a small widget that lives in your menubar, easily accessible and intuitive to use. It seamlessly syncs with the OS X Address Book, which is what I want, but without having to ever open address book again.
Interesting twist: Cobook also connects to your social network accounts and automatically looks up pictures, companies, phone numbers etc. At this point, I think I like that, but let’s see, over the long run.
Here, try it yourself. Not sure why, but Cobook app is free.
Subtle Patterns
Subtle Patterns, by Atle Mo, offers high quality tilable textured patterns for web designers, free to use.
(via howaboutorange)
Wind Map
Wind Map shows you a live map of wind flowing over the US. You can also go back in time and look up days that passed already: The March 14th map looks pretty neat.
(via Khoi)
Brooklyn Beta/Summer Camp
It’s a pretty special day for my studiomates Chris and Cameron, forces behind Brooklyn Beta, the friendliest conference I have every attended. With today’s launch of Summer Camp they are moving beyond just being a conference.
Chris and Cameron were inspired by what Y Combinator has done for developers and hope to show some of the same love for designers. Not at the expense of developers, though. Their ideal team has both a designer and a developer working together.
With Summer Camp they aim to help “designer-developer teams” build the next generation of web products and change the world.
With the Brooklyn Beta conference, Chris and Cameron try to help spread big ideas and connect designers and developers together. With Summer Camp, they want to take it a step further and remove what is quite possibly the biggest barrier of all, money.
It’s a 12-week program in the summer leading up to the conference. They invest $25,000 in your company for a 6% stake, and give you a lot more help along the way.
Summer Camp is part of the Brooklyn Beta nonprofit, so any gains made in this year’s investments will go right back into the community and hopefully fund the next round of Summer Campers.
And lucky me, I have the honor to be one of the Summer Camp advisors. At the ready to offer advice and experience. Check out the impressive advisor list:
- Ben Pieratt, Co-founder of Svpply
- Charles Adler, Co-founder of Kickstarter
- Dan Mall, Founder of SuperFriendly
- Fred Wilson, Partner at Union Square Ventures
- Gina Bianchini, Founder and CEO of Mightybell
- Hayley Barna, Co-founder of Birchbox
- Jason Santa Maria, Creative Director of Typekit and A Book Apart
- Jeffrey Zeldman, Founder of Happy Cog and A List Apart
- Jessica Hische, Letterer and Type Designer
- Joe Gebbia, Co-founder of Airbnb
- John Borthwick, Founder and CEO of Betaworks
- Liz Danzico, Chair and Co-founder of SVA Interaction Design
- Matthew Smith, Creative Director of Zaarly
- Michael Galpert, Co-founder of Aviary
- Randy Hunt, Creative Director of Etsy
- Tim O’Reilly, Founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media Inc.
- Wilson Miner, Head of Design at Rdio
- and moi
Here’s what Chris and Cameron are hoping Summer Camp will fund:
“We are hoping to back big ideas looking to make a real impact. Don’t just make something for your peers. Build something that fixes the insanity of modern education. Or helps people weather the upcoming financial crises and rise in unemployment. Or improves the health of people around the world. Or brings neighbors closer together. Or helps people run small businesses. Or strengthens the bonds of families. Or puts existing abusive, mammoth institutions out of business (pretty please).”
Chris and Cameron deserve an internet hug for pulling this off.
Loft Resumes
Loft Resumes turns your vanilla-looking resume into a beautifully custom designed one that stands out from the crowd. Great idea for people that don’t have the design skills themselves.
(via Fab)
An All New Behance
Huge congrats to the team over at Behance for their brand-spanking-new site. They’ve completely redesigned key features – gallery browsing, activity feeds, member profiles, curated galleries, and the follower experience.
Their new Explore lets you sort the world’s creative work by field, location and tools. (Here’s an example for the location ‘Brooklyn’) And their new Activity Feed provides a visual dashboard for tracking the creative work of people you care about. The redesigned portfolio pages and project views bring a new level of transparency and attribution as they clearly indicate where and when your work has been featured.
One of my personal favorite features is that you can search by materials used. Way cool! And then of course there are the curated sites, Typography Served is a site I often get lost in.
Read more about the changes here. And check out the new site.
GuideGuide
Forget manually dragging Photoshop guidelines to create a grid, use GuideGuide instead. Just enter your grid specs and GuideGuide will place each guide for you. Best of all you can clear everything with a single click. GuideGuide is free, please support the makers by donating a small amount.
(via destroytoday)
Introducing The Curator’s Code
My studiomate Maria *just* launched The Curator’s Code — a movement to honor and standardize attribution of discovery across the web. (This is so dear to me, I can barely breathe as I type!)
While we have systems in place for literary citation, image attribution, and scientific reference, we don’t yet have a system that codifies the attribution of discovery in curation as a currency of the information economy, a system that treats discovery as the creative labor that it is.
This is what The Curator’s Code is – a system for honoring the creative and intellectual labor of information discovery by making attribution consistent and codified, the celebrated norm.
Read Maria’s post explaining The Curator’s Code in detail.
Or go straight to The Curator’s Code site and download the Bookmarklet.
Maria, I am so proud of you and thankful for making this happen! This is huge! And big giant props to Kelli Anderson for designing the site.
UPDATE: There was a lot of discussion happening around the launch of this over the past two days: Daniel Howells wrote an interesting blog post and I followed many heated debates over on Twitter. I just want to clarify one thing:
I don’t care if anyone adapts to Maria’s proposed symbols for attribution or if people continue using a simple via/HT or ~. All I care about is that people *do* attribute their findings. Why? Because it shows respect *and* most of all, it allows us to discover news sources. The ‘via’ is oftentimes a virtual door into a magic new world that I didn’t know existed.
I am just glad that this attribution conversation is taking place.
Yay! Codes
YAY! CODES! is a free service that makes it painless for developers to distribute promo codes to their customers.
Feel like this could be a service I came up with, given the color scheme and name. Just kidding.
(via daringfireball)
Docracy
Docracy is a social repository of legal documents. Docracy’s mission is to make useful legal documents freely available to the public.
Anyone can upload or write a new document, or branch, edit and improve existing documents either for the community or for personal use. Documents are private by default: only you can see and edit them. If you make them public, only you, as the owner, will be able to edit them (thus creating new versions), but other people will be able to branch them, privately or publicly.
Explore
My friend Maria Popova just launched Explore, a discovery engine for meaningful knowledge. A project by Coursekit, with Maria as the editor. Trust me when I say, you better bookmark this one.
Offscreen
Offscreen is a new print magazine that looks at the life and work of people that create websites and apps. Thumbs up!
Musical Democracy
Anthm turns your iPhone into a futuristic, handheld jukebox. Launch the app, start a party then you and your friends can add music into one playlist. You can request from millions (yes, millions) of songs. No need to use your own library of music, Anthm will stream all the music for you straight from Rdio.
Take 30 seconds to watch this video to see how it works.
We will be giving this a try at our studio tomorrow. Thanks for the find, Jonnie!
iStockPack
Team Tattly is currently researching packaging and POS system ideas. I just stumbled upon iStockPack, a site that lets you to download vector files of packaging templates.
Question for my readers: Are there other similar resources out there that you can think of? Thank you!
Beaker
Beaker is a new business and culture magazine that launched today. It is for the idea generation and aims to equip entrepreneurs, technologists and executives to act on their ideas while navigating between the stages of idea to product, product to market, and the first few years of a startup.
Beaker plans to create and curate articles on early stage operations, startup culture and technology trends from around the world.
Amrit Richmond is the brainchild behind the project. I am excited to see where she will take it. Congratulations, Amrit!
