88 Studios

Silverlight - very impressive image handling

I was really impressed by the demo of Silverlight at SXSW. Of course, being a Microsoft product, one is predisposed to dislike it, but it handled images beautifully. This hard rock cafe demo, shows off this image handling capability. You have to install the beta2 plugin - which is 4megs. With this size download, it's difficult to know if it's actually a usable product... i'll use it when the audience is there... Other than the adoption issue, it looks very promising. Good enough to sway me from Flash for some image heavy apps.

Art Gallery Management Software

Don't know much about this field - but could be an interesting intersection/integration point. Encyclia-G helps galleries manage their inventory and has ties to web site management. What's interesting is that they've assumed a certain structure for navigating/displaying a gallery - the model is what I call the E-bay model for selling art. Reams of thumbnail images strewn across a page. A far cry from the real experience. With a 2006 copyright, this biz may no longer be in biz. Hard to tell.

added: 2.29.08
artlogic.net - SaaS

Crosspost to Delicious & Typepad from Google Reader

Sweet - I just finished some refinements to my mashup of some scripts that allow me to post to this blog and to Delicious, simultaneously, in 2 clicks, links and my commentary about articles from within Google Reader. So now I can be reading, have a quick thought, and Whamo!, post it in 2 places along with a personal note. Oh, and the personal note is also cross posted as the content of the blog post and as the note to Delicious. This is so streamline, I should test it in a windtunnel. If by anychance, you are reading this and are interested in it, post a comment and I can un-hard code some things and make this script public. Ie: if there's anyone else in the world who happens to wander upon this blog (already unlikely) and happens to have the same pressing need to cross post to Typepad and Delicious from Google Reader (all the more unlikely).

Art News Widget

Hm. I don't like the way that widget is working. Doesn't refresh enough and the articles aren't relevant enough. I'm thinking that there needs to be some kind of RSS reader archiving service. I've done a little searching and haven't seen anything of the sort. Google reader has a feature that lets you create a web page from your starred items, which is getting there - but i'd also like to be able to add notes and organize by tag/category - so that I could then pull a feed from a particular tag or tag combination into a news widget. Or add the categories independently to my blog/website.

It's almost like delicious for RSS feeds. I suppose you could use delicious to do this, but the process would be laborious.

Something like this would be really useful for people doing research and wanting to share it on a blog - i'm writing a book right now and doing something of the sort in an ad-hoc sort of way (mobilevoter.org/blog.html). Also have a client for whom the widget-side of this idea would be valuable. Well, i'll keep searching for a tool and if I can't find one, will probably build one.

RSS Online Art News Widget

I just made an online art news widget! It took me several hours and is not working great yet. You can see it in the right nav. I was surprise how difficult it was actually - I set it up at Widgetbox and it required getting into some JavaScript - I would have thought there would be a more turnkey approach to creating a widget out of an RSS feed. Maybe there is, but I couldn't find anything that was quite right.

Also tried using Yahoo Pipes, but didn't have much luck getting reliable output. It seemed to vacillate between good results and crap results.

What I'd really like to do is create a widget where you can easily check off news clips that should be archived and select a category, and the news will be saved for permaternity there. As it stands, the news will just cycle through this widget, so it doesn't provide anything other than immediate value.

Well, will keep working on it....

Art Widgets

Why can't I find any art widgets? Crazy that none of these art sites would offer them. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place. I found one for ITunes album art, but that was about it. There's a Facebook art app for displaying art in your profile - i think it's run by AllPosters.com - but they don't seem to have a widget themselves.