Embeddable Mind Maps – WiseMapping offers an online collaborative home for mind maps with some nice features. In addition to a graphical editor and the ability to invite others to work on your mind maps, they offer the ability to link a topic to any page on the internet with automatic snapshotting. They’ve also got export to SVG, PDF, or the free desktop mindmapping application FreeMind.
Beyond that, though, they’ve implemented their solution using SVG and VML, which means maps from WiseMapping are embeddable on other web pages (something not easily done with Flash-based maps). The drawbacks? Customizations are fairly basic, and they only work in a limited set of browsers.
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Now Your Can Bungee Too – Bungee Connect (which we covered in a look at their earlier alpha version) has opened the doors on its public beta. Give them your email address and you can immediately start using their all-web IDE to build and deploy mashup applications. Since the alpha, they’ve improved and polished many aspects of their toolchain, and providing you’re willing to go up the learning curve, they look to be a serious contender.
This is the first moment of truth for Bungee. They’ve got a good story and some high-powered tools – the question is, now that they’ve built it, who will come? Their introductory videos will get you started quickly, but mastering the depth will be a challenge for many developers.
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Think Yours is Messier Than Mine? – The folks over at MyFax are sponsoring a contest to find the messiest office in the US or Canada. To enter, you just need to fill out their form and show them a picture or video of your disaster area. The prize? A cool $10,000 in cash for the messiest of the messiest.
We’re three weeks out of five into the contest, so you can already see some of the finalists on their web site. From the looks of things, the competition is pretty stiff. Of course, if you’ve been rigorously following our advice on organizing your life and getting things done, you have no chance of winning this one. Sorry about that.
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Online Picture Editor – PicResize actually does a lot more than just resize pictures these days. After uploading a picture from your hard drive, you can crop or resize it, change the orientation, or apply a small variety of art effects (Oil painting, sharpen, blur, and so on). When you’re done, just click Save to get back a jpg, gif, or png of your edited image.
There’s nothing here that you can’t do with a variety of client-side tools, of course, but if you’re stranded on a computer that’s not your own, this is an easy way to do simple editing. They’ve also got an API and a batch resizer tool.
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Marketing help for MicroISVs – WWD contributor Bob Walsh has released a new ebook, MicroISV Sites That Sell!, that should be of interest to anyone trying to hawk a software product over the internet. The ebook is all about coming up with a “unique selling proposition” even if you don’t understand what a USP is when you pick it up. Aimed squarely at software developers, it takes a design pattern approach to marketing, with step-by-step exercises that anyone ought to be able to follow.
I had a chance to read a copy in prepublication, and it’s darned good work. The next time I find myself involved with a small software company selling to niche markets, this one is going to come right off my shelf for another read.
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Amazing Keyboards – Richard Nagy builds amazing “steampunk” style custom keyboards, and if you have a spare $800 or $1000 laying around, he’ll build one for you too. The price seems exorbitant at first, but once you see these creations and ponder what goes into them in terms of materials and labor it’s not out of line. Antiqued brass and copper, old typewriter keys, custom accents…the end result is spectacular.
Not for everyone, surely, but if you find yourself searching for a gift for the web worker who has everything, one of these would be a practically unique way to go. Gorgeous work.
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One for the Paper Lovers – The Xambox is a new device from Xamance, a French company. Their site is in French, but there’s an English promotional video up on YouTube. The device is reminiscent of the Fujitsu ScanSnap, but with a twist. In addition to scanning documents to indexed PDFs, it also files the hard copies for you in a special tray. If you ever need the actual piece of paper, the application will tell you where to find it – “three places beyond the black divider,” for example.
If you’re in a business where you feel you have to keep the originals, but don’t want to be bothered with filing them, this looks like an interesting solution to getting a hybrid paperless-paperful office going. No pricing information that I can see, and I can’t find an obvious place to order one, but perhaps our eagle-eyed readers can help.
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Out-Googling Google – ManagedQ isn’t really a new search engine, since it uses Google’s results. But what it does with those results is pretty stunning. Put in a search term, and you get back a page of site thumbnails (large enough to be generally readable), and a batch of common extracted terms (people, places, and things) down the left hand side. Click a term to add that to the filter; click the Next and Previous panels to flip through results. Just start typing to do an instant search (using regular expressions if you want) across the text of all displayed pages.
The result is a sort of visual search experience that is very flexible and great for quickly focusing in on the best results from a Google sea. And amazingly enough, it’s actually fast, despite all the behind-the-scenes rendering and ajax trickery that must be going on.
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