visual

Visualize your cash flow with My Cashflow

Cash flow may be the single most important measure of your financial health, not only as it now stands but also going forward into the future. Wesley Steiner's My Cashflow is a free tool for visualizing and tracking your cash flow, both in the short term and in the days, weeks, and months ahead. It's not focused on what you've spent but what you spend going forward, so you don't need to enter stuff like receipts. By helping you visualize your paycheck and where it goes, My Cashflow can help you identify and reduce unnecessary expenses, … Read more

Visual Land Prestige 7

The Visual Land Prestige 7 7-inch tablet runs Android 4.0 and is currently available for as low as $145 on Newegg. The tablet houses a 1.2GHz Cortex A8 processor, 512MB of RAM, and 8GB of internal storage, which can be expanded to 32GB via the tablet's built-in microSD card slot.

It also includes a Mini-USB port, Mini-HDMI, and built-in 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi. The screen has a low resolution of 800x480 pixels with a front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera.

The tablet is being marketed as a low-cost minimalist device used for Web surfing, e-book reading, and … Read more

Visual Land Connect

The Visual Land Connect 7-inch tablet runs Android 2.3 and is currently available for as low as $165 on Amazon and Newegg. The tablet houses a 1.2GHz Cortex A8 processor, 512MB of RAM, and 8GB of internal storage, which can be expanded to 32GB via the tablet's built-in microSD card slot.

It also includes a Mini-USB port, Mini-HDMI, and built-in 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi. The screen sports a low resolution of 800x480 pixels with a front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera.

The tablet is being marketed as a low-cost minimalist device used for Web surfing, e-book reading, … Read more

Instagram updates to 2.5 with 'visual improvements'

Instagram gets faster and brighter today as it rolls out its new 2.5 features for iOS.

Among the new items are a spruced up profile tab, different ways to search, commenting improvements, and visual and speed enhancements. There is also a noticeable Facebook feature that lets users share likes, or little hearts, to Facebook if they want.

Of these new features, the app does seem quite a bit faster with photos loading more quickly. The most noticeable change is the "Explore" tab, which was exchanged for the "Popular" tab and also has a new icon.… Read more

Twitter data shows trending topics tend to change rapidly

Twitter has taken a deeper look into how quickly its users change the terms or phrases they tweet on a given topic, or their churn rate, and released some of this data today.

For example, when Steve Jobs passed away, people began rapidly including "Steve Jobs" in their tweets, but a short while later "Apple" began trending, then "Pixar," and finally "Stay foolish."

"Looking at terms and phrases in Tweets and in real-time search queries, we see that the most frequent terms in one hour or day tend to be very … Read more

View online videos in Visual Explorer Ultimate

It's tough to get noticed in the Browser Wars, let alone get ahead, but it helps to have an angle. Visual Explorer Ultimate is a free Web browser optimized for viewing and downloading video online. It offers a lot of security features, too, such as privacy, antiphishing, and ad-blocking capabilities, and it works with your Internet Explorer favorites. It requires IE5 or better installed in your system, too.

Visual Explorer's up-to-date interface includes a unified address-search bar called the Navigation Bar, built-in Google search field, and tabs. The default light blue color scheme and toolbar style give Visual … Read more

Titanic 'story map' delves into passengers' fates

The explosion of digital tools is opening new ways to explore the famous 100-year old Titanic shipwreck.

Mapping software company ESRI today released an interactive map showing the country of origin and ultimate fate of all the passengers on the Titanic. For first-time Titanic followers, the map displays the actual route of the seemingly invincible ship and the location in the North Atlantic where it struck an iceberg and sunk.

The mapping shows that many of the 2,200 passengers came from London and New York, but there were many from Scandinavia, eastern Europe, and Lebanon.

It also clearly shows … Read more

Play ball! Here's your MLB 2012 gaming roundup

Spring is in the air so you know what that means: the start of the 2012 baseball season. It's also the time of year where two game developers are competing for your hard-earned cash. So what's the best baseball game to pick up this year?

That will all depend on which console you own. Those with a PlayStation 3 have a choice, either MLB 12: The Show or Major League Baseball 2K12. On the other hand, Xbox 360 owners are locked in to only one title to satisfy their baseball itch. Unfortunately for the latter, this year's best baseball game is exclusive to the PlayStation 3.… Read more

Google artists create a real-time 'Wind Map'

Two technology artists who head Google's "Big Picture" visualization research group debuted a new project this week that shows a time-lapse animation of wind speeds across the U.S.

"An invisible, ancient source of energy surrounds us--energy that powered the first explorations of the world, and that may be a key to the future," the artists wrote in a post yesterday. "This map shows you the delicate tracery of wind flowing over the US right now."

The black map, simply named "Wind Map," displays white streaks that show varying wind speeds … Read more

NASA video visualizes a 'Perpetual Ocean'

NASA has released a computer visualization project called "Perpetual Ocean" that presents a data-created time lapse of the Earth's ocean and sea surface currents over a two-year period.

The animation (see below) shows the globe slowly spinning as white swirls curl and move in the water around landmasses. It looks as if Vincent van Gogh had painted into the oceans -- from the Gulf of Mexico to the Indian Ocean to the Black Sea.

Using NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's computational model called Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean Phase II ( ECCO2), scientists simulated … Read more