Webware

Here's a mosaic we put together using Image Mosaic Generator and the Webware 100 logo.

The Flickr API has opened up a lot of fun tools over the years. This morning we got a tip about Image Mosaic Generator, a free service that creates neat-looking picture mosaics of uploaded images. The service uses Flickr images to make up each mosaic and lets users save the end result to their hard drive. Images have a fair bit of variation, although you're likely to see a few repeats close up. The service doesn't link back to the original Flickr images, which is a bit disappointing, but as a result, handles the conversion from image to mosaic in just a few minutes.

This is by no means one of the first tools to do this, but one of the simplest Web-based ones I've run into. Also worth checking out if you're playing around with Adobe's Apollo runtime, is Developer Derrick Grigg's mosaic creator, which lets you use Flickr shots that match search criteria. This could come in handy if you have a beach picture, as you could run it through the tool using public photos related to beaches.


Flickrvision shows you newly geotagged shots on Flickr using a Google Map.
(Credit: CNET Networks)

The one thing these Web-based services still can't do is pull local photos on your hard drive to make up the mosaic, something that's not easily accomplished without software and a hefty photo library.

Flickrvision is a fun mashup that shows you real-time photos people have geotagged on Flickr using a Google Map. Mousing over them will display a larger preview and information about the shot in a lightbox pop-up. You can also click the thumbnail to go straight to the original shot.

Flickrvision was created by the same developer who made Twittervision, a similar service that shows the latest Twitter posts and where they originated from.

Flickr has its own mashup of geotagged photos, although it doesn't show real-time results like Flickrvision does.

[Note: This post has been updated with a video taken from today's keynote from the Web 2.0 Expo, to see it click the 'read more' link at the bottom of the post]

Today Adobe announced their new Media Player, a multi-platform, online-enabled application that runs on Adobe's Apollo framework. Along with a full featured desktop media player for Flash files, Adobe plans on including a themed online music store like Microsoft's XBOX Live Marketplace where people can purchase music and movies.

Adobe Media Player will join the bevy of online music and media stores like iTunes, Napster, Urge, Rhapsody and others. Like the competition, Adobe is using DRM, both for downloads and streaming media to secure purchased content.

There's no word when the service will be available, but expect details and partnerships to emerge as Apollo develops.

From their keynote presentation today, we also got a sneak peak of Buzznote, a collaborative word processor that runs off the Apollo framework.

Our early hands-on with Apollo can be found here. And to see a video of the app in action, keep reading.

I just got a preview of the new version of Joyent Connector, the slick work-group app I covered last year. The interface has been cleaned up a bit (not that it was bad to begin with), but the big news is that Joyent is announcing an offline version of its service. By the end of April, Joyent users will be able to get a downloadable client for the service that lets them access their work-group data even when their PC is disconnected.

Joyent's new offline app is even slicker than its online version.

(Credit: Joyent)

Joyent's client app uses the company's new platform, which it calls Slingshot. This tool provides a runtime for the Web development environment Rails (which Joyent is developed in), and also makes it possible for Rails apps to use local system resources. For example, applications built using Slingshot and Rails can exchange data with desktop apps via drag-and-drop. Slingshot also provides the critical synchronization tools, which are necessary for an app that spends part of its time working with data over the Internet, and part of its time using a subset of that data that's mirrored to the user's local hard disk.

Joyent CEO David Young expects many of his customers to use the runtime version of the client all the time, even though they never work offline. It's faster and more fluid, he says, and I'm not surprised. Web apps are great, but there's nothing like a local machine running its own executables for delivering a rich user experience. Within the next year or so, Young expects to see more online apps that "push their processing out to the edge [of the network]."

That's just what Adobe's Apollo is all about, of course. Also bearing witness to this trend: Very soon, e-mail service provider Zimbra will announce an offline client to its Web-based product.

We'll take both Joyent and Zimbra for a spin as soon as we can.

And speaking of offline access to Web-based apps, I need to take a jab Google. In October 2006, Google representatives told me they were going to "take a shot" at building offline access to their online office apps. Since then, Adobe, Joyent, Zimbra, Salesforce.com, and other companies have demonstrated real progress towards the construction of hybrid (offline/online) apps, Google still has nothing to show in this space.

Joyent will be one of the many presenters at tomorrow's Under the Radar: Office 2.0 event.

YourMinis, the popular single page aggregator service, has launched desktop integration with its library of over 14 million widgets, using Adobe's Apollo technology. After installing the Apollo runtime and the YourMinis Apollo plug-in on your PC or Mac, you can simply click on any widget in the YourMinis library and click "Add to Desktop." Likewise, there's the option to send any widget to the Web if you'd prefer it to stay on one of your YourMinis pages. It's really well-done.

Once they're on your desktop, you can drag them around, change colors, transparency levels, and various settings for each widget--the usual features that come with a full-fledged widget application.

Mac users likely will be uninterested with the new feature, as they've already got a built-in widget engine with OS X's Dashboard. PC users, on the other hand, now have another free way to put widgets on their desktop besides Yahoo Widgets and Google Desktop. As we've mentioned before, Apollo is still pretty early on in development, and the YourMinis widgets are RAM-hungry. With just four open, they were taking up more CPU cycles and memory than Microsoft Word and Outlook combined. It will be interesting to see how Adobe addresses this problem further along in Apollo's development.

See also News.com's take on how Apollo is 'one-upping' Ajax.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Adobe announced on Sunday night that it was releasing the first public alpha version of the Apollo runtime, which will allow end users to run Apollo applications. A few hours later, the downloads--the runtime Apollo client as well as a developer's kit--appeared on the company's site.

Finetune has made a slick Apollo-based player.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Apollo is the new framework that allows developers to build rich applications that run without a browser, yet still take advantage of the Adobe Flash expertise that they've been using for the past few years to create cool Web-based apps. Like many other industry watchers, I've written very enthusiastic stories about Apollo. I believe it is going to be one of the key technologies in the development of hybrid applications--apps that put a rich interface on the desktop with most of the heavy lifting taking place on a Web server. Apollo is going to help Web 2.0 services escape from the confines and constraints of a Web browser. And that's great.

You can try some sample Apollo apps now, but don't expect to be terribly impressed. If you're not a developer, few are worth bothering with. Most do a good job of showing off some raw capabilities but aren't what anyone would consider must-have tools. One demo app, Lookup, is a system hog, even though it performs a very simple service: it looks up terms in online dictionaries and thesauruses. Another app, the RSS reader Fresh, doesn't let you paste feed URLs into it (you have to type them by hand or import an entire OPML file). The Finetune Desktop is very nice, though: Ii's a slick, browserless interface to the Finetune (ZDNet review) music recommendation service.

Apollo is not yet ready to take over for traditional Windows or Macintosh executables. But the release of the public alpha is an encouraging milestone. I know there are many developers eager to apply their expertise to this new platform.

For more details, see Martin LaMonica's CNET News.com story, and Ryan Stewart's post on ZDNet.com. Also, check out the upcoming Flash-based Trillian, which doesn't use Apollo--the developers said they couldn't wait.

A cool Flash interface to eBay

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Adobe has been pitching its Apollo technology since last year. It's the new platform that will let you install Web apps on the desktop. At Demo 07, we got a nice demo of an eBay app--a Flash interface to the auction site. The app kept working when the Internet connection was pulled. When the demonstrator's laptop was plugged back into the network, the app synced its data back to eBay.

Honestly, the idea of apps that work when disconnected is becoming less important as bandwidth becomes more ubiquitous, but it's still interesting, and the Apollo demos look really good. What's really important is not that they work when disconnected, but rather that they work without a browser. I look forward to seeing a growth of apps that use the Internet but that don't have to live within a browser nor inherit all the user interface elements that aren't necessary in a real app.