Webware

DoInk is a free online drawing and animation tool that runs right in your browser. You can treat it like Microsoft Paint and use it to do just a quick doodle, or take advantage of its layer cloning and vector-based designs to create relatively advanced animations.

I chose the latter, and put together a pretty slick looking animation in just a few minutes. Adding additional frames is simple and intuitive, and the app saves everything you're working on in the background (and in the cloud) so there are no local files to worry about. You can also hop between projects at any time, just like you would in a software app.

DoInk feels a little bit like a desktop application, but runs entirely in Java.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The app does a great job at cloning individual frames, and will show each one that came before it as a "ghost" that remains in the background while you work on the new one. If you notice one or more of them needs to be a little longer you can also begin cloning it several times right from the timeline that sits in the bottom of the screen. This lets you make minute adjustments like moving a character's mouth, or background imagery to create a realistic looking animation.

When done with any creation you can share it with the DoInk community, e-mail it to a friend, or embed it on a blog or social-networking profile. I've embedded one below that behaves like a YouTube video and won't start until you hit the play button. You can also publish anything you've made straight to YouTube, which is a nice touch.

(via Delicious)

Meet my new octopus! What should I name him?

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)

NEW YORK--In the press room at the Web 2.0 Expo at the Jacob Javits Convention Center here, there are a ton of fliers, stickers, and press kits lying around for us reporters and bloggers to peruse.

It's kind of hard for any one of them to stand out. Unless you're like collaboration software start-up Octopz, which we reviewed last year.

The company's strategy: Leave out some bright turquoise-and-green stuffed octopi, free for the taking. No corny company logos, no attached pitch, just a cute stuffed sea creature with a flash drive press kit tied around its neck with ribbon. They were way too adorable for me to say no. And it might actually serve its PR purpose of keeping Octopz in this reporter's memory.

But even if you aren't really into cute stuffed toys, there are plenty of uses for an octopus. I was sitting next to ReadWriteWeb contributor Blake Robinson in the press room, and he said he thought it might make a nice toy for his dog. Another reporter told me that maybe he'd pick one up for his kid.

And props to Octopz for aesthetics: the flash drive tied around the octopus' neck was lime-green and turquoise to match the color scheme.

Click here for full coverage of Web 2.0 Expo

GoAnimate is a browser-based animation studio. It lets you build multi-scene animated creations, complete with support for music, transitions, and user-uploaded page elements. I spent most of this morning playing around with it and the results are about on par with what you'd find on one of those animated greeting cards.

Like most video editing applications GoAnimate centers around a time line. Everything is drag and drop, so you can pick out characters, props, backgrounds and special effects and simple put them on the canvas where you see fit. Each "scene" can be edited to last as long as you want, and you can drag finished scenes around the time line to re-order them. Basically everything is set up to let you quickly clone and continue your work with minimal effort.

The short I made consisted of nine scenes and took about a half hour to make, however most of that was me learning how to use the tool. Part of the process is picking out ready made characters and customizing them which is fairly intuitive and similar to working on a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. As the author you can move objects up and down, and program in things like automated object movement and transitions.

GoAnimate lets you stick cropped heads onto ready-made animated characters quickly and easily. The results can be rather humorous.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

One cool feature is that you can upload pictures from your hard drive, Facebook, or Flickr and turn them into props, backgrounds, or human heads. These heads can be stuck onto the bodies of pre-made characters, so with just a few head shots you can make your very own animated faces by splicing scenes together.

While simple to use, the tool is not without its shortcomings. For instance, you can't set up several character movements or actions within one scene. This means attaching a speech bubble to a character requires its own scene instead of being able to time out multiple speech bubbles in one scene using delay. I know this seems like a small quibble, but it means adding in more scenes when you could simply mark out the action on a separate time line.

The tool also feels a little cramped on larger screens as it doesn't scale to match the extra width. This, too, is a small quibble, but after having played with Flash game creator PlayCrafter yesterday (story), tools that account for this extra space make it far easier for people who are serious about using them as an alternative to desktop applications.

GoAnimate is completely free to use. You can see an example of the test one I made here.

If you like your news straight up, just the facts, gray lady style, skip this story. MSNBC is launching some new toys for its news service that let you scan headlines in creative (and goofy) ways, and even play games with them. They're all part of the MSNBC NewsWare service.

Spectra is the service's new headline viewer. You select the categories you want to see, and it throws them up in an orbiting view for you. Each category has a color associated with it, which presumably gives you some subliminal clue as to where each headline fits in your consciousness. Unfortunately, you cannot select the stories in the orbital view directly to learn more about them.

Just like the carousel at the park! But with famines, wars, and elections.

Obviously, when I hold up my yellow mug it means I want yellow journalism.

The color coding also gets used in what may be the dumbest news gizmo I've ever seen: The application can connect to your Webcam and throw headlines up on the screen based on the color of what the camera is seeing. Wear a red shirt and you'll see a lot of Top Headlines. Green: Travel or sports (depending on the shade). Want to see latest videos? Hold an orange up to your camera. Really, you can't make this stuff up.

Other developments: The NewsBlaster game, where you have to shoot like-colored orbs that release headlines, which you also have to shoot for points. What fun!

The most sober of the new products is the NewsScroller widget, which lets you select which categories of news you like (using the same GrrAnimals colors of Spectra) and which you can then embed in your social site, blog, or start page. The widget does, though, let you select the importance to you of each news category, and will give you more or fewer stories per category to match. That's pretty smart.

I completely support experiments in data visualization. Because by trying more things, we learn what not to do.

I was at a bit of an impasse earlier today while writing about the new Google Maps page that lets you see user adjustments in real-time. A video to show off the feature would have been overkill, while an animated GIF afforded the same view to readers at a substantially smaller file size. Not having Photoshop installed on this machine (which has a pretty simple animated-GIF-making wizard), and not wanting to go through a tedious multistep process using Paint.net, I turned to Gickr.

Gickr is a simple tool that lets you upload up to 10 files from Flickr or your PC and turn them into an animated GIF with variable speed control. The service is aimed mostly at social networking users who want to pack the most into their profile picture or photo galleries, but if you've ever been curious about making an animated GIF but have been put off either by some of the obscure special software required or complex how-to guides, then this is the tool for you.

Once you've uploaded your images to the service you can tweak things like how big you want the end image to be, and how fast it cycles through each picture. Gickr hosts the GIF for you, and gives you an embed code and the option to add tags to make it a part of the user gallery. The one limitation is that the service adds a little Gickr watermark to your image in the top left corner, even if you want to host the image yourself. That, and the fast transition speed is truly nauseating unless you're attempting to make a cartoon. I still enjoy its simplicity when compared with admittedly more powerful, but complicated standalone software tools.

Old-school Mac users might remember a little application called HyperCard. Originally a database application, it doubled as a casual animation tool--letting users create fairly basic cartoons, frame by frame. This morning I've been playing around with AniBOOM's ShapeShifter, a Web-based animation creation tool that brings back those old feelings of black-and-white computing, with a new social bookmarking twist.

ShapeShifter is pretty simple to use. There are four shapes to choose from, and you can place them wherever you want on the canvas. Each shape can be rotated, resized and grouped together to make new forms. When you're done moving things around you just add another frame. Every time you do this, all your shapes come with you from the frame before. To see the last few frames at once, there's an "Onion" button which displays three of each shape's previous movements in layers. This is incredibly helpful if you want to figure out what you were doing.

To spice up your creation, there are four basic sound effects. You can also upload your own files, to replace them, although the file size is capped at 50KB, so they must be kept small.

When you have finished your masterpiece, it can be shared with other AniBOOM members or friends (via URL), who can rate and comment on it. It's a little bit like YouTube, but the content is made entirely on the site. Unfortunately you can't embed your work on other sites--something I think would do well on social networking profiles.

ShapeShifter isn't a replacement to professional animation tools, but it's really easy to pick up and surprisingly fun to use. I'm holding back on calling it a time waster, as it's more of an art tool.

ShapeShifter's workspace is fairly simple. Shapes on the left, and editing tools on the right.

(Credit: CNET Networks)