Thursday, July 9, 2009

Find your Images Anywhere

I was rummaging around on the Web the other day & looking for new stuff on Delicious when I ran across mention of a new search engine called TinEye.



As an artist, or web designer you may have an interest in finding where your images appear on the Web.

The demo clip pretty much speaks for itself. All I might add is my experience trying it out for the first time.

Several months ago I'd found and saved a great Anime character that I admired for its style and I haven't been able to rediscover the site where I'd found it.

Enter TinEye.

I uploaded the image to TinEye's Search field and hit Enter. AMAZING response - The original website instantly appeared at the top of the search results, together with all of the other instances of it, or a part of it on the web. 1.09 Billion images searched in 1.something seconds.

Prognosis: TinEye rocks.

Thursday, July 2, 2009

Have the Web be what you want

I'm a sucker for new knowledge.

Finding new tools, new ways to work. So I spend some time each day studying and that usually includes technology & the web.

As I've mentioned before, I'm certainly no geek by far. But by golly if I keep up at this rate I'll eventually -- still be years behind!

Nevertheless here's my latest find. A recent project beta release from the Mozilla Labs called Ubiquity.

ubiquity ▸ noun: the state of being everywhere at once (or seeming to be everywhere at once)

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

At this juncture it's a bit steep for us most, but not too hard to see where it's going to take us in a very very short time.  I'm getting to the point where I enjoy being able to merge the use of various applications and always pleased to discover moments when an intuitive guess as to what may happen with a new one is rewarded by success.

I truly admire and applaud the developers in the Open Source community.  (If the people that currently consider themselves to be our government could remotely approach the group competence and cooperation level of the guys working with Mozilla, Linux, Google & all the rest we'd be experiencing all of the freedoms we desire !)

I've been using the new Firefox 3.5 for a little bit here and ran across this one today when I decided to foray in search of any other recent goodies.

Google's Wave is going to be shattering with its use of open-source code that allows anyone with an idea for an application to create an interface to incorporate it into and with other applications.

Similarly this Ubiquity will shortly enable us non-geeks to create "Mashups" with our own work ( In web development, a mashup
is "a web page or application that combines data or functionality from
two or more external sources to create a new service. The term mashup implies easy, fast integration, frequently using open APIs
and data sources to produce results that were not the original reason
for producing the raw source data. An example of a mashup is the use of
cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information to real estate data, thereby creating a new and distinct Web service that was not originally provided by either source. - wikipedia )

I tried this out today.  Went to Mozilla's Firefox addons and found the latest version, installed the addon and walked through the intro.  Granted, I didn't start flowing maps into my Gmail or move like Aza Raskin but I discovered I can begin to learn it and who knows where that will take me next.




Powered by ScribeFire.