Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 Beta

image source: Yahoo!

Yahoo! launch Beta version 9 of their messenger service. The new version has a whole lot of features. It has the ability to View Yahoo Videos, YouTube, Flickr, Forward Text messages, Voice calls between computers and whole lot more.

The Yahoo Messenger 9 will flaunt its new design interface and the favorite emoticons will feature new moods and stylish icons. The interactions and features using this new app has been improved at higher levels. For example, when you mouse over a friend's ID, options to IM, call or sms appear making it easier to navigate. Another interesting feature is the increase of file size that can be transferred over the messenger service, its upto 2GB of data which is a GB more than what was available before.

A very good package all together...

Flash Loaded

With plenty of interactive flash websites coming up everyday. We see drastic change in design and creativity over years now. This is purely because of broadband prevailing across the globe. With the popularity of Flash used on website, Flashloaded has come up with many flash components for designers to integrate on websites for a price.

Have a look at their extensive library of flash components and widgets.

Also check: FlashDen

The Winepocket

Now something to improve the way you gift a Wine bottle to your friend or family member. Tired of the good old brown bag? Here is something to impress your friend/party host with a cool and presentable carry bag and its the Winepocket. The design gives a comfortable opening at the top to grip onto the Winepocket and the same opening is used to place and pull the wine bottle out. The Winepocket is made out of industrial wool.

Cow-powered laptops !

One Laptop Per Child Project is finalizing the design of a cow-powered generator that can be used as a low-cost energy source in Indian villages. The One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC) is toying with a novel source of power for its low-cost cows.

There is a plan to drive a dynamo (taken from an old Fiat that is commonly used as taxis in Mumbai ) through a system of belts and pulleys using cows/cattle.

The goal is to develop a low-cost energy source that can be used in Indian villages. Working in a village close to Mumbai, OLPC's Sarwal said the group considered using solar energy but sunlight near Mumbai was not "consistently strong." There was not enough wind or running water nearby to use these as sources of power, and the cost of running a gas-powered motor was too high.But the village had an abundance of cattle that were being used in the fields. So we decided to design something around that.

Blue Pulse introduce Social Networking over a mobile phone. Future is mobile and right from banking, chatting, communicating, internet and now Social Networking. The service features a Universal Inbox where messages, updates and invites from friends are consolidated in one box. Group messaging is also possible on this service.

Bountii, product search engine

Bountii, is a search engine to look-up and compare price and best deals of consumer products. Their unique point is having detailed and intense price information and details on products when compared with other product based search engines. The site targets users looking for best deals on consumer electronics, digital cameras, television, LCD s, computers etc. The information shared with the users based on search results include Shipping, low prices of a specific product etc.

With the festive season just around the corner Bountii could have a lot of people hitting the site for better and smart deals to go for.

Sony launch HDMS-S1D 80GB photo album

With digital cameras giving the freedom to take as many pictures as any photographer would want, there are just too many photos to manage, store and organize the same. Sony with its HDMS-S1D Digital Photo Album help us solve the issues faced by us to manage all our photo collection.

The device not only has the ability to store and maintain 50,000 digital photos but also has the ports to support HDTV. The Sony HDMS-S1D has multiple ports on front facet to import pictures from different storage devices.

Microsoft mashes it up for beginners with Popfly

Popfly is the fun and easy way to build and share mashups, gadgets, and Web pages. It’s made up of online visual tools for building Web pages and mashups and a social network where you can host, share, rate, comment and even remix creations from other Popfly users.

Users can use Popfly to add games, slide shows, Halo 3 statistics or eBay auctions to their Facebook profile, blog or personal Web page; build a Web page for a club or organization; and leverage blocks from Popfly partners like Twitter, Facebook and Dapper to drive site awareness and traffic.

Here are some things you can do with Popfly:

1. Add some fun to your Facebook page, web site, or Windows Live Spaces page


2. Build a home page


3. Mix and re-mix photos and videos


4. Unify your online personality

Visit Popfly for more details.

Forus SR-500N speakers

I was looking for a nice set of desktop speakers for my PC and came across these cool speakers sets made and sold in Korea. These can be used with any music players in the market.

Andrew Fentem's touch screen game

Andrew Fentem's Research Design Art Engineering has gone through extensive research on touch screen computer games. Multi-object tracking and kinetic surfaces technology. This is a good form of game device. To start with Andrew Fentem has come out with the digital touch surface of the good old Rubik's cube and its called the FENTIX CUBE game.

This digital puzzle cube has multi-colored LEDs controlled by the touch sensitive surface. Have a look at the video to see how it works for real.

Wild Charger the wireless charger

Its no science fiction now. The Wild Charger charging pad is a wireless mobile phone charger and is exclusive to Motorola Razr phone for now. All you need t do is jsut place the electronic device on the charging plate of Wild Charger and voila the device starts to charge its batteries.

Wild Charger will soon introduce charger for other leading phone, mp3 players, apple products brands. If this device gets compatible to most of our daily use devices then we are talking of jsut placing all these devices on one single charge plate and have all our electronics on full charge with no hassle.

Findings from Web Design Survey - A List Apart

A List apart has released their Findings From the Web Design Survey. The downloadable pdf gives a huge understanding about the web design and the people involved. They conducted a survey with 37 questions across the people in web design. With the data collected by this survey, they have presented their findings meaningfully in the PDF. The findings involves very interesting topics from Gender, Geographic region, Hours worked per week to most wanted topics like Salary range, Claimed skills etc.

Also Check: 2007surveyresults.pdf

Jonas Samson's light-emitting wallpaper

Its big market for mood lighting this year. Here is a light emitting wallpaper which displays 2 dimensional objects. The wallpaper when turned off does not give any clue of having any light source being embedded in it. Jonas Samson came up with this cool idea of lighting up the walls.

Blurb online book builder

Blurb allow users to choose default template and design the book online using their user friendly and easy to use BookSmart software. Users have the flexibility to create Business Portfolio, Management books, Books based on blogs and many more. These books can be sold for profit too by showcasing your book on Blurb's online store.

There are over 150 layouts to choose from and personalize the same. The cover can be customized too, you can have a hard or soft finish cover with dust jackets too. The cost of books start from $12.95 onwards.

Button Devkit from Bartelme Design

Bartelme is back with this DevKit, and this time he is back with "Button Devkit". Like all his previous kit, he has provided enough scope of fun for designers in source files. Designers can improvise to make thier own version from the source files. More than the button kit I liked his previous Smiley Devkit. Its fun to play with smiley dev kit, were you will end up in lot many versions of smiley.

Above all the fun, these buttons can be used on both personal and commercial websites.

Also Check:
Smiley Devkit
Flag Button Devkit
Deep Blue Wallpaper
WP Dark Customization Kit
Wallpaper Devkit 3
Wallpaper Devkit 2
Wallpaper Devkit

Free World Map with features to customize

Printable World map is a free service where users can click any country and color the region of your choice from the color pallet provided on the tool/site. The quality is good enough to be used for publishing, Television, Schools or at Work as claimed by Printable world map

Skype and 3 introduce internet telephony

Skype and 3 jointly introduce internet telephony. Yep! Skype on your 3 mobiles phones it is. Call anywhere in the world make free calls while using the Skype 3 mobile phones. The Skype on 3 mobile network phones let you talk to friends and families while they are online on Skype.

New Photoshop logo from Adobe

Adobe has announced their new logo and tag line for Photoshop. On the first look it’s fresh and glossy, but I feel somehow its not relating to represent Photoshop. The critics and comments are reflecting the same. Here are few links that gives you the clear insight of Photoshop's new branding and comments:

1. Creativebits.org
   
2. Photoshopblog.net
3. Blogs.adobe.com

Photoshop Express

Adobe has put up a version of its flagship product online for free. Yes, you will be able to use Photoshop Express to edit your photos right in your browser, free of charge. But it wont carry all the features that a standalone would have. You can use this online edition if you just want to clean up some of your digital pictures, you can't go wrong.

Visual WebGui - RIA Framework

Visual WebGui is an open source rapid application development framework for graphic user interfaces of IT web applications. Visual WebGui lets you cut down development time and risk factors to the minimum, throughout the life cycle of the application, without compromising on performance, security or complexity.

Visual WebGui is the only framework that provides seamless integration to Visual Studio and the .NET framework to replace the obsolete paradigms of ASP.NET in both design-time and run-time. Visual WebGui offering is unique and not more of the same (150 AJAX frameworks)! Visual WebGui replaces all of the ASP.NET methodologies which were designed for developing sites, with WinForms methodologies, which were designed for developing applications.

Intel's New Online Community

CoolSW is an online community of people passionate about software. Members post information about an interesting new software company and, more important, the community votes on whether they think a software company is, well, "cool."

Companies that receive a lot of votes get elevated to the site's front page where the casual visitor can see what community members consider the most interesting software. Contributors are putting "Collective Intelligence" to work.

You are welcome to visit, enjoy the postings and conversation, but if you would like to be part of community and post, vote and/or comment, then you'll need to take the easy membership plunge. The site has free membership and although CoolSW shares some common features with other voting communities, they are different in practice.

Tablecloth from Css Globe

A very easy to integrate interaction for forms is out for web developers to integrate on view only form data. Its called the Tablecloth by Css Globe. An easy to implement/integrate behaviour for a given table data elements. A light weight 2 liner code is to be added to the HTML page and voila mouse over on the Table and you will some interesting interaction of the same. Check the demo page for more and you can also download the code and test it on your HTML to see how it works.

Helma Open Source Web Application

Helma is an open source web application framework for fast and efficient scripting and serving of your websites and Internet applications.

Helma is written in Java and employs Javascript for its server-side scripting environment, removing the need for compilation cycles and reducing development costs while giving you instant access to leverage the whole wealth of Java libraries out there.

Google, IBM promote 'cloud' computing at universities

Google Inc. and IBM have teamed up to offer a curriculum and support for software development on large-scale distributed computing systems, with six universities signing up so far.

The program is designed to help students and researchers get experience working on Internet-scale applications, the companies said. The relatively new form of parallel computing, sometimes called cloud computing, hasn't yet caught on in university settings.

BM and Google have dedicated a cluster of several hundred computers -- including PCs donated by Google and IBM BladeCenter servers -- and the companies expect the cluster to grow to more than 1,600 processors.

The companies call these clusters "cloud" computing. A cloud is a collection of machines that can serve as a host for a variety of applications, including interactive Web 2.0 applications. Clouds support a broader set of applications than do traditional computing grids, because they allow various kinds of middleware to be hosted on virtual machines distributed across the cloud.

Visit IBM for more details.

RapidWeaver for Mac

A web design software called RapidWeaver is exclusively developed for the Mac. The product has features to publish HTMLs compliant to W3C standards. RapidWeaver also features podcasting, inline comments, RSS feeds and tag support too. More importantly is SEO friendly. The popular features of setting different and cutomizable themes are available and allows users to change colors and other core layout inputs to improve the aesthetics of a website/blog.

RapidWeaver has inbuilt .Mac, FTP and SFTP support which allows user to publish the page/website onto the server and its called the Smart Publishing.

Usability Issues

Smashing magazine has provided a very useful article on "30 Usability Issues To Be Aware Of". The article starts with the information about usability principle then gives a clear Psychology behind Usability, and ends with the usability glossary. All through article it has apt examples and informative websites about usability to learn.

Also check:
30 Usability Issues To Be Aware Of
10 Usability Nightmares You Should Be Aware Of

PS3, 40 gb model price drops in the UK

Sony officially announce the price drop of the 40GB capacity Sony PS3 gaming console. This new 40GB console will make its way in the UK market on the 10th of October and does not play PS2 titles. It will retail for about £299 and $610 USD. Thats not all, Sony has plans to reduce the price of the 60Gb console and will cost around £349 and $712 USD.

Also check: Gamespot

Wi-Fi detecting T Shirt

You read it right! The future of wearing technology on ourselves are becoming a reality these days. A Wi-Fi signal detector embedded onto a T-Shirt and stylish to look at too. The glowing bars on the shirt dynamically changes depending on the strength of the wi-fi signal in that area. The T-Shirt will retail for about $29.99 and it is planned for launch sometime this month.

CSS Play release free Horizontal menus

CSS play gives away 15 ready to use horizontal menus using the sliding doors technique which allows the menu elemets to wrap with the text. The menu style carries cue from Mac style and a few with Windows Vista style.

Nike Amp+ Sport Remote Control

The Nike Amp+ Sport Remote Control is a cool watch with functionalities of a remote if mated with a Nike+ iPod Sport Kit to control the iPod. Teh Nike Amp+ watch also sports a voice feedback of the time, distance and pace when mated withthe Nike+ Ready shoes. The LED displays the time and its 50m water resistant.

Pultius TV remote control

Tired of pressing a button swarm through a a host of channels? Here is a concept design from Artlebedev of remote control, a really long one. A shortcut to all the channels available. Hmmm! will this design really help our couch potatoes? We will have to wait and see, if its launched.

Planet Earth and Global Warming

With Movies, TV Shows, Debates and Books all talking about how we are killing our planet directly and indirectly, we are still not doing anything about it neither do we realize our responsibility to save the planet. Here, we have smashLab taking some effort to pass the message of Global Warming to the public with a very informative and well designed flash based website designcanchange.org .

Here is a very powerful AD campaign and a visual of what our planet will look like in the future.

image source: adsoftheworld.com

Nostromo™ SpeedPad n52

I have been gaming from the days of the Spectrum/Comodore machines to the Playstations and XBox of today. For all these years passing by and I have seen very advanced changes in the way the games behave and also how ergonomic the controllers have become to make it wasy on the gamers. Though I have used different controllers provided by consoles, Iam more accustomed to the Keyboard and now I have trouble trying to get myself comfortable with the Nintendo controls.

Keyboard had always been the bits and part of life for everyone and Belkin has something for us to play around with. Its the Nostromo Seepdpad n52, its a device with important keys swapped from the keyboard required to play any given game. For people who are still comfortable with the keyboard and wants to play a PC game on the Console version, here it is no sweat of trying to understand the console controller from now on.

Also check: Belkin

Microsoft HealthVault

When it's your job to protect your family's health, you need every advantage. Imagine if you had a way to collect, store, and share the health information critical to your family's well-being.

HealthVault is the new and FREE way to do just that.

Imagine controlling the flow of your health information. Whether you need to search the Web for the most up-to-date treatments, catalog existing health records, receive test results, or monitor current physical readings — HealthVault gives you the control you need.

Be well. Protected.

Best photoshop tutorials of September

As most of the successful blogs provide their month round up, psdtuts has come up with their own idea with difference. They have picked up some of the best Photoshop tutorials that were published on the web last month(September). It’s too good a list of resource and inspiration. If a pdf version were provided of this monthly round up it could have made our life easier to archive it :)

Also check: http://psdtuts.com/web/web-roundup

Freelance Radio

Freelanceswitch revamps their blog with a free flowing design. With the new design coming along well, they have decided on having their articles podcasted. The podcast focuses on guiding freelancers on making the right move to get that BIG $$. This link is a good catch, check it out and let us know what you think of a service like Freelance radio.

Also Check: http://freelanceswitch.com/podcasts

Next generation Zune

With Apple launching a whole range of products from their stable, its Microsoft's payback time with their next generation Zune mp3 players. The new Zune has flavors of 4GB, 8GB and 80GB. The 80GB player's shell is much sleeker than the old 30 GB model and has a 3.2" display. Zune also comes in an ultra sleek model which are based on flash memory cards and colors of pink, green, black and glossy red.

XBox 360 Halo3 special edition console

The Halo 3 Special Edtion console has a green color shell with a green wireless controller, Component cables, Ethernet cables. Go online over XBox Live and start gaming over the multiplayer network.

You can buy this product of Amazon for $399.99. Have fun.

Samsung and Bang & Olufsen

Its another music player cum mobile phone and very unique next generation design mobile phone from a collaborative effort by Samsung and Bang & Olufsen. Its called the Serenata. With speakers from B&O integrated, music experience from the phone is enhanced and yes its High-Fidelity on the move. Serenata has 4gb of storage space and the interesting feature of the phone is the touch sensitive dial and sensi touch screen. Hope the the killer looks carries a good user experience while navigating and using it as a regular phone.

Click image to enlarge

Sony unveils the PRS-505 eBook reader

Sony launch PRS-505 the new eBook reader. As per Sony's press release the PRS-505 would retail at $300 and is available in Dark Blue and Silver. The new reader has a thinner profile than its predecessor and has 8 levels of grey shade than the 4 carried by the older one. Sony had improved this new and improved reader based on many feedback and survey from users of the old eBook. The battery life is fair enough with capacity to turn 7,500 pages.

ArtRage 2.5 released

Ambient Design a software company specializes in developing creative domain applications. The company is based out of New Zealand and their current flagship product is ArtRage, a simple to use digital painting application. The software simulates a canvas and gives realistic feel and output of oil, pencil sketch effect and a whole lot more. The ArtRage 2.5 starter edition is available for download which is more of a trialware with some of the features greyed out on the application. A ful version would retail about $25.

Wow wee! it is, radio controlled

FlyTech™ Dragonfly is one of those next generation toys. A dragon model that can fly with a radio controller. It has a flexible frame which is resistant to crash. The toy can be used both indoors and outdoors which is perfect for any day use. The speed, altitude and direction can be controlled.

Watch the video here

Sony with another teaser

Its becoming a habit of Sony releasing teaser ads of their upcoming products, leaving the people trying to understand what the product really is. With the Rolly creating waves among people now another slim and sleek looking machine from the Sony stable. Rolly was a mystery even after the release of its pictures. We shall wait and see what this is all about soon. Until then watch this space.