Go have a spin yourself.
Archive for the ‘service’ Category
Zinadoo
Friday, February 9th, 2007Instant RSS, just add IM
Saturday, August 19th, 2006Here is a fascinating and useful service; Sabifoo. Add the Sabifoo botto your instant messanger contact list. Send it a message and it creates an RSS feed as well as a web page, structured like a blog. No other setup is required. No usernames, passwords or email addresses. Just add and start sending IMs to it. Very cool idea.
I see it working best for personal lists and quick note-taking.
Still on Sabifoo it shows an interesting form of authentication. By using your IM to send commands you are veryfing who you are. You have logged into your IM and so any messages to Sabifoo are coming from you. Nice idea.
Gliffy
Friday, July 14th, 2006
The other day I sent around a Visio diagram that the boss wanted. A few minutes later my inbox was flooded with emails that went along the lines of “Cannot open it.” There are a couple of Mac users here who can’t open Visio documents and a couple of Windows users on older versions of Visio. The boss also wanted the diagram as a JPG to easily insert into a PowerPoint presentation.
Gliffy would have been ideal. It is an online flowchart/diagraming app (using Flash) and has one simple, killer feature; a URL to a JPG version of your diagram.
So I can create diagrams and send around the JPG URL to show people. It also has a collaboration feature, via email, which allows anyone you invite to work on the diagram through the Flash interface. It exports to JPG, SVG and PNG, allows printing and has the full set of diagraming tools you expect.
One feature it does need though is import and export of Visio and Omnigraffle files.
Amazon queue it up
Friday, July 14th, 2006Amazon have released their Simple Queue Service, SQS, to the world. Technically it is exactly what the name suggests; a simple queuing service. Like S3 it does one thing and it does it well. Like S3 pricing is on usage, 10 cents for every thousand messages and 20 cents for every gig of data transfered.
Effectively though it is a lot more than that. Tie SQS up with S3 and some simple Rails code and you have a massively scalable, reliable application.
They also provide a Windows Communication Framework “add-in” which should make it really interesting for Windows developers.
I am really liking what Amazon are doing here, taking the core technologies found on servers that power applications, making them globally available and providing the kind of power smaller developments didn’t have access to.
(Thanks to Paul Fallon for the news.)
