Presentations and Slide Shows done the easy way

If you want or need a presentation or slide show but,

1. You don’t own any presentation software,
2. You are not at the office or home where you have the software,
3. You need to share this slide show with a lot of people or you want it available for anyone,
4. You believe making presentations are hard and you don’t like Power Point,

then I have a web site for you to visit.

At spresent you can create and edit high-quality Flash presentations online.
You can send presentations via e-mail or publish on your web site or blog and that is just the beginning.
Right now the site says it is in beta 3 but most everything works well and I didn’t have any problems creating a basic slide show that included graphs, pictures, lists, audio, and video.

There are quite a few demos posted on youtube and at there site to help you get started.
The following is a example of a presentation created at spresent.com.
spresent demo

Radio Control Pirate Ship

Radio control gadgets have always been on my cool stuff list. A RC pirate ship is something I never expected to see in a catalog or even expected any one to build. This one based on the description, sounds like it should provide hours of fun for all.

Directly from the sellers web site:
“Authentically detailed ship cruises using a powerful motor and twin propellers. Water-resistant transmitter controls forward and reverse speeds, and left and right turns. Ship even has a cannon with light and sound effects that are triggered from the transmitter.”

Plus the cost is reasonable at $79.98. It is on my list of items to purchase when the mortgage is paid. <grin>

Pirate ship

Cool new site reviews coming

While traveling around the Inet reading blogs, searching, etc, I have found some very cool new “Web 2.0″ sites that will be reviewed in the very near future.

Netvibes vs Pageflakes vs Yourminis – Round 2

Back in February I commented about all three of these sites vying for you home page honors.

Now that I have worked with each for a while, I would like to give you an update on who won round 2, but first some new features from each.

Netvibes – Netvibes has to its credit hundreds of modules, thousands of feeds, hundreds of podcasts, thousands of tabs, and events. This gives Netvibes the edge on total number of items that can be configured or added to your page.

The key here is to be able to search through all this vast data to find what you want. This is very difficult as their search engine will only find each word and not combinations. Results returned aren’t necessarily relevant. Why don’t they use Google or Yahoo’s search engine? They need to fix this NOW. Are you listening Netvibes?

I would also like to see the ability to make my own color theme. The colors that are available through their “settings” are very pastel and too bright for my liking. Since just about everything is customizable, why not the themes?

Ok, so I have pointed out some good stuff and some stuff that needs to be fixed. It still is a good host to have as your home page. With all that is available plan to spend lots of time getting it configured like you want.

Pageflakes – Pageflakes has everything Netvibes has, but uses different terms to represent the same items. Podcasts, tabs, flakes (Netvibes modules), are all available with Pageflakes. The selection is much smaller in each category therefore you are more limited in what is already pre-made. You do have the capability to build whatever you want similar to Netvibes. If you want anything specialized you will have to do some building on your own.

Pageflakes has the same problem as Netvibes in that you can not customize the themes. Where is my CSS editor?

The visual quality is much better than Netvibes. The interfaces is clean and resembles MS Windows. I find it easier to use since it has scroll bars and Netvibes does not.

Yourminis – Yourminis is built with Flash so its interfaces fits the Flash mold and not the AJAX metaphor like Netvibes and Pageflakes. This also limits you to the prebuilt widgets and items that comes with Yourminis. There are plenty to choose from so you won’t be disappointed if this is your selection for a home page.

To be fair I have not spent as much time with Yourminis as I have with Pageflakes and Netvibes. So a revisit will be in order after I give it more time and try all that is offered.

SUMMARY – Right now, at least for round 2, I will give the nod to Pageflakes. All 3 are done quite well and the decision will take some time if you really evaluate what each has to offer.

Stay tuned for round 3 in a few weeks.

Waisting time with Toondoo.com

I just spent the last few hours relaxing and reading the great user created cartoons at toondoo.com. This site lets you create very simple or complex comic strip type cartoons and publish them online.

The interface is based on Flash and using the comic creator is very easy. In just a few minutes you can have your own comic strip created and published. Just make a selection from the list of a characters, pictures, or backgrounds, and add your text and you have your comic strip.

I created a few comics for your enjoyment. Just search for Seniorgeek and take a look.

http://www.toondoo.com/View.toon?param=3863

The new My.Yahoo vs Netvibes vs Yourminis vs Pageflakes

Now there is a new player in my search for the best home page/news page. My Yahoo has been updated with new visual, customization, interface, and it looks very “web 2.0″.

I don’t really see why all the new AJAX pages are called Web 2.0. It is just the evolution of the technology used to produce web pages, nothing more. I could go into this more but that is not the subject of this post.

I like the changes Yahoo have done to bring my.yahoo.com pages up to the current AJAX style that Netvibes and the rest of the players are now doing.

Now on to the new stuff at my.yahoo.com
1. I do like the theme colors. Right now I am using the Sand color with the Steel structure. These are OK but I would like to be able to pick any color from the color chart like Netvibes and Yourminis allows.
2. MyYahoo now allows up to 4 columns to pick from but still does not allow total control of page likes its arch rivals.
3. The new menu of Yahoo services is nice but still not as complete as the others in this contest of home pages.
A lot of the things I had on my old my.yahoo pages are not there, but in there place is a note saying they are being modified and updated. I realize that Yahoo says this new version is still in beta so we will not pass judgment until all is finished.

So now you have my initial observation of the my.yahoo.

Netvibes vs Yourminis vs Pageflakes

I have a Netvibes account which I have been using for a while (see previous post) and now I just signed up for Yourminis and Pageflakes. All three of these sites want to be your home page or your personal digital newspaper. I am going to work with all three of them for a few weeks to try to find out the pros and cons of each service.

The key here is which service will survive the shakeout. How much money, talent, management, and programmers are behind each service? There is room for maybe all three. Right now Yahoo, Google, Excite, MSN, AOL, are all surviving so all three of these may survive.

Next is to see how much press at the major sites each one of these services will receive. The aforementioned above won’t mention these as they will take users away from there sites, with the exception of Yahoo and Google.

Stay tuned for a complete report in the future.

Example 2 – Making Yahoo Pipes work for you

Ok, I said I would have example 2 in a couple of days. So follow along with example 2.

Since I am always looking for the best tech deal, I created the following pipe. It checks 8 sites for the best price on the item you select. Open the following pipe in the edit mode and follow along.
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/xnT4eke52xGJsMmKIBeTaQ/

This first thing we need is the ‘text input’ module so we can select what we are looking for.

Next we need to know what sites we are going to seach. For this we use the ‘fetch’ module to input the URL of each site.

You can select as many sites as you want but I have found out that is you put more than 6 sites in a ‘fetch’ module it really slows down the search. Use multiple ‘fetch’ modules if you need more that 6 sites.

Next we need to filter out duplicate results from each site so we use the ‘filter’ module.

Now we link the output from the fetch module to the filter module to get rid of all the duplicates.
We also need to link the output of the ‘test input’ module to the filter module at the ‘text’ input of the description and title because this is the item name we are searching.

Now there is one special item I should mention here. I have created another pipe called ‘embedded’ which I add to this pipe because it already has some predefined searches built. You can examine that pipe later if you want. I just wanted to mention it here.

Once we have the outputs of the the ‘filter’ and ‘embedded search’ tied together with the ‘union’ module we can sort the output as we desire. I have sorted this by date in ascending order because I want to know what is the most recent tech deal out there.

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The following is the complete pipe for your review. Feel free to post comments or ask questions.

Making Yahoo Pipes work for you

I have been working with Yahoo Pipes some more to get my sorting criteria more defined. Usually two things happen, 1 you get too many results or 2, you get too little or not enough of what you expected. It is time to thing like the search engines or define your searches using pipes to get the results.

Pipes has this nice feature called debugger that is in the bottom right of your pipes screen. It lets you select different modules in your pipe to see what the output is at that module. Start at the first module and see your output. Here you should lots of results. Keep adding modules and defining ‘joins’ and ‘uniques’ until you get the expected output.

Don’t stop, keep experimenting.
Keep checking the debugger at each module as you work through designing and refining your pipe.

Make your own custom RSS feed using Yahoo Pipes

Earlier I wrote a bit about Yahoo Pipes. OK, so they are a real cool tech thing but what can I do with them that is useful?
The following is 2 examples of what you can do or accomplish with Yahoo Pipes. I use both of these to help search the ‘net and keep up with ‘techie happenings’. I am sure you will be able to find many more uses.

OK, on with example one.
In this example I will use a Yahoo Pipe that I created to search blogs of the Adobe Flex developers to see the programing examples and tip they have posted for us new to Flex programming.

The pipe I use is – http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/YDmnWU242xGw2aZcE5PZnA/
When you run this pipe at the end of the results is a link to create a RSS news feed from the pipe. Click the ’subscribe to’ down arrow and select netvibes. What you do not have a Netvibes account? (See my post ‘Netvibes – Your Personal Newspaper’ to read about getting your own personal newspaper.)
Once you have the RSS feed in Netvibes, every time you click the refresh button on the feed, Netvibes runs your Pipe to update the results. Your personal newspaper is then current to that minute.

So much cool stuff and so little time.

Example 2 to follow in a couple of days or maybe tomorrow.