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Students at Oxford are receiving fines via email after University staff discovered evidence of campus rules being broken on Facebook. The misdemeanors in question are typical student fare: “spraying fluids” (hopefully not urine) and throwing eggs.
Read the full story at msnbc.com.
Following the appearance of thousands of Google Maps mashups, Google have introduced a new technology to encourage further user interaction. The “mapplets” (mini-webpages inside an IFrame) can be combined to create custom mashups: for example, you could display information on house prices, crime rates and cemeteries simultaneously, with built-in features such as driving directions thrown in for good measure.
The following YouTube video shows the system in use:
You can find out more about mapplets here:
http://www.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/mapplets/
More info on the Google Earth/Maps blog.
The service will be live to the public sometime today, following months of private beta.
Yesterday Apple announced the release of the Safari 3 beta for both Mac and PC. Rumoured to be faster than Linford Christie after a nandrolone binge, how does it fare?
As with the PC iTunes installation, Apple forces you to install Quicktime as part of the installation process which is a mild irritation - having disabled Quicktime’s tasktray process from a previous installation, I now have it running again. I suppose you have to chuckle at Apple’s little jokes.
Once installed it looks… a little out of place. With OSX scrollbars and form elements, it feels a little like a deviant, cross-dressing browser; a PC application in Mac getup. Like its Mac counterpart, it lacks a homepage button which is alarming, irritating and surprising in equal measure. I’m struggling to think of a single reason for its omission.
My PC browser of choice is, like many people, Firefox. It’s not perfect, but its many little add-ons and shortcuts make it a cut above the rest. In highly unscientific tests of uncached page loading speeds however, Safari 3 doesn’t seem to be the speed demon it claims to be. It actually seems slower than Firefox, a fact that is emphasised by Safari’s preference for loading the entire page before displaying anything at all. I’ll be trying out the Mac implementation soon to see whether its blistering pace is evident on OSX.
One very welcome feature of the new Safari browser, however, is the beautifully anti-aliased HTML text. Why PC users have been made to suffer without this feature for so long (save for IE7’s poor ClearType implementation) is a question even the wisest of wise men would struggle to answer.
So overall, it’s nothing to write home about. A browser like any other (minus the home button), with nice looking text but out of place looking form elements. I’ll stick with Firefox I think.
As reported on Ars Technica, Google seems to have sneakily added some rudimentary face recognition filtering to its image searches.
Search for ‘ferrari’ and you’ll find, as expected, a multitude of images of Ferrari cars. However, append ‘imgtype=face’ to the end of the url string and see only images of people!
What will they think of next?
Amazon have announced their intention to launch an MP3 music download store. The site will offer millions of songs, all of which will be available as DRM-free MP3 files.
Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder and CEO says:
“Our MP3-only strategy means all the music that customers buy on Amazon is always DRM-free and plays on any device. We’re excited to have EMI joining us in this effort and look forward to offering our customers MP3s from amazing artists like Coldplay, Norah Jones and Joss Stone.”
If Amazon prices its offering competitively it is sure to pose a serious challenge to the market leader, Apple’s iTunes store. Other DRM-free music sites such as eMusic have proven popular, so there’s no reason why Amazon won’t be able to make a serious dent in iTunes’ market share.
eBay To Go allows eBay users to showcase their favourite auctions directly on a website or blog. It’s a brilliant idea by eBay. True, it’s hardly original, but it’s sure to be popular with eBay users and blogger alike.
See below for a sample “widget” created with eBay To Go:
Adobe has today announced its plans to release the Flex source code under the terms of the Mozilla Public License, giving developers the opportunity to contribute to the ongoing development of the framework.
The strategy will mean a closer working relationship between the development team and end user which, in turn, Adobe hopes will attract new developers, improve the framework architecture and lead to opportunities for collaboration with other open source projects.
Adobe will continue to offer a commercial version of the Flex SDK.
More information on the move can be found in the Adobe press release and on the Adobe Labs pages.
A List Apart have opened their first annual survey of the web design industry. You can join in by clicking here.
Mozilla yesterday announced the release of Thunderbird 2, the latest version of its open source email client.
The primary focus seems to have been on improving the interface and workflow, with perhaps the most interesting feature being the ability to tag emails for quicker and more accurate message searching.
More details and download links can be found on the Mozilla website.
