I never thought I’d say this, but I kind of want an iPad. Why? One App which was recently released makes so much sense that it has single-handedly changed my perception of what being socially active on the web should be.
Flipboard is the App, and it promises to unify all of your social media consumption and interaction in one place. Flipboard pulls all of your friend’s tweets, Facebook posts, etc into a digital magazine where you can view thumbnails of and click to read full articles of everything your social circle is linking to online.
The app has a very natural “flip” gesture to turn pages and navigate, but better yet, it allows you to comment back on anything your friends are posting, all from one place. It makes so much sense it’s surprising it took so long for someone to make our lives a bit easier!
What would show up on your Flipboard? How would you apply this app to your business?
Have you ever used Google Maps or Bing Maps street view to locate a store front, points of interest or a specific street address? It can become a fairly time consuming, often frustrating task as you jump from bubble to bubble, turn your camera and attempt to zoom in on fuzzy details. Microsoft Research recently released their solution to this problem, dubbed “Street Slide.” Street Slide functions by turning streets into a 2 Dimensional side-scroller, showing street name and address and store logos. It allows you to quickly scrub up and down streets, rotate your view 180 degrees to the other side of the street, and even jump onto connecting streets, providing a much faster way of finding those points of interest.
It’s funny how navigating a 2 Dimensional world is the fastest way to locate points of interest in our 3 dimensional world. Go figure!
Google is set to release a web-based application called App Inventor which will enable everyone to create and publish their own android apps. You can currently only watch videos/tutorials and request access on the App Inventor site, but it should open up for beta testing soon.
Google chose to use a visual editor to appeal to those with little or no understanding of programming, and it looks like they are targeting classroom learning to begin with. The true depth of App Inventor will soon be known, and I hope it appeals to everyone who wants to create an app but doesn’t quite know how.
This is one more reason why Google’s open source platform is gaining huge popularity. The people come first.
