@Square in Montclair

@Square gains market share in Montclair!

@izzyiz20

Plain English

by Slate Labs

This product is still in development. Contact us if you have an idea for how to use it.

By Jeremy Singer-Vine.

Every field has its own jargon that's meaningless to everyone else. Sometimes you want to translate a given -ese into lay terms while preserving the original text. Plain English is designed to facilitate this.

The premise is straightforward: The original text is highlighted in yellow. When you click on a phrase, it toggles to the re-written simpler version, in gray. Buttons at the top allow you to toggle the whole thing at once. The words are stored in a simple JSON file.

Example: Federal Reserve jargon simplified.

* * * *

the following works, but doesn't have the gray and yellow highlighting of the original:

The Federal Reserve is about to create $600 billion out of thin air. It's a huge, experimental stimulus program that will affect stock markets and government policies around the world.

But the Fed announced its plan in a statement written largely in jargon and code. So here, from Planet Money and Slate, is today's statement, translated into plain English.

You can click on each sentence below to see our translation line by line. Or click "convert all" to translate the entire statement.

Gravilux

fun! *

flickr

• iTunes Store
• web version

Gravilux lets you draw with 'stars': it’s a combination of painting, animation, art, science, and gaming. As you touch the screen, gravity draws simulated stars to your fingertips. You can tease and twist the particles into galaxies, or explode them like a supernova.

When you double-tap, you can change parameters including gravity and number of stars, and enable antigravity or heat. Multiple fingers and multiple people can touch the screen at once, collaborating or competing.

Gravilux was first released as a work of interactive art by Scott Sona Snibbe that was only available in galleries and museums. [review, Padvance] Now it’s available as an iPhone and iPad application.

Xoomin LLC

Etude (iPhone App)

View In iTunes


Etude is sheet music on steroids. Whether you're an accomplished musician or someone who couldn't carry a tune given a wheelbarrow, Etude will quickly become an indispensable tool for adding new songs to your repertoire. Choose from hundreds (and soon to be thousands) of songs, hear and see how they should be played, and learn them yourself. From Fur Elise to The Entertainer to The Itsy Bitsy Spider, Etude spans music genres, ages, and difficulty levels to bring a vast assortment of sheet music literally to your fingertips!

HOW IT WORKS
Discover and download sheet music instantly from Etude’s in-app store, where you’ll find hundreds of well known songs (all of which are free right now). Scroll through real sheet music, hear it, and even see where to place your fingers on the keyboard as the notes scroll by at your desired speed. Learning to play new music could not be easier!

INTERFACE

• Displays authentic, beautifully-engraved sheet music reformatted for optimal viewing on your mobile device
• Graphical piano keyboard reveals which keys to press at each point
• Built-in MIDI music synthesizer lets you listen at any speed you'd like
• Customizable settings let you fine-tune how Etude shows and plays back music

IN-APP "STORE"

• Access hundreds of songs of all genres and styles and download them instantly to your personal library to play as often as you like.
• Search or browse by composer, style, staff picks, or most popular
• All music in the store right now is FREE. In the future, we'll be working with publishers to bring you premium tracks from current artists.

INTEGRATION

• Social networking features let you share the music you're learning with your friends via Facebook and Twitter.
• View in depth metadata about music, including composer, arranger, year published, and links to further reading on sites like Wikipedia.
• Connects with the iTunes Music Store to point you at professional performances of the piece you're trying to master.

twitter @anywhere

twitter blog

@anywhere

15527139682765141

Monday, March 15, 2010

When we designed Twitter, we took a different approach—we didn’t require a relationship model like that of a social network. Keeping things open meant you could browse our site to read tweets from friends, celebrities, companies, media outlets, fictional characters, and more. You could follow any account and be followed by any account. As a result, companies started interacting with customers, celebrities connected with fans, governments became more transparent, and people started discovering and sharing information in a new, participatory manner.

We’ve developed a new set of frameworks for adding this Twitter experience anywhere on the web. Soon, sites many of us visit every day will be able to recreate these open, engaging interactions providing a new layer of value for visitors without sending them to Twitter.com. Our open technology platform is well known and Twitter APIs are already widely implemented but

this is a different approach because we’ve created something incredibly simple. Rather than implementing APIs, site owners need only drop in a few lines of javascript. This new set of frameworks is called

@anywhere.

Twitter will be part of our favorite sites!

When we're ready to launch, initial participating sites will include Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube. Imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page—and that’s just the beginning. Twitter has proven to be compelling in a variety of ways. With @anywhere, web site owners and operators will be able to offer visitors more value with less heavy lifting.

iPad IMagineering

iPad iMagineering from Penguin Books on Vimeo.

Some imagined book-related ipad products.

. . .. ... .. . .

more thoughts on books in the age of the iPad

@craigmod (& NYT)

Blogger Template Designer

In Blogger’s more than 10 years, we’ve learned that blogging is a powerful way for people to express themselves. More than 350,000 words are written on Blogger every minute of every day and over the years we’ve added a bunch of features to ensure that writing those words is as easy, fun and rewarding as possible. Today, we’re happy to announce the launch of theBlogger Template Designer on Blogger in Draft, our experimental playground where you can try out the latest features Blogger has to offer. Instead of creating a lot of new templates that will grow stale over time, we decided to go beyond static templates and reinvent the whole process of designing your blog, making it even easier to express yourself online.

The Blogger Template Designer is our big first step in improving not just our template designs, but all the ways that you can customize the look and layout of your blog. If you try out the Blogger Template Designer, you’ll find:

• Fifteen new professional templates to start from (and more on their way)
• Custom blog layouts with one, two and three columns
• Hundreds of free professional background images from iStockphoto, the leading microstock image marketplace
• Customizable colors, fonts and more

Check out this video for a peek at what you can do with the Blogger Template Designer:



For more info, check out our post on the Blogger in draft blog. Give the Blogger Template Designer a test drive, and then let us know what you think!

Posted by Pete Hopkins, Tech Lead, Blogger

The Wired iPad App: Video Demo