The February Update

Welcome to the Leap Year issue. I thought I'd make this edition extra exclusive by sending it out on February 29th!

In this issue we have 3D browsing, another useful Firefox extension, and a guy who connected 16 Playstations together...

Regards

Ben Roberts
Editor

Space Time - a new way to browse the web

Ever so often a product comes along that blows your socks off. I think Spacetime is one of them. It's basically a web browser, but not like anything you've seen before.

Spacetime provides a three-dimensional workspace for you to browse web pages in. New browser windows appear in front of the existing window within the 3D space, and you also have a time-line across the bottom of the screen showing your activities.

The killer application of Spacetime is with search. Instead of entering a search term into a search engine and being presented with a list of matching pages, Spacetime will go off and actually load each of the pages that the search returned. Normally this would be highly undesirable, but because you have unlimited browsing space within the 3D environment, this is no problem. You can then quickly flick through the resulting pages, just giving each one a cursory glance until you find the one you want to look at more closely.

Spacetime also provides shortcut buttons for each of your search terms at the bottom of the interface - clicking these takes you to the instance of each term on the current page, so as well as flicking through pages quickly you can also find the search terms on the page quickly.

One downside to Spacetime - it does require a fairly hefty hardware specification - I tried it on my lowly 1.6GHz Athlon machine and it worked but wasn't really fast enough to be usable. Spacetime recommend a 2.4GHz processor or higher - so most relatively recent machines should be up to the task. Spacetime is also currently only available for the Windows platform, although a Mac version is coming soon.

Explaining Spacetime in words isn't really all that effective - so I highly encourage you to watch the video demonstration, or download it and try if for yourself. Like almost everything I recommend, Spacetime is of course absolutely free.

Spacetime homepage and video demonstration:
http://www.spacetime.com/

Industry News

Nanowires allow 'power dressing'

Scientists in the US have developed brush shaped nano-devices that can generate electricity when the rub against each other. Once developed further, these could be woven into clothes to harness the movement of the wearer to power portable devices such as MP3 players or mobile phones.

The devices could also be woven in to the fabric of tents to harness wind power. The scientists also foresee uses in health care, where the devices could be used to power pacemakers or subcutaneous drug delivery systems.

Full Article (BBC News)

Next Firefox release to focus on search

The next release of the Firefox browser, Firefox 3, is due soon. Apparently search functionality is one of the main focuses of the new release. When entering search terms, Firefox will also look in your browsing history and bookmarks to help you easily find the sites you want.

Mozilla have also announced that Firefox 3 should have fixed many of the memory leaks that have plagued the version 2 release, and that it will be faster, sleeker and more usable. Firefox 3 is currently in its third beta release so the final release should be imminent.

Full Article (BBC News)

Boffin uses 16 Playstation 3's to build supercomputer

Astrophysicist Gaurav Khanna has connected 16 PS3's together to create a supercomputer to study black holes. Apparently the chip used by the PS3 for processing high performance graphics is perfect for analysing black holes too, and 16 of them together provides the combined power you need to actually do it!

Full article (The Register)

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Software Selection

Read It Later Firefox Extension

Read It Later is a really useful extension for Firefox. Once installed, two buttons appear on your toolbar. The first allows you to save the current page in to your "Read it later" list, and the second button allows you to choose a previously saved page from your "Read it later" list.

Before I had this installed, I would always end up with various pages open in Firefox that I would leave open for days sometimes, until I could get around to giving them my full attention. Not only does having all these additional pages open slow down Firefox and bloat its memory usage, but it also makes it easy to lose the pages by accidentally closing them. Now I have the Read It Later extension installed this problem simply goes away.

Read It Later stores your list as a series of bookmarks in a custom bookmarks folder, so it's easy to export or manage your list by organising your bookmarks in the usual manner.

Read It Later homepage
http://www.ideashower.com/ideas/launched/read-it-later/

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is a web based service that, as the name suggests, allows you to run surveys. It's been running for a many years now, and provides a very comprehensive service, ranging from basic free functionality to annual subscriptions with unlimited surveys etc.

The application affords you a lot of flexibility when designing your survey, including theme, question format and structure, pagination and many other features.

Once you publish your survey, participants submit their responses and SurveyMonkey stores the data. It then offers you detailed analysis and reporting tools to allow you to extract the information you need, plus allowing you to download the raw survey data for your own offline processing.

SurveyMonkey homepage:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/

That's all for this month

Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed this issue. If you know anyone who might appreciate this please take a moment to refer them - it will be much appreciated.

Until next time,

Ben Roberts
Editor

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The February Update