xBlog: The visual thinking weblog
7th August 2007

The Information Machine

A 1957 animated short by Charles And Ray Eames: “Applies graphic sensitivity to medium in cartoon form, and traces the history of storing and analyzing information from the days of the cavemen to today’s age of electronic brains.”

posted in History, Movies/TV, Technology | Permalink | Comments Off

7th August 2007

Visuale Blog

“I’m Enrico Bertini a postdoc researcher at the Departement of Informatics at University of Fribourg, Switzerland. My research activity focuses mainly on Information Visualization, that is, graphical interactive interfaces to access complex and/or large volume information to extract knowledge and support the formation and assessment of hypothesis.”

posted in Data visualization, Information design | Permalink | Comments Off

7th August 2007

Saving View Source

“We look at a lot of Ajax applications, and we have seen a lot of trends over the last couple of years. In general we are maturing, but as complexity has gone up in Ajax applications we are seeing one scary trend. The first set of apps simply added some <script> that did some happy XMLHttpRequest dancing. Then we abstracted to libraries such as Dojo and Prototype. Then people tried to do the right thing and use unobtrusive JavaScript where we keep the HTMl structure separate from the code. We would all like to see more of this. Unfortunately, we are starting to see Ajax applications that look more like Flash web pages…” (Thanks SuccessForce!)

btw, you can see some work XPLANE has been doing for Salesforce over at the Successforce blog.

posted in HTML/DHTML/XHTML, Scripts (JS/PHP/etc), Web development, XPLANE | Permalink | Comments Off

7th August 2007

Microsoft Office Open XML File Format Converter for Mac

“With the Office Open XML Converter, you can convert Office Open XML files to a format that is compatible with Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac and Microsoft Office v. X for Mac. You can choose to convert and open one file, or convert a large number of files… This version [currently 0.2 Beta] of the converter can convert the following Office Open XML file formats:

  • Word Document (*.docx)
  • Word Macro-Enabled Document (*.docm)
  • PowerPoint Presentation (*.pptx)
  • PowerPoint Show (*.ppsx)
  • PowerPoint Template (*.potx)”

posted in Software/Hardware | Permalink | Comments Off