BRUSCA

Google Maps Street View

Posted by Brusca under Google

Street View Now in Australia
On my usual lunch time raid of news.com.au to catch the latest in pretty much any news I noticed an article on the “Street View” now being available for Google Maps in Australia. maps.google.com.au.

When browsing for a service or address you are provided with specific options. One of those is “Street View”, which displays imagery as if you were standing on the street itself. Once selected the map displays the streets available to Street View highlighted in blue.

Now I do realise that this has been around for a little while in the US so in a sense it is nothing new. But when you go ahead and type in your address and are able to see a photo of your own home from the street in Google Maps (see image below), well lets just say it does feel a little weird to say the least.

I must admit though despite the privacy issues Google are struggling with, that Google Maps is a brilliant and versatile application. Certainly a testimony of what you can do with billions of spare dollars.

15 People Who Changed the Internet

Posted by Brusca under Google

1. Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google Inc.)
2. Sir Tim Berners-Lee (Created World Wide Web)
3. Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)
4. Shawn Fanning (Napster, Rupture)
5. Kevin Rose (Digg)
6. Matt Mullenweg (WordPress)
7. Bram Cohen (BitTorrent)
8. Pierre Omidyar (eBay)
9. Mike Morhaime (Blizzard Entertainment - World of Warcraft)
10. Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia)
11. Craig Newmark (Craigslist)
12. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen (YouTube)
13. David Filo and Jerry Yang (Yahoo! Inc)
14. Jack Ma (Alibaba)
15. Jeff Preston Bezos (Amazon)
Full Details

webdu 2008

Posted by Brusca under Adobe, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, Google

It’s been another whirlwind webdu. As per usual webdu gives anyone with a passion for this kind of work the added motivation to continue to grow and explore new realms as they arise with technology growth within the web world. Sometimes aspects of your work can be demotivating, thankfully there are exciting times ahead.

Flash CS4 has some very nice features. One of them being the use of inverse kinematics. You can now create bone structures to help animate characters from within flash and the bones can be accessed using actionscript.

An example can be seen here at The Flash Blog

New Dreamweaver and Fireworks CS4 beta versions are now available and we got a sneak peek of those at webdu 2008. Some very nice feature like webkit built directly into Dreamweaver.

Google Maps API for Flash. Google have finally released an API for Flash. Meaning we can stop using the Yahoo maps application on the Steve Irwin Day events page and use the much better mapping system from Google, that’s right Yahoo, there is a world outside of the United States.

All in all a good conference, and some very nice new features and toolsets to help us at Australia Zoo deliver RIA’s through the browser and on the desktop.

Now time to sleep!