We love it when people adapt Google Maps to create fun new applications, and the “Goggles Flight Sim” is one of the best we’ve seen for a while.
Created by London designer Mark Caswell-Daniels as a piece of viral marketing (it’s working, Mark!) for his Flash-scripting talents, the flight sim uses aerial images loaded in from Google’s mapping service.
After selecting your city from a drop down list (which currently offers London, New York, Paris, Toyko and Washington DC), you find yourself in charge of a cartoon biplane flying over a rolling landscape created by seamless Google Maps images.
The controls are pretty rudimentary, with keyboard arrows controlling direction and height, letting you sweep and soar around cities – and plunge earthwards in a kamikaze crash if you feel so inclined.
There are – not surprisingly – some rough edges, the most annoying being the inability to climb very high.
Without an accompanying map overview or sign-posted landmarks, this means it can be hard to work out where you are, which can be rather frustrating (we found that following railway lines or major rivers usually got us to the centre of cities in the end).
Still, as an office timewaster it’s second to none, and well worth a go.
We emailed Mark about his flight sim and he told us that it was still in beta at the moment, and that it wasn’t actually meant to be released quite yet.
He explains, “a mate interpreted ‘don’t tell anybody about it’ as ’email all your friends with a link’ so the cat got out of the bag before I finished it!”
Still, Mark acknowledges that, “all publicity is good publicity,” and we’ll look forward to playing with the finished version soon!
Nice one, Mark!
Today, a rather old book from the late 11th century England (1086 to be precise) will be brought online to be searched. The Domesday Book, is the earliest surviving survey and valuation of the King, his senior supporters, the land they owned and their resources.
You might think that there’s a little difficulty in using it, as many of the surnames used by people and names of areas have changed substantially over the last thousand-odd years. Luckily they thought of that one. Simply enter the modern name in the Place Name box, if you’re a boffin with knowledge of ye-olde world, you enter the old name in the Other keywords box.
There’s a couple of theories as to why it’s called the Domesday or Doomsday Book (depending on your preferenece) – Biblical Day of Judgement or when some bloke called Christ will return to judge the living and the dead. Neither of them particularly jolly.
Vodafone is hotly denying that its enthusiasm for 3G has waned, after rumours began circulating that the operator was cutting handset subsidies and abandoned all hope of the technology ever becoming a lucrative commercial success.
Video calling
Not surprisingly, the UK’s only 3G-only network, 3, were quick to quibble about the claims, insisting that the wild popularity of their downloadable music and mobile TV services is proof positive that the demand is there – if the technology is marketed correctly.
The terrible day that the mobile phone companies had been hoping wasn’t going to arrive, is here. Skype have today announced four WiFi handsets that let you send and receive calls without switching your computer on while wanding around – err, like a mobile phone. They’ve been expected for a while, but are finally getting closer to the hands of the public, being as they’ll start selling in Q3 this year.
We got our hand on the NetGear SPH101 recently and were really impressed with the solid build and how easy it was to use. The Skype interface was loyal to the computer-based editions, with the graphics being an exact replica.
Desperate to program your Sky+ PVR, while out and about? Or can’t be bothered to reach for the TV remote control when you’ve got you mobile in your hand?
It looks like using it might be a bit of palaver with the need to SMS quite precise and long winded instructions
The US Democratic party has adopted net-neutrality as a party-political issue following the rejection of a second pro-neutrality amendment in a vote late last week.
Former presidential candidate Senator John Kerry commented, “This vote was a gift to cable and telephone companies, and a slap in the face of every Internet user and consumer.” Another Democrat, Senator Ron Wyden, placed a ‘hold’ on the bill which temporarily stops further progress but a decision is inevitable and both sides are marshaling forces behind their cause.
We played with the Packard Bell EasyNote ‘Skype Edition’ Laptop, at its first European showing yesterday. The machine we used was the only one in Europe and had been jetted in from development labs in Estonia.
As you can see from the close-up photo, the Skype button sits on the right, the microphone on the left and in the centre is a video camera, a la new Mac laptops. There’s an LED between the mic and video camera and another surrounding the Skype button.
Calling quality
Imagine a world where Internet performance is controlled by the company who owns the cables and where speed is sold to the highest bidder. Imagine a world where some Web sites load faster than others, where some sites aren’t even visible and where search engines pay a tax to make sure their services perform at an acceptable speed. That’s the world US Telecommunications companies (telcos) such as AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner are trying to create.
As Doctorow and other commentators have observed, Internet users and businesses already pay proportionally for their use of the net, allowing the owners of the infrastructure to take a further cut distorts the market in favour of those with the deepest pockets and threatens innovation and the development of new services.
To date, most ADSL equipment that BT has put out has been pretty …. functional … or put another way, ugly. Their ethernet routers have been transposed from office equipment, and their USB kit, the Frog as it was known … well don’t get us started on that*.
BT have clearly had the industrial designers on the case and what they’ve turned out is a bit of a looker.
What can you connect to it?
The only issue we raised after spending a brief time with it was the usage indicator lights that sit at the top of the unit, which flicker whenever data passes through the box. Sadly, as yet, these can’t be turned off.
Hot on the heels of Windows Messenger Live comes Yahoo’s new upgrade to their own Instant Messaging service, offering plug-ins to let users share more information.
Widgets and Plug Ins
Of course, there’s nothing new to all this embedding malarkey, with the industry boys – Microsoft, Google, AOL and Skype – all falling over themselves to make desktop-based applications shareable over IM services, but Yahoo are hoping that by opening up Messenger to become more of a distribution platform they’ll be able to attract punter-luring new services.