Cobalt Edge LLC is Christopher Bailey's consulting company, and tech blog space. Chris is the VP of Engineering at and developer of DealBase.com the largest hotel deals site on the web, as well as VP of Engineering at Bring Light a charitable giving site. I've previously worked at Adobe Systems (twice), and a few startups. You can also find me on GitHub. Finally, I'm the developer of the Visionary Saver screen saver.
I've been swamped at work, so haven't had much time to work on Visionary Saver. But, I should have an update in the next week or two. Some of the things I'm working on:
I've put up a new version of Visionary Saver the Twittervision/Flickrvision, and now Twittervision 3D and Twitter Flash RailsConf visualizers. The options panel is a bit different now - it's just checkboxes. If you want to randomize between different visions, just check which ones you'd like to randomize for.
I'm still at RailsConf, but will be home this coming week and can then work on settings for which saver you want to run on which monitor of a multiple monitor setup, so stay tuned.Download Visionary Saver
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My co-worker Chris Haupt has tweaked the TwitterCamp Apollo app, for displaying RailsConf tweets. Very nice. You can get it on the RailsConf wiki "Toys" page.
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I think Twittervision, and Flickrvision are really cool. However, I thought, to be even better, why not have them as a screen saver?! So, last night I whipped up a MacOS X screen saver that shows these. You can choose one or the other, or have it randomly choose which one to use. This is literally a quick hack. I plan to add some other visualizations, such as Breathing Earth, and others (send me your suggestions).
Download Visionary Saver
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Check out Twitter, a relatively new web app. It's very simple, it shows the status of people (here's ). Status is any short bit of text the person wants to state. When I first saw this, I thought it was just plain silly. Gee, do you really need up to the minute (or whatever) updates on what people are doing? Could people really keep it up to date enough to be http://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifinteresting/useful? Would people actually use it?
Tonight I was checking it out, and noticed that they have an ActionScript 3 library so as to make using their public API trivial from Flash/Flex apps (I'm using Flex a fair bit these days). I then noticed that you can update your status via IM as well as via SMS from your mobile phone. Ok, now it's getting a bit more interesting. Maybe you can keep it fairly up to date with relative ease.Also the AS3 lib and API, as well as the ability to shield your status from the public (only your Twitter "friends" can see it), made me think about tieing this in to the Agile tasking tool we're working on for RailsConf. It could potentially be interesting to have a "work" Twitter account, and use the API to show people's status. You could then tie it in to the tasking app, and anytime anyone changed a task's status (for example, they set a task to now be "in progress", the app would shoot out a Twitter message (aka a "tweet") to indicate that. Then using the public API you could show your team's "timeline" on a web page. Useful? Questionable. Geeky fun? You bet.
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