It’s been dormant for about a year now but the maintainer intends to start making updates to his showhouse of AJAX effects.

According to Google they can predict flu trends two weeks faster than the CDC…

We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together. We compared our query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and discovered that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States.

Remember the syntastical excellence of “All Your Base Are Belong to Us”? Or the stirring barritone of Tay Zonday? And how could we forget impassioned fervor of “Leave Britney Alone”? Good times, my friends, good times.

Well, thanks to the wonderful people at Dipity, you can relive these pop culture milestones and every other meme that has traveled through cyberspace with their nifty Internet Meme timeline. The timeline is fully interactive, with the ability to change the scale from 25 years-at-a-glace all the way down to an hour-by-hour view.

Give it a look if only to increase your awareness of the stupidity quirkiness of the Internet age. Former EKGers may even get misty-eyed.

280 North is a company that has developed a web application that rivals MS Powerpoint and looks an awful lot like Apple Keynote.  It’s called 280 Slides and it’s amazing.  From from the screenshot alone you have to say, “That’s a web application!?”

Furthermore, it’s developed in a new open source framework called Cappuccino.  Cappuccino, unlike Mootools, JQuery and their kin, is built for building web applications versus web sites.  HTML, DOM and CSS are all abstracted away.  From what it looks like, it’s more like writing a MacOSX Cocoa application - but in Javascript; it runs without a plugin or server side services.  Furthermore, to embrace the Cocoa development “feel”, the underlying language Objective-J (a take off of MacOSX’s “Objective-C”, which Cocoa uses) that extends traditional Javascript to allow dynamic imports of includes and Objective-C’s object model.

There’s a lot of new stuff here…

It comes up more and more that dynamic web page features should offer visual hints to site visitors that “this process may take a moment, please wait”.  Enter the spinning, bouncing, hypnotizing animated GIF commonly called “a throbber”.  There have been multiple sites in the past that have served as libraries for commonly used throbbers on the web.  But this one is different.  The nice thing about this one is that it can alter the background colors of the animated GIF you choose to suit the need at hand.

Bookmark this one FED’s!  Designers too - designers should be providing FED’s visually fitting “themes” for dynamic behavor, like throbbers.  This web tool should help.

As part of a coding challenge, Mathieu ‘p01′ Henri wrote a never ending animation of a Sierpiński carpet using canvas techniques (for browsers that support the tag) and Javascript.  This is not Flash.

This is pretty cool online app for creating screenshots of URLs. Just type in the URL, and it generates jpgs of various sizes. It’s really nice for creating screenshots of long pages.

http://www.thumbalizr.com/

Front-End Developers:

It took me a while to get this going, so I figured I would share it in case anybody else comes across the same issue. On http://mercuryracing.com/techcorners/ when you click on “Join our email list”, in the div overlay that comes up, the blinking cursor bar failed to appear in input text fields in Firefox.

The Firefox bug report is here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=167801

It is fixed with the code below, thanks to comments #50 and #51 on bug report page:
#emailListPopupContainer {
position: fixed;
position:expression(”absolute”);
overflow-x: visible;
overflow-y: visible;
…
}

http://www.endless.com

The various ways you can narrow down your product search is pretty impressive.