Impressive web application to design your Sao Paulo apartment, the way you like it.

MaxHaus Virtual

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Make sure your new year resolutions sticks with Start a resolution!

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BHF Food for Thought Viral

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Make your own parade with this excellent viral!

Potato Parade

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VectorMagic is a powerful vectorization online tool.

The main interface is quite simple : bitmap on the left, vector graphics on the right. Before this screen, I just had to upload an image, choose some parameters (is this a photo, a logo or whatever?) determine my final palette (only for logos) and save the resulting EPS file. Magic!

The source bitmap image was this very page Idletogether logo :

As you can see, the resolution is quite bad, but it was a good test for this tool, which performed fairly well, see by yourself by downloading the resulting EPS file (I converted it to PDF) : only the text in not readable, the curves are perfect.

Magic ? Yes, almost. At least it’s a good start when converting bitmap to vector graphics. Go for it!

Still not convinced ? Have a look at their comparison page.

The Domino’s Pizza Australia Website features a great “Order Pizza Online” system.

It has a Pizza selection, pickup & delivery options, saves your details, gives you an interactive time display for the pickup/delivery, all in a nice and enjoyable interface design.

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Mint is a pretty scary-at-first, interesting online money management app. that connects to your bank account and retrieves all the information on a daily basis. It then puts into charts and analyzes it for you so you can see where you money comes from and where it goes.

Charting and alerts on fees are pretty cool.

So far, it’s a US only product and I wasn’t able to connect my Australian bank account to it. I’m hoping I can soon.

M studio are based in New York producing a range of interesting Flash based web projects. It’s their own site is what caught my eye.

Normally I am turned off by the interface–is–king approach to web design, but in this case the result is sufficiently elegant to cause me concede that perhaps, if executed with flair and appropriate content, it can be made to work.

M studio

This is a really cool demo of a desktop / web app called TileUI.

I have to say, however, that I will stick to Finder for day-to-day work, huh.

More info here

Please note that the concept has already been seen in a yet-to-be-released application seen here.

(Thanks Raz-L)

Bubbl.us is a cute web application that helps brainstorming. You maybe familiar with the concept of mind-maps. I would also refer to it as a very simple UML diagram maker.

It takes about 10 seconds to be up to speed as it was designed to be really simple. It takes a bit of getting used to for the custom controls (when you roll over each bubbles).

You can generate structures such as organizational charts, development reference or plan your next holiday. If you are a bit geeky, you could use this application for nearly any type of planning.

The interface is cute but features quite unclear icons to: move, remove, link-to, change colour and add sibling/child.

The powerful use of keyboards shortcuts such as Enter to add a child and Tab to add a sibling make it really quick to prototype a structure. The moving around of bubbles is handled quite well, but you can easily waste minutes getting it to look okay.

An annoying error message “Your session expired” appears if you try to generate a new sheet in demo mode. I can see why this would happen as a developer, but there is obviously room for improvement in that area.

Nevertheless, Bubbl.us is a free application that does exactly what you need it to do in good fashion. Options like save to Jpeg or PNG, embed to HTML, print and e-mail make it a must have for daily use!

Vayama is yet another travel site! This one relies on Flash and is very graphical concerning your itinerary.

It features clarity, which is really rare for a website of this class. They say they get you the best deals, but I couldn’t tell you if it is true. Also the search speed was decent.

The flash engine seems to work really well, I have however noticed glitches when you use the calendar, which is HTML over the Flash. It tends to flick visually. That’s a known issue in the world of developers and it often requires trickery to get it to work properly. Therefor, I wouldn’t call that a big issue.

The application seems to do what you need it to do in good fashion. It has a clever feature, that, as an experienced user of these sites, I would call brilliant: it remembers the last search details you have entered. That is, your From and To as well as dates. Small details like these make a major difference to pick a site to book my next trip.

However, I can’t really judge the service or the staff as I haven’t dealt with them!

We’re getting there. Surely, we’re getting there.

After Flash being released with a proper engine (and AS3), we can find some very interesting projects taking out old games from the past.

Remember the original Doom? I used to play hours on my PC at the time. Well some dude (couldn’t find his name!) spends his time reading the original WAD file from Doom and is currently working on bringing it to Flash!

I never thought some day I would be playing Doom in a browser.

Can’t wait to see a more complete version, as this is pretty rough

This isn’t quite the impressive work seen with Papervision 3D, but a good old 3D engine with sprites all over the shop.

Bubble Guru is what I would call a brilliant idea. The concept is to record a short personal video explaining the content of a webpage. That video then gets embedded transparently on top of the existing design and explain the content to the visitor at his/her first visit. Example of a perfect place for this: a product page.

What is great is that you can finally put a face to a product, you can feel as if you are having a personal demo of the page and what’s to see here.

It outlines perfectly and focus the end-users to what they should think of the product - simply explaining it to them, face to face.

I think this kind of feature reinforces the trust ration of a potential buyer and give him confidence when he/she is about to take out the credit card. A great asset for any web app.

On the downside, I find their service plans rather expensive and limiting. For free, you get to place a 20 second message, which really is nothing. The next plan is $9.95 monthly and that only gives you 5 messages up to 1 minute each. The advanced plan at $29.95 monthly is not even worth mentioning.

A great idea for a new line of products, that needs some competition.

Although the concept has been seen for about a thousand years (computer-wise), this adventure game is really fun.

Sometimes it’s not entirely about the concept, the big idea, but it’s about the end-product. It’s about the feel of it, the realization.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the old Indiana Jones game on PC when I had to describe this game.

MTV Me is a wicked little game that I recommend spending some time on. It was made by the Preloaded champs and as usual, I love their stuff.

The attention to detail is often what saves a product from has-been to a has-to-be-seen.

Voyage is the most original RSS Reader I’ve ever seen. Each hour containing new items produces a “layer” of articles. Use your mouse wheel to navigate through layers, click on interesting articles or even on the timeline and feel like being in the latest Hollywood futuristic movie. I’m not saying it’s an handy way to read feeds, but it’s the most impressive one, for sure!