Mocha VNC for iPhone - iPod Touch. Free Lite Version.. Playing around with MochaSoft VNC Lite for the iPhone/iPod Touch. Set up was very simple. Am typing this on my MacBook through my iPhone… A bit too meta….

Simplify Media is an application that allows you to share your music over the net. In addition you can listen to up to 30 other streams from your friends music collections. In addition they have a nice application for the iPhone/iPod Touch that allows you to access music from your own computer, or from friends computers, using our iPhone/iPod Touch.

[From Simplify Media - You've Been Invited]

Today CNET reports that Google has added translations to its offerings for the iPhone.

What with the flaky nature of Twitter of late, I’ve been playing around with Friendfeed, the social networking tool that allows you to build a customised feed made up of content that friends on other collaborative sites have shared, including news articles, photos, Twitter posts, and weblog postings. Basically it is a web presence stream catching tool.

In addition to displaying the content, the FriendFeed interface on the web, and on clients such as Twhirl or MySocial 24×7, allow you to comment on an item. For example in Twitter if you want to comment you @reply to the individual. The item is posted chronologically, and this makes it difficult to follow conversations. For example this morning Steve Dembo and Ryan Bretag are having a Twitter discussion about the merits of interactive clicker type tools in the classroom. It started last night and continues on this morning, but it is hard to follow on Twitter. In FriendFeed comments are nested with the original Tweet/post. As others comment on the posting they are added along with yours. You also have the option of sending an @reply directly to Twitter. Kind of a foot in both worlds. (the Friendfeed web interface and MySocial 24×7 allow this, Twhirl has not yet implemented this feature.)

I also like that you can follow a friend’s web contributions. For example FriendFeed allows you to aggregate posts to sites such as YouTube, Flickr and over 40 other web sites/tools. I am finding that I like following friends and collegues in this manner, rather than jumping around from various sites to see if they have posted anything new.

Update: Another feature of FriendFeed is something they call Rooms. Basically private spaces that a team or workgroup could set up to have a Twitter like discussion area, but only viewable to those that you allow in. Might be useful in a school or classroom setting…

Michael Tyson, a Computer Science PhD student, living in Melbourne, Australia, has created a service (Speak to iTunes Audiobook Service) running on Mac OS X that converts any text to an iTunes compatible audio file. Select some text, invoke the service, and his tool converts the text into a spoken file using the Mac OS X text to speech tool. The file is placed in the Audiobooks section of your iTunes collection.

I installed the service and converted a few articles. I found the result to be pretty good. Not the same as having had it read by a person, but useful none the less.

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Technorati Tags: iTunes, michael tyson

It looks like this has been up since last summer, but today was the first I have heard of TagCrowd. TagCrowd is a web based tool that allows you to visualize word frequencies as a tag cloud. You can visualize web pages, text files, and contents of your clipboard and then embed the tag cloud in your page. This could be great for teachers to use to visualize frequently used vocabulary from text sources. Amazon has a similar feature, concordance, for books that are searchable in their Search Inside feature, but TagCrowd allows you to do this with any text. The example below is from the freely available (in public domain) text of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain at the University of Virginia.

TagCrowd was created by Daniel Steinbock, a doctoral student in Design and Education at Stanford University. You can read more about TagCrowd, and some interesting uses ideas, on the TagCrowd Blog…

By way of NancyW and Twitter…

TagCrowd Example:
The 100 most frequently found words in Tom Sawyer available at the University of Virginia…

Cabel Sasser is a software developer and one of the founders of Panic Software, the folks that make Transmit along with some other nice web development tools. Transmit is a great FTP utility for the Mac and a tool that I find myself using just about everyday. Cabel also does some other coding and his weblog, cabel.name is a good read for folks who like to keep up with smart independent software developers. (If you are interested in software design, his talk from C4 is very informative and entertaining…)

This morning, David Warlick pointed to a nice little piece of Javascript that Cabel wrote that produces a nice visual effect when viewing images that have been posted to your web site. He calls it FancyZoom. Basically when a thumbnail link is clicked a larger version of the image appears as a call out. A very nice effect. Below is an example. Click the image to see the effect.