Wolfram Alpha: Its OMG

Wolfram Alpha was launched in May’09. Its not a search engine, its “answer” engine. It was made by Wolfram research, founded by Stephen Wolfram( child prodigy I must say, read about him on wikipedia ), a mathematician and physicist.

This site is amazing, it is an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages. You type in query like “e^2” and it gives you answers in graphs, value etc. if you type in “chocolate” it will give its nutritious facts. This site amaze me from the very first time I have seen it and to be more specific the answers it gives.

They have APIs waiting to be used and give some awesome website. You can create a Pro account for more benefits. I personally feel this thing can do something to internet what Hotmail did to email.

Pinterest: New buzz

Pinterest is a new website launched in March’10. Instead of going the traditional way, it used people’s interest as its base.

Login is by invite only for now. You can pin your interests, see and re-pin other people’s interest, follow people having same interest. It do not give the social experience which Facebook gives but its of great use for companies and individual products. They can conduct survey for their products or analyse their products.

There is also one thing I would like to focus on- design. Look at the vertical layout, jQuery plugin Masonry gave it that look. Its kind of nice and new design.

They have APIs for sharing and all. Lets see who comes up with something new using it. Try it, see if you like it.

Cool front page

There is a site on internet  We Are Empire. This site has pretty cool front page. Page is pretty descriptive too plus it don’t irritate the user by reloading for new content. Some other site like this which I personally liked is Nike‘s nike better world site. It takes a little while to load but every information is on just one single page and designed in awesome way using HTML5, z-index and many more things. We will come to it some other time.

But we will talk about the former one here. After running a console over the site, I understood what they had done. Well its nothing but Javascript and applaud to the maker, it is used very well for designing. It do not have flash.

1. What they had done is when you click on the front logo which is image it shows you next div which is hidden behind it and hide the top div.
2. Now you see 4 bubbles. Thats interesting now margin of the image in background of the bubble changes when you hover it while hiding the overflow. This is a good thing, must have taken long time to do that.
3. Open at the bottom is the coolest thing. Click on it and another page comes with no page loading. Again is the game of margin. Margin-top is changed using Javascript to animate.
4. There are smaller effects also like close appearing and hiding, get in touch etc.

So, this is how this front page is working. Try making yours with such innovation.

Here is a example of that a very short one.

<script type="text/javascript">
function anim(mydiv)
{
   var i = 0;
   while(i < 10)
  {
     mydiv.style.marginTop = 10*i + 'px';
     i++;
  }
}
</script>
<div id="mydiv" onclick="javascript:anim(this)">
    test
</div>

There is no need to explain the code above. Its self explanatory and use basics of Javascript and HTML.