Orangeinks

Cool FaceBook Games from Playfish

Playfish is a social gaming provider which focuses on making games for social networks. The service aims to create a new genre of games by combining the best elements of casual games, social networks, MMOGs and virtual worlds. This will provide an entirely new, more social ways of enjoying great games together.

Social gaming is now becoming more and more of a trend with the popularity of social networking sites. While the types of games that can be played on social networks are not for hardware hungry hard core gamers, this will surely appeal to casual gamers who spends a lot of time in their favorite social networking sites.

The games that Playfish provides are quite addictive and fun to play. They only support Facebook as of the moment. With all the great feedback and reviews that they are getting from users and news sites, I’m pretty sure that it’s only a matter of time when support for other popular networking sites is made available.

The Games:

Who Has The Biggest Brain: A brain game where you are taken through a series of four mini games (Calculation, Memory, Logic, and Visual) which will test your brain’s ability on each category.

Word Challenge: A vocabulary hunting game where you are given 6 letters. The objective of the game is to create a 3-6 letter word from the letters provided as fast as you can. It’s like a text twist with a twist.

Bowling Buddies: You can enjoy a game of Bowling with your online buddies by creating your own customizable 3D character. You can play this in single player mode or go head to head with friends in challenge mode.

You might want to try out these games in your social network (currently Facebook) to play with your friends. You will have to check back from time to time though to see if they will be supporting your favorite social networking site.

Tags: Games, playfish, social networking games, social networking site

Photoshop: Change Eye Color Step by Step Tutorial

Anyone up for Photoshop colored contact lenses? This video will teach you how to change the eye color using Photoshop.

Tags: eye color, Photoshop, tutorial, video

Quikmaps Lets You Draw on Google Maps

QuikMaps is a map service editor with a few simple additional features that Google Maps can’t provide. It allows you to draw lines on the map, make scribbles and insert different markers. This is service not only helps users in providing geo locations (which Google Maps can do on its own), it also allows users to add more information in the map.

The editor is very simple and very easy to use.

• To add markers, simply drag the markers to your desired location on the map and just drag them around to move them. Left click the marker to add information on that particular marker and Right Clicking the marker will immediately delete it. There is also quite a fair amount of markers and icon sets that you can choose from.

• Drawing straight lines on the map is done in a connect-the-dots manner. Simply choose draw line on top to the map and place a dot on the point of origin and place another on a different location.

• The Scribble tool is a freehand drawing tool. You can doodle and scribble to your heart’s content using this tool.

• You can also add text labels on the map by dragging the Text Label icon to the location you want your text to appear on. To delete a text, just right click on the text and it will disappear.

• They also released their API code to the public so developers can integrate QuikMaps to their web applications.

When you are finished with your map doodling and marking, just insert a title for the map, place some information if you like and save it. You can easily access the map again for editing. The map can be easily exported to KML(Google Earth) and GPX(GPS) format or you can get the embed code to place it on your blogs and websites. Check below for the sample I took from QuikMaps.

Tags: geo location, google earth, google maps, map, quikmaps, web service

Quick Button Maker from the Buttonator

The Buttonator is a simple online button maker (I think that’s just about it). What else can I say? Just select a button design and place the text that you want to appear in it. You can select fonts for your text and choose a color that suites your taste. Oh, and you can also choose from a small list of button designs. You don’t have to register in order to create a button and download it. However, if you want your buttons to be hosted at buttonator, you have to sign up and create a profile.

Great for users who do not want to use image editors just to create a small and simple button.

Tags: button, buttonator, web service, webapp

Mixx Launches Mixx Communities

Social media news aggregator Mixx recently launched “Mixx Communities.” It’s a Mixx extension where users can create a niche community site under the wings of Mixx. Members can contribute to the community by submitting their stories like they would normally on the larger Mixx community.

The created Mixx Community will be given its own subdomain. Community administrators can create their own niche topic tabs. This will enable content filtering for a smaller niche community. They are also allowed to customize the look and feel of the community site that they created. Administrators can personally brand their community site and insert their own logo, edit color schemes and post editorial content. They are also given the option to monetize their site by placing an Adsense unit (Shared revenues).

This is a great step for Mixx, offering its members to create their own niche social media community and earn a buck in the process. It’s like a BlogSpot for social media. Any member of Mixx can set up his/her own community. The setup process is quite easy that even a non techie person can create and customize a community in just a few minutes. Gathering members for the community is always the hardest part. Administrators can invite their Mixx friends to join in their newly created community and they can also send invitations by email.

With Reddit going opensource and Mixx making this community offering to its users, it would be interesting to know what Digg will come up with.

Tags: mixx, mixx communities, News, social media

The PodiPodi Website Enhancement Tool

PodiPodi is a very cool way of adding non intrusive user interface enhancements to your websites. It is an experimental project in human-Machine Interaction inspired by Enso, a command line interface for desktop systems developed by Humanized, Inc. PodiPodi is a widget developed in JavaScript which allows you to easily add features without redesigning your blog or website.

I just received an invite from PodiPodi and got a chance to test their service. I must say that this particular enhancement widget is very impressive. It looks great and what I like about it is that it doesn’t interfere with the browsing. It gives the user the power to choose if he/she wants to use it or not. It will only load a service only if initiated by the user. The widget is customizable and can be done in your PodiPodi account. The owner can select which additional services he wants to add in his website.

How it Works:

Once the plugin is installed, just click the PodiPodi button or simply press Shift+Spacebar. A command line interface will appear and the user can immediately use the additional services that the owner added. Just type help on the PodiPodi command line to get the list of commands and services available for the particular site. I installed the widget and it’s already running at Orangeinks so that you can test it here.

Below is the list of service enhancements available (and coming soon) in PodiPodi.

• Info: Show additional information about the website
• Calculate: Calculate the result of a simple
mathematical expression.
• Send a comment: Visitors of the site can send messages to the web owner
• Tell a friend: Visitors can send messages to their friends and tell them about the website
• Sitemap: Show the site map of the website for a better navigation
• Flickr: show web designer’s pictures posted in Flickr or search for photos on Flickr
• Friends: Show your friend sites
• Google Web Search: make possible to perform searches through Google, parameters (languages, regions, etc.) are customizable
• Google Images Search: make possible to perform searches through Google Images, parameters (languages, regions, etc.) are customizable
• Yahoo Web Search: make possible to perform searches through Yahoo, parameters (languages, regions, etc.) are customizable
• Yahoo Images Search: make possible to perform searches through Yahoo Images, parameters (languages, regions, etc.) are customizable
• Youtube Search: make possible to perform searches through Google Videos and YouTube, parameters (languages, regions, etc.) are customizable
• Weather (coming soon): get the weather of a specific location or the city specified by the owner of the website
• Wikipedia (coming soon): Search wikipedia for specific contents

PodiPodi has been tested and works great in the browsers listed below:
Firefox2, Firefox3, Safari 2,Opera 9 and Internet Explorer 6 and 7 (in IE6 no rounded corners yet, probably never…)

The service is still in private beta. If you want to try it in your websites, you have to register as a beta tester for PodiPodi.

Tags: podipodi, website enhancement, widget