Posts by tanagramster

SortSite Web Page Analysis – We’ve got a fancy new tool and we’re sharing!

Click here to request your report (for the TLNGR folks)

Dynamic Site Mapping!

SortSite, by PowerMapper Software is a very nice web page analysis tool. We’ve been using it’s baby sister (self-titled Powermapper) for many years and are very impressed with the additional analysis features provided by SiteSort on top of the core Powermapper functionality.

In a nutshell this application will crawl your web site and generate a detailed site map based on your linking structure and then it will analyze each page and image for every form of compliance you can imagine that may be keeping your search engine ranking down. How cool is that!?! (err.. not the down part)

From their web site:

One click is all it takes to analyze an entire web site. Each page is checked against 450+ standards based checkpoints.

Accessibility – check against W3C WCAG1, WCAG2 and Section 508 guidelines
Compatibility – check for browser specific code, script and image formats
Compliance – check for compliance with EU and US law
Broken Links – check for broken links and other errors
Search Engine Optimization – check Google, Yahoo and Bing webmaster guidelines
Web Standards – validate HTML, XHTML and CSS
Usability – check against Usability.gov guidelines

Here is an example of an error issues page.

Detailed Analysis

If you’ve got the time and budget we highly recommend integrating this application into your quality assurance (QA) cycles for rapid high-level analysis of your site and its potential deficiencies. They have a free 30-day trial (limited functionality) or you can pop $350.oo for the professional application.

They even have an online tool that works with Macs.

 

BUT WAIT!

For a limited time we, Tanagram Internet Citizens, are offering to run our licensed professional version of this application on your web site for to anyone who asks! Why would we do such a crazy thing? Well first; we’re pretty sure we can’t sell the reports but even if we could, we like to help out and if more people took a good hard look at their web site code, the internet would be a better place. Perhaps even cats and dogs would get along, but let’s not wish for too much.

Click here to tell us the web site you’d like analyzed.

I WANTS MY REPORT!

(ha it’s the same link, but we figured we’d make it HUGE for our short attention-span friends)

ttfn!


Augmented Reality App sees “markers” embedded in wallpaper.


We’re experimenting with Facebook advertising. Fan us and stick it to our credit card!


Tim and I are back from the land of imagination.

Menlo Park is a mystical place. A place of unicorns and giants. Behind Tim (pictured above) is a tree it would take 4 people to wrap their arms around and it is sitting in someone’s front yard. Tim and I were consistently amazed by the sights, sounds, smells (Jasmine everywhere) that permeate this land of imagination. It’s no wonder so many amazing things are born here.


Minority Report-style Mobile Interface

Minority Report-style Mobile Interface

touchless_ui.jpg

Some of the folks over in the Ishikawa Komuro Laboratory at The University of Tokyo have prototyped a Minority Report-like touchless gestural mobile interface that, in addition to the ubiquitous air typing, also allows the user to interact with with the interface in 3D.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Mobile | Digg this!


Robot Kung Fu!


Seriously, until if we had a cat, it’d be nervous right now. It would need to learn Kung Fu pronto!


Why is Tanagram so fascinated with Robots?!?


Because robots, like em or not, are your future. They do amazingly boring tasks perfectly, indefinitely, so you don’t have to. We think automation is exciting and mechanized automation plays a big role in that future. We also have project concepts that will rely heavily on our durable new friends. We’ll share more on that when we can.

For now know that this particular robot is solving a number of real-world supply chain issues including handling a dynamic range of pallet objects and addressing potential impending recall issues by simplifying the warehousing architecture. Simple and beautiful.


Tentacle robot!


Tentacle robot!

These Doc-Ock-like robotic tentacles by German tech firm Festo are given the fully cheesy industrial film treatment, but there is tons of cool here as well. For starters, the tentacles are covered in touch sensors (or something similar) and can be manually guided. The project is a continuation of Festo’s biology-inspired robots like the fun AquaJellies.

More:

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Robotics | Digg this!


A tip-of-the-hat to IDEO: Toy Lab for their partnership with Sesame Street and the resulting cool iPhone apps.

We like to pretend we compete with the ginormous-brained folks at IDEO but the truth of the matter is they have no idea who we are.. (we pretend we will sneak up on them and… BOOO!) Regardless, we are huge fans of the IDEO: ToyLab Balloonimals app and are now quite smitten with Elmo’s Monster Maker. It’s obvious they did some real thinking on the user experience (UX) as it is dead simple and perfect for kids who just want to touch things (like noses). Throw Elmo into the mix and you’re guaranteed to witness a kid-neuron supernova. 

Nice job on this guys, and thank you. My daughter is going to love playing with this. You can get yours here: http://ideotoylab.com/sesamestreet/ It’s $4 on the AppStore (ouch). 

One last thing… Can we get an iPad version? Thanks!


Chicagoans, join us in supporting a great local institution the St. James Food Pantry. $10 goes a long way! http://bit.ly/cKKnuE

St. James Food Repository

Awarded “Most Outstanding Agency in 2009″ by the greater Chicago Food Depository – photo on their Facebook page.

See them here.