Today on Refrederator: Little Swee’ Pea. A trademark of the Zukor cartoons were the multi-layered backgrounds that moved at different speeds, creating the impression of 3-dimensionality. Some of the Popeye cartoons use them, this one included, and all of the Betty Boop cartoons feature them as a mainstay. Have a look and see for yourselves!
Category Archives: Reviews
Reviews of products and services.
On-Off Alarm Clock
Engadget has a post about this, and I couldn’t help writing one either. This looks like a pretty cool alarm clock, and the price is very reasonable given that it’s made by a designer. The clock is angle shaped, and it has two positions. One side is for alarm-on, and the other for alarm-off. I have to ask the same question Engadget did. Is there a Snooze functionality?
Here’s the link to the designer’s site (Nina Tolstrup), and here’s the link to the Engadget post. Photo courtesy of Nina Tolstrup and GreenerGrassDesign.
A review of SimplyHired
I’ve been using SimplyHired for the past few days, and wanted to share my impressions with you. The site is an aggregator. It pulls job listings from all of the major job sites and filters them for you based on your search criteria. At my latest check, they were indexing over 5,381,261 jobs. That’s a LOT of jobs!
I love the search by zipcode feature. I was able to punch that in, plus a keyword, and boom, I got a listing of all the jobs matching that keyword near my home. Beautiful! What’s also very cool is that the site’s using AJAX, so when you save something, the entire page doesn’t have to refresh.
Without creating an account, I was able to save jobs to look at them later. When I decided to create an account, those same jobs I’d saved showed up under it after I logged on. Nice!
You can rate jobs and put comments next to each, like, “applied 4/24/06”, which is what I did. (Incidentally, I’m looking for a job…) The jobs are then sorted automatically based on your rating, with the highest-rated ones bubbling up to the top.
The design is beautiful and clean. The color scheme is great. The functionality works better than advertised. What can I say, I love it!
Google Pages, re-launched
Justin Rosenstein, Product Manager and Google Page Creator, posted an entry to the Google Blog a few days ago where he detailed the reason for the application. If my memory serves me right, Google Pages launched a few months ago, but access to it was withdrawn or limited in some way. Perhaps the Google folks thought it needed some more work. Anyway, Justin has just re-launched it, so I assume it’s now ready for public consumption.
Just tried it out, and it does seem to be a really easy way to create web pages, much like the .Mac service – except this is free, and there don’t appear to be any bandwidth limitations, at least none I can find. Then again, there isn’t the tight integration here that one finds on the .Mac service, such as with GarageBand or iPhoto, to allow for one-click publishing of podcasts or photos. Still, it’s a pretty cool service.
Here’s the link to the Google Blog entry, and here’s a link to Google Pages.
Measuring the cost of corruption
The World Bank has put together a very informative collection of papers and websites on corruption at this web page. They define corruption as “theft of public resources for private gain”, and they define and evaluate the various costs associated with corruption.
They name two in the summary: one is redistributive, and is incurred when businesses with political power abuse that privilege to get a contract at the expense of their competitors, and the other is a welfare cost, which is to the overall economy, and thus makes everyone worse off.
The papers and websites are all free to access, and the language is surprisingly clear-cut and demonstrative. This is a really good resource, and I encourage you to take advantage of it. Here is the link to it.
Raoul Pop 