Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Ooh, I found something shiny

While trawling through the forums for xkcd I found a reference to drawball and wondered what it was. Turns out it's a Flash application that allows anyone to draw on a ball (actually a circle), which sounds fairly naff but isn't.

To draw, you have to zoom in - the zoom level is 4096 times the size of the full circle. You get given a limited amount of ink and can change nib size and colour using simple controls. The amount of ink you have available decreases as you draw and increases over time. Many people are drawing on the ball at the same time and because of this, nothing is permanent.

There are some surprisingly good pieces of art considering the rudimentary tools available and there is a showcase of these at the drawball hall of fame.

Finally a new feature is the drawball playback which shows a history of what the ball looked like at a speed of 40 hours per second.

Thursday, June 19, 2008

50 office-speak phrases you love to hate

Continuing with the theme of lists here are 0 office-speak phrases you love to hate from the BBC News Magazine