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Google recently added a new feature that allows you to easily embed Google Map Street Views in any web page just by copy and pasting some generated HTML. After you’ve drilled down to a street map location just click “link to this page” in the right hand corner. From there you’ll notice the second form field on the page reads “Paste HTML to embed in website”, that’s the code you want. Another cool thing to note: below the form field you’ll see another link that says “Customize and Preview embedded map”. This links to a new popup window that gives you a choice of selecting predetermined view port sizes (small, medium, large) or entering your own custom dimensions.

I’ve entered my office address and customized the view port sizes for my page layout. Here’s the example:

View Larger Map

Looks like Adobe is working on a new product that would give designers another tool to help bridge the communication gap between design and development. The product is code named “Thermo” and after viewing a demo video it looks to be some sort of WYSIWYG product for flash/flex applications.

There is definitely a gap that needs to be addressed in product development between design and dev and with the advent of the “Rich Internet Application” a simple tool that would allow designers to work with data and specify functionality and behavior would be welcomed. As the demo illustrates you can start with a Photoshop comp, bring it into Thermo and then turn items into functioning components with just a few clicks.

On the plus side described in the video, Thermo supposedly will write code that’s reusable to developers, so the designer is actually creating a functioning prototype. This allows the designer to contribute more than just static comps. The problem is I’m a little skeptical on how usable the generated code from Thermo would actually be. And Is it realistic to think that a developer would use the code?. It reminds me of the garbage html and JavaScript that Dreamweaver would spit out. Sure, your front end developers loved using that stuff right?

At the very least It could be a powerful tool that would help convey the designers vision, regardless if the code was used or not. It seems like the product could be quicker and friendlier than using flash.

If you missed the first SEED conference in Chicago with Jason Fried of 37 Signals, Carlos Segura of T.26 and Jim Coudal of Coudal Partners like I did, this is your chance to catch it the second time around. From what I read and heard from an old coworker, the conference focuses on design and entrepreneurship, and it definitely sounded worth the money. Unfortunately I’m out of town that weekend so I’m missing my chance to go again! Doah!

Last week I attended my first Chicago IxDA group event. The topic was RIA’s (Rich Internet Applications): what are they, how do you define them, etc. The monthly discussion is only the second the IxDA chapter has held, and on my first attendance my impression was very positive. Some interesting conversation came about, and overall I thought it was definitely a worthwhile way to spend a school night.

A couple interesting questions from the session:

1. Does an RIA have to exist in a browser window? For example, is iTunes a Rich Internet Application? iTunes pulls from the web so does that justify calling it an RIA? (more…)

I was looking for a way to display a small sampling of recent photos on the site. Ideally I wanted a solution that tied in with Flickr so I could manage my photos from one location. While researching I ran across a WordPress plugin called FAlbum from the people at RandomByte.org.

The plug-in, as I was thrilled to find, pulls your photos from flickr and displays photos, albums, and tag sets right in your WordPress blog. Considering I was looking for a solution much simpler I was pleasantly surprised at how robust FAlbum was! The setup was pretty painless. I’m still in the midst of tweaking some of the presentation but so far everything seems pretty customizable. The only small snafu I ran into was a few database errors on initial setup. I’m running WordPress 2.3.1 and after installing the plugin (version 0.7) I kept getting a caching error that read “WordPress database error: falbum_cache’ doesn’t exist] DELETE from wpfalbum_cache…

I read on the RandomByte wiki that if you manually create the falbum_cache table it would take care of the database errors issue and sure enough it did. It looks like they just released a 0.7.1 update to FAlbum. Taking a quick glance it looks like they might have fixed the database cache issue.