Engagement Commons: A new tool to empower civic engagement
"With the explosion of open data, we've seen a proliferation of civic software aiming to get community information on everything from road closures to restaurant inspections into people's hands.
The apps have great potential for engaging people in improving their communities. But often the people closest to the data - city leaders and staffers - have a difficult time finding and weeding through all the software to determine what's right for both their needs and their community.
That's why we're building Engagement Commons, a comprehensive catalogue of civic engagement software. It's a project of Civic Commons, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation's Technology for Engagement Initiative, which funds projects that use technology to inspire on-the-ground action."
(Nick Grossman, Civic Commons Executive Director, 11 January 2012)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
WinDirStat: Windows Directory Statistics
"When in 2003 I came across the KDE program KDirStat (http://kdirstat.sourceforge.net), I was fascinated and enthusiastic about it, as it is probably the same with many others. I had been thinking of writing a disk usage tool before, and saw: that's it!
SequoiaView (http://w3.win.tue.nl/nl/onderzoek/onderzoek_informatica/visualization/sequoiaview/) was around, but KDirStat's concept of coupling a tree list view with a treemap was unrivaled, and I didn't find anything equivalent for MS Windows. So I wrote WinDirStat, using Mark Bruls, Kees Huizing, Jarke J. vanWijk, and Huub van de Wetering's papers on squarified treemaps (http://www.win.tue.nl/~vanwijk/stm.pdf) and cushion treemaps (http://www.win.tue.nl/~vanwijk/ctm.pdf).
I didn't worry too much about the functionality but simply cloned KDirStat. The pacman is not my idea, the extension list is. I tried to size and position each GUI element optimally and to avoid modal dialogue boxes. The program should output much information while requiring few user input. When I thought it was complete, I gave it to my sister and watched her interaction with the software. That gave me another two weeks of work to do. This procedure, together with the testplan, secured WinDirStat's quality.
Meanwhile, a colleague of mine wrote Disc Inventory X (http://www.derlien.com/), a clone for Mac OS X.
That's the story so far. Oliver has taken responsibility for the project, many translations have been contributed. I've largely switched to Linux and observe WinDirStat's amazing download numbers. I hope we can provide some new version slowly but surely."
(Bernhard Seifert, 2010-07-28)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Pixlr: web-based photo editor
"Pixlr is the creator of online cloud-based image tools. Today we have two applications in our suite, one we call Pixlr Editor and the other is Pixlr Express. They are built in Flash and you need to have a Flash plug in to get it to work."
(Pixlr.com)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Epic Games announces the launch of the Unreal Development Kit
"Epic Games, Inc. announces the launch of the Unreal Development Kit (UDK), a free edition of Unreal Engine 3 that provides community access to the award-winning toolset like never before. This software release is available to anyone interested in using 3D game engine technology, including game developers, students, hobbyists, researchers, creators of 3D visualizations and simulations, and digital filmmakers. Anyone can start working with the industry-leading Unreal Engine 3 toolset by downloading UDK at www.udk.com, where detailed product features, technical documentation, commercial licensing terms, support resources and more are also available.
An unprecedented milestone in game development, the release of UDK awards free access to the same world-class tools and technology used by many of the world’s best video game developers and publishers. Unreal Engine 3 is a constantly evolving game engine, and UDK contains all the most recently added features and technological enhancements, including many that have yet to be seen in an Unreal Engine game. Furthermore, Epic Games will release ongoing, upgraded builds of UDK for free."
(Epic Games Inc., 5 November 2009)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
FreeMind: free mind mapping software
"FreeMind is a premier free mind-mapping (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map) software written in Java. The recent development has hopefully turned it into high productivity tool. We are proud that the operation and navigation of FreeMind is faster than that of MindManager because of one-click 'fold / unfold' and 'follow link' operations.
So you want to write a completely new metaphysics? Why don't you use FreeMind? You have a tool at hand that remarkably resembles the tray slips of Robert Pirsig, described in his sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance called Lila. Do you want to refactor your essays in a similar way you would refactor software? Or do you want to keep personal knowledge base, which is easy to manage? Why don't you try FreeMind? Do you want to prioritize, know where you are, where you've been and where you are heading, as Stephen Covey would advise you? Have you tried FreeMind to keep track of all the things that are needed for that?"
(FreeMind)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
