i love innovation

jQuery TOOLS - The UI library for the Web

Essential tools for modern websites

Let’s face it: do you really need drag-and-drop, resizable windows or sortable tables in your web applications? Websites are not desktop applications. They are different.

What you really need are tabs, tooltips, accordions, overlays, smooth navigation, great visual effects and all those “web 2.0″ goodies that you have seen on your favourite websites.

This library contains six of the most useful JavaScript tools available for today’s website. The beauty of this library is that all of these tools can be used together, extended, configured and styled. In the end, you can have hundreds of different widgets and new personal ways of using the library.

This looks kind of interesting. If anything, it appears to be more simple that the jQuery UI project’s stuff.

Socrata | Making Data Social

Discover useful, unique and unusual data sets created by the community.

One of the biggest shifts in the Internet over the past couple years has been movement toward all data being socialized–more or less: everyone adds, everyone takes. Without going into the philosophical implications of this, I’ll just say there’s good and bad in this paradigm shift.

That being said, this is pretty neat. It appears that Socrata is a system that finds public databases of information (a lot of Government stuff), aggregates it, and gives it a standard interface through their website.

Seems quite helpful for those looking for data, but not wanting to wade through tons of databases to get at it.

Kudos to the creators.

Moousture

A mouse gesture library with power and flexiblity to mould itself for you. Implemented on Mootools following the Object Oriented standards. Library is aimed to set out a future framework for mouse guesters for any browser including modern mobile devices

This is really cool. It allows you to create web apps/pages that use mouse gestures as event handlers. Could be really used badly, but with care, could really enhance a user experience. I like it.

Erich Vieth published an post a while back at dangerousintersection.org that is worth sharing here. It is titled “More time = Shorter letter” and is a collection of quotes that help illuminate the nature of concise and effective communication. Summary: it take work to be concise.

Read it.

Here’s a cool product from the MoMa store. The use is probably obvious. Gives you a little cushion when sitting, kneeling, or resting on hard surfaces.

I am posting this mostly just because it’s cool, but there’s also a certain level of innovation involved in this product. The designer (Joe Gebbia) has found a way to take a common thing like a cushion, and using form, color, and texture (it’s soft and cushiony) make the ordinary object to be cool and fun.

$25.00 from the MoMa Store
(check out the other awesome stuff there too)

(via swissmiss)