#19 Other applications

It's just as well that it's reasonably quiet today, or that I've had sufficient time between referring people to the book desk and telling them how to use the internet to experiment with some of the award-winning apps.

The first one I looked at was ColorBlender, which I think is really neat. It gives you an adjustable slider to control levels of red, blue and green so you can blend your own colours onscreen. It also generates a complementary palette. The nifty thing is the way it supplies the html code for each colour underneath, constantly changing as you adjust your sliders. Simple, elegant and useful—well, if you're a web designer, anyway, and are trying to come up with a colour scheme for your website that moves beyond the 216-colour palette (and can't remember all those pesky hex codes). You can also save your scheme (useful for sharing between multiple designers) and browse those that other people have created. Library usefulness? Not so much, unless you're a web designer.

Looked at a couple of other sites; felt that on the whole I missed the point of things like widgets and creating lists online, and that I've had enough of photo-sharing and retail type things already. I notice that Google Maps is in there, which I've used before and think is reasonably useful, though I vastly prefer Street Directory for Australian locations. This is really good, much better than the linked maps in the online White Pages. Street Directory is not only based on Melways and thus has really clear, easy-to-read maps, there's optional layers you can turn on and off to show houses for rent or sale and they've recently added in panoramas and photos, mostly of parks and such so far, but clearly they're working on lots of developments. It's a very nifty site, and incredibly useful perhaps not so much for the library itself, but certainly for a lot of library users.

I did like the looks of Last FM, but am discouraged from using it personally because I no longer have internet access at home and TSD are understandably not keen on us employees downloading lots of stuff. It would be neat if we ever had our music collection digitised, even if it was just the out-of-copyright stuff, to use a similar application to let people listen to our music and then find other things that were similar (all from within our collection). I think we're a ways off from that kind of thing, though.

Finally, à propos of nothing, one of my friends invited me to join Goodreads, a social book recommendation/review site which cosmetically looks like it must be related to LibraryThing. I haven't had a thorough explore, which I would want to do before signing up, but it looks like it could definitely be useful for accommodating user-generated comments on books—something we've talked about doing here. Sort of like a hybrid between Amazon and the book review wiki, with the whole social side of things enabling users to connect with each other as well.