Now available in the app store: Pendipity.

Pendipity is a collaborative drawing app for the iPad. Similar iPad apps in the app store can connect you to someone only as long as they’re on the same network (i.e. sitting next to you). What’s particularly unique about Pendipity is that it connects you to remote users randomly, regardless of physical location. If you’re thinking, “Hey, this is just like a Chatroulette for drawing!”, you’d be right. While a single-user drawing mode exists, Pendipity is most enjoyable when drawing with others. Open the app, and wait for another user to connect. Once you’re connected, you’ve got a shared drawing canvas with someone that could be down the street, or around the world.

As we’ve learned from the logo drawing tool we offer on the main BuzaMoto page, there are those types of people that prefer to draw obscenities under the guise of anonymity. We’re hoping that the $2.99 price tag will prevent such users from entering into the pool of Pendipity users that you might get paired with. Time will tell.

In the meantime, if you’ve got an iPad, grab Pendipity from the app store and get drawing!

iPad-based news reading apps are a dime a dozen these days.

Unfortunately, while many of them differ from an aesthetic/usability standpoint, they all generally present the same types of content in the same way. Strip out some text, pull out an image, and display the result in a little box. The end result is something that gives you little snippets of information devoid of context. I like seeing the web in the way it was originally intended — the font, the layout, the image arrangement, everything. The problem is that web pages take a few seconds to load. Every time you click, you have to wait, and this makes casual browsing of *real* web content very difficult.

Percolater is an iPad news reader app that does the waiting up front, so you don’t have to. What you get is full screen previews of the pages you’re friends are sharing on Twitter (or items from your Google Reader account) that you can flip through as fast as sifting through a stack of paper, even when you’re without a network connection.

We recently demoed the app at an Apple-sponsored Stanford iOS app showcase, and got some really great feedback from Yahoo! researchers, Apple employees, and the Stanford community. Remarkably, we had two users tell us that while they enjoyed Flipboard, one of the best designed iPad reader apps available, they said they liked Percolater better. Aww, shucks!

You can grab Percolater from the iOS app store.

I just posted JSGestureRecognizer which is a bit like a JavaScript implementation of UIGestureRecognizer on iOS for Mobile Safari. If you’re familiar with UIGestureRecognizer, this should come in really handy.

I wrote this because:

1. I got sick of writing touchstart/touchmove/touchend events to support Mobile Safari
2. I didn’t see any implementation out there that I liked
3. I like how UIGestureRecognizer works in iOS and wanted Mobile Safari to work similarly
4. I wanted to be able to easily create my own gestures

Anyway, there’s documentation on the project page, and you can get a copy of it on github.

Hooking up Tak’s outstanding PhotoViewer to Feedabot is clearly an excellent idea. Here’s proof.

I wanted to play with the new CSS transition stuff, to see what all the fuss was about. At the same time I wanted to make something useful, so I thought why not make a little site for my friend Dave, who is one bad ass photographer. I have a rough demo up and it works pretty well. It only works with Safari 4, but the good news is that it also works with Mobile Safari.

It’s really nice that the animation is defined in the CSS and you don’t need any JavaScript to move objects. It was also really simple to implement, most of the work was done in about an hour. The interaction is simple. Click a picture to zoom into it, then a full version loads, click on it and you zoom back out. You can also move the thumbnails around.

I had to violate some ui for the iPad because of the way mobile safari handles events, or more precisely, doesn’t handle events. I wanted to maintain the native gestures of but weirdly enough safari does fire any events when double tapping to zoom in, as stated in their documentation. Why?

I decided implementing my own photo uploading/managing would be too much of a pain in the ass, after all Dave isn’t paying me for this. Yes, this may come as a shock, but I’m not a total asshole. So I decided to use Flickr as a CMS. Since the API allows for a JavaScript callback, there’s no backend proxy work required.

Anyway, here’s a little taste of how it works. You need Safari 4 or iPhone OS 3. Currently, there are three different ways to load photos.

1) Load from a JSON file

Loading a JSON file, don’t pass any query terms: http://mud.mitplw.com/PhotoViewer/

The actual JSON file is: http://mud.mitplw.com/PhotoViewer/index.json

2) Load Photosets from a Flickr user

Pass a photoset=flickr_user_id query, like this (using Luis’s Flickr account)

http://mud.mitplw.com/PhotoViewer/?photoset=75903973@N00

HINT: you can look up user_ids with idGettr.

3) Load Photos from Flickr using tag search

Pass any comma delimited tags like ?drunk,punks

http://mud.mitplw.com/PhotoViewer/?drunk,punks

Finally, I’ll post the source on github when I finally finish Dave’s site. Also, maybe in the near future I’ll add some local storage and HTML5 video support…