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Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Add Animated Charts to your PowerPoint Presentations

Microsoft PowerPoint offers a variety of charts and graphs that you can add to your presentations. These charts will mostly appear as static images on your slides though you can use PowerPoint's built-in animation tools to add some movement and interactivity.

For instance, if you have have added a bar chart on one of you slides, you may apply custom animations to the chart such that each of the bars appear on screen with a fade or, say, a wipe. This support page has more details on how you can animate charts in PowerPoint.

Animated Charts Wizard

Animated charts, if done well, can help you grab the attention of your live audience. With PowerPoint, you can add some basic animations to your charts but the workflow is not as easy as you would like it to be.

If you are therefore looking for an alternate charting tool that's more intuitive and one that can generate impressive animated charts but in considerable less amount of time, try oomfo.

Oomfo is a free plug-in that lets you create Adobe Flash based animated charts right inside your copy of Microsoft PowerPoint. It supports all the recent versions of Microsoft Office including Office 2010.

It uses a simple wizard – choose a chart type, type the data into the wizard (or you can copy-paste cells from Excel) and it will then insert the chart into your current PowerPoint slide as a Flash (SWF) object. You can place the chart anywhere on the slide or even resize it just like a regular image based chart.

What you see above is a video of a sample PowerPoint chart that was created using Oomfo.

The chart animation plays as soon as the slide appears on the screen and then you can use your mouse pointer to highlight the various data points, something which is not that easy to accomplish in standard PowerPoint.

This article, titled Add Animated Charts to your PowerPoint Presentations, was originally published at Digital Inspiration under Charts, Powerpoint, Software.

How to Research Domain Names on the Web

domain names

Researching domain names on the web is often frustrating because all the good names that are in your mind have already been taken. There are however tools that you help you brainstorm new ideas for domain names and you may sometimes strike gold.

The IANA maintains a complete list of top-level domains (like .am for Armenia or .be for Belgium) that you may consider registering in case the usual .com and .org addresses for your domain are not available.

It's obviously not easy for anyone to search through dozens of domain extensions manually so a tool like iWantMyName should help. With a single click, iWantMyName lets you check the availability of a domain name against most of the international domains* from one place.

Another excellent tool for researching domains is Domai.nr. Give it any word and Domai.nr will suggest some really creative domain names around that word.

For instance, if you are looking for a domain like "awesome", Domai.nr will check the availability of generic domains (like awesome.com) as well as unconventional domains like aweso.me, aws.me, aw.sm, etc. which also make lot of sense in case the original one is not available.

You may also use characters from Arabic, Hindi and other non-Latin scripts when searching for domains on both Domai.nr and iWantMyName.

Wolfram Alpha, the versatile and intelligent search engine, is also a pretty handy tool for discovering clever domain names on your own.

For instance, if you are looking to book a .in domain, you can use a query like words ending with in to determine all the proper English words that can go with the .in extension. Similarly, a query like words containing news will find English words that contain the letter news thus helping you find more variants of the domain name that you may have in mind.

Finally, you should also check out Domize – it may look like any other domain search tool but Domize is actually quite powerful under the hood.

Domize lets you search domains in bulk and that too in a very interesting manner. You can say [parrots,pigeons,crows] in one query and it will find the domain availability for all these words separately but in one go. Or you can frame a query with a set of words like [red,blue][balls,berries] and Domize will check the availability for all the various combinations like redballs, redberries, blueballs, etc.

Domains expire after some time and if the current owner chooses not to renew them, they are released in the open market for others to grab. You can use a tool like Domain Monitor to track the status of one or more domains and the service will send you instant email alerts as soon as the status /whois information of any of these domains is changed.

Also see: Precautions before buying Web Domains

[*] Some of these country-level domain extensions can only registered by citizens of that country and hence may not be available to you.

This article, titled How to Research Domain Names on the Web, was originally published at Digital Inspiration under Web Domains, Internet.

Bookmarklet Turns Any Webpage Into a Whiteboard

Social sites like Twitter and Facebook have made it easy for you to quickly share news articles, blog posts, etc. around but wouldn't it be nice if you could also add some of your own commentary to the page before sharing it with the world?

Well, there's a new and interesting web app called markup.io that can help you here. It instantly turns any web page into a virtual whiteboard where you can add text, draw shapes, arrows or even do some freehand drawings. Here's a quick demo:

While you are on a site, hit the markup.io button on your browser bookmarks toolbar and it will float a set of drawing tools one that page. You can scribble over the page now and when you hit publish, all your drawings and annotations are saved to a unique URL that you can now pass along in your social circle.

If you make a mistake, you can use the usual keyboard shortcuts -- ctrl+z will undo your previous action while the backspace key will remove the element from the page.

Markup.io is available in the form of a bookmarklet so there's no need to download or install anything and it's compatible with all browsers except for IE 6 (which you shouldn't be using anyway). Thanks Richard.

Also see: Collection of useful Bookmarklets

This article, titled Bookmarklet Turns Any Webpage Into a Whiteboard, was originally published at Digital Inspiration under Annotate, Bookmarklets, Whiteboard, Internet.

A Prototype Greenhouse Demonstrates the Future of Farming on the Moon

A portable, collapsible greenhouse inspired in part by a crop-producing system at a South Pole research station could someday provide fresh vegetables and other foods in future manned lunar or Martian outposts. Working in conjunction with private industry, the University of Arizona's Controlled Environment Agriculture Center (CEAC) has set up a demo lunar greenhouse to demonstrate how a hydroponic system could grow peanuts, potatoes, tomatoes and other crops for colonists on other planets.

The 18-foot, membrane-sheathed system collapses into a 4-foot wide disk for easy packing on an interplanetary mission. When extended, it is fitted with water-cooled lamps and seed packets prepped to sprout without soil. They hydroponic system needs little oversight, relying on automated systems and control algorithms to analyze data gathered by embedded sensors that optimize the controlled ecosystem. The whole system takes just ten minutes to set up and produces vegetables within a month.

The design is similar to that of a greenhouse housed at the U.S. South Pole Station in Antarctica, which was built by the same company that is collaborating with the CEAC on the lunar greenhouse. But the lunar greenhouse would possess some interesting technical twists that would make it even more sustainable. Water for the system would be derived from the attending astronauts' urine, CO2 produced by their breathing, and fiber optics could pipe sunlight into the chamber from outside, dispensing with the need for power for the sodium vapor lamps (ostensibly a future lunar base would be built underground to shield it and its inhabitants from solar weather, cosmic radiation, and small meteorites).

But while designed for use hundreds of thousands of miles away, the technology could also have applications here on the ground. Engineers working on the project think the tech could enhance urban farming techniques, bringing food production out of the fields and into population centers. The emphasis on self-contained, self-sustaining systems in space could also inform efforts to make agriculture as efficient and sustainable as possible.

[Space]

Micron introduces V100 LCOS projector, WQVGA in an 8.5cc package

Projector-phones are still a rare commodity, despite the array of tiny projectors available to shove in the things. Micron is now beaming a picture of its hat into the ring, announcing the V100 LCOS projector. It's a wee thing, measuring just 33 x 31 x 12mm, pumping out five lumens of light at a resolution of 320 x 240 while pulling down just 1.5 watts of power. The big deal here is integrated circuitry that takes care of any processing required to display images, meaning no additional drain on your already over-taxed mobile processor. No word on availability or what this will cost manufacturers to stuff in their devices, but we'd like to see a few more pixels out of it before it goes mainstream.

Micron introduces V100 LCOS projector, WQVGA in an 8.5cc package originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 19 Oct 2010 19:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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