Live Yahoo! Answers cloud

Something I've been working on internally for Yahoo!, for their cafeteria.
Inspired by Robert Hodgin's work. Go check his stuff out at Flight404... totally brilliant.

This gave me a chance to try out opengl blend functions and learn how to pull off neat light-like effects! Very tasty...

This application grabs Yahoo! Answers rss feed and finds the most common words and then displays them into the cloud. Words get bigger as their frequency grows, effectively showing what topics of interest is the general Answers world talking about at this very moment.

Ofcourse I had to take some artistic liberties and filter out many stop-words like "the", "and", etc.

Did I mention I only had two days to fully work on it? Yeah, kinda my fault though since I was technically given a week but only really had two days left after I finally thought of a concept worth sketching out. This is why it's not very conceptually deep, and is just mostly eye-candy thrown together at the last minute.






I've been using a Mac for a week straight now. I'm loving it. The powerbook ain't that heavy, although it is slightly heavier than my tabby even with its dvd-drive removed. I must say I love it. Everything about it is fast and easy, and the OS is fast to get used to, although I'm still trippin' over hotkeys here and there (almost lost this entire blog post doing a wrong hotkey!!).

I still love this city even though it's had its ups and downs. Got TWO parking tickets today (!!!) once while I was IN MY CAR waiting for Aaron to get our bagels. Yikes! The other was clearly a mistake and I shall contest it.

Parking woes aside, Starbucks on Union Square is open 24/7 and there is free wi-fi nearby. The Borders is open till 11pm most weeknights and plenty of people packed in there up until closing hours. And alas on Saturday nights the city is made of win to use 4chan parlance.

Oh, me linking 4chan is you visiting at your own risk. The place is definitely NSFW.