Charticles one day, NewsGlobes the next. It’s all getting a bit ‘Day Today‘ round these parts.
NewsGlobe is a project that’s come out of the next.yahoo.net stables. There’s a description of how it came about here.
For last month’s Yahoo! Hack Day, I decided to show off some of the impressive capabilities of the latest Adobe Flash Player and ActionScript 3 by building a visually interesting new way to browse Yahoo! News top stories. In a surprisingly short amount of time, I was able to mash up two existing Yahoo! services, and then represent the information in a virtual environment I call the NewsGlobe.
I love the non-committal use of ‘surprisingly short amount of time’, in my head that means a few hours. I’ve got a hyperactive head sometimes.
But I really would love to know how quickly this was pulled together. Because although, as the author admits, it’s not perfect. It is a slick piece of interface design which I’m sure will be imitated widely. And once you’ve built the engine there’s lots you can do with it…
My mind’s drifted back to The Day Today and I can’t help thinking about building News Kidneys or 3D Currency Cats:
