Ok, I’m totally obsessed with Flickr.  Any time I have any free time at work, I am instantaneously driven to the Flickr Explore page, so this web application offering from Idée Labs, really had me giddy when I started playing with it yesterday.

The app is called the Multicolr Search Lab, and it pulls 10 million Creative Commons images from Flickr based on the color of your choosing.  At first glance I thought this was just a cool idea, but I quickly learned this app was much more than than that because it doesn’t pull images based on the color of your choosing, but the color scheme of your choosing.  I’m not going to add any images of it or blabber on any longer because I really want you to experience it for yourself, so go check it out:

http://labs.ideeinc.com/multicolr/

Mozilla Labs have released a very early alpha version of their new Firefox extension, Ubiquity. Yes, the name is a bit strange and hard to get behind, but after using it for 30 seconds, you’ll instantly sear it into your brain for good like I did. Ubiquity is all about using common, everyday language to open up the web and bring all of the different services you use everyday together. Everyone finds it annoying to see an address and then have to open up another tab to open Google Maps, or having to open Wikipedia to search for a weird reference in a blog you’re reading. It should be quicker and easier right? Well now it is.

I can’t explain Ubiquity any further without just giving you a few examples. How about you want to know what the weather is like outside. Normally I would go to Weather Underground, type in my city, and then search and wait for the new page to load. Ubiquity makes it easy. Option Spacebar opens up ubiquity right in your browser. Now just type ‘weather’ and then the zip code or the city you want weather for, and you’ll get this:

This pulls the information from Weather Underground and displays it right in your browser. Need more info? Just press Enter and you will be taken to the weather page for the place you searched for on Weather Underground.

You can also use Google Maps in Ubiquity. Just type map and then the address and you’ll get a Google Map thumbnail of the location right in the Ubiquity popup. And once again, press enter and your browser will take you to the map you searched for on Google Maps. I’m going into advanced mode here with this last example using Google Maps, but this really shows the power and possibilities that Ubiquity holds. If you’ve ever searched for apartments on Craigslist, you know how annoying it is to see the location of the apartment. You have to open up the listing, copy the address and then paste it in Google Maps. And then you want to easily compare the location of multiple apartments easily? Forget about it. In comes Ubiquity. Just highlight the listings that you want to map. Open up Ubiquity and type map-these. Ubiquity will search through the highlighted listings and map them all on Google Maps for you. Unbelievable.

Now Ubiquity is only in early, early alpha, but as you can already see, it is bringing all of the great services on the web together. Other than the services I mentioned here, it also works with Google Searching, Gmail, youtube, Twitter, iMDB, among others. Make sure you check out the Documentation to get the lingo down and find out all of the great services you can use after you download the extension. Enjoy.

Well, I just graduated from Canisius College a month ago, and already started working full time at STUDIO llc. I also stopped messing around and got a real version of mattmcgurn.com/asymptotedesign.com onto the web today.

I started Asymptote Design, my name for my design brand, in 2004 when I was a senior in high school as a place for me to put all my work, and maybe get a freelance gig two. Here’s what it looked like way back then:

Yeah, pretty crappy, but I didn’t know what I was doing at all at the time. Then in late 2005, I designed version 2, which looked like this:

That was totally made with tables, and most of the HTML was done (poorly) by Photoshop…pretty embarrassing I know.

With the new version, I wanted it to look like I knew what I was doing, and I think I pulled that off. It took so long for me to get this off the ground because I was committed to everything being contained on one page, and the load time to be as minimal as humanly possible. This meant optimizing EVERY image on the page, doing some sneaky JavaScript, and most time consuming of all, cutting down my portfolio. It was hard for me to not include every piece I thought that was portfolio-worthy, but I think the 20 pieces that made the final cut really showcase where my strengths are.

Well enough talk, go check it out! mattmcgurn.com

A few photographs I took in Montreal last year are being featured in a news story on nowpublic.com. The news story is Canada invisible as brands go global. Check it out!

mattrobs over at the Mac Themes Forums has posted an awesome looking skin for Growl notifications that looks just like the popups on the iPhone.

If you don’t know what Growl is, it is a plugin for OSX that creates popups for important events. For example, you can have a growl notification for incoming emails, iChat instant messages, completed downloads (ftp/safari/ect.) or even the name of a new song playing in iTunes. Definitely check it out if you have never tried it.

You can download iPhonesque directly by clicking here.

The Version 3 Beta of my portfolio site, AsymptoteDesign.com has been live for almost 2 months now, and I am hard at work on a finalized third version of the site. ‘Version 3 Beta’ was mostly a joke because in the Web 2.0 world, everything has a beta version for some reason, but it was also a way for me to quickly get up some of my new work with good HTML/CSS while at the same time getting rid of the crappy, two years old 2nd version of the site.

Re-Branding is a scary thing to do because you need to create an all new look, while at the same time not alienating everyone who knows your old brand (which wasn’t hard for me since no one knows my site haha). But going into Version 3, I knew it was time to re-brand my image. I have had the same exact look since 2003, and I designed it when I really had no idea about good design or what branding even was. So I started my re-branding by making a list of all the things that I didn’t like about my current image. Top of the list was the white backgrounds that took up 90% of the screen in the first two versions. My branding for the last 5 years was essentially straight out of the 90s GAP khaki commercials and Apple’s Switch campaign (If the Switch campaign brought the name Ellen Feiss to mind, you are a HUGE nerd…don’t even say she wasn’t super hot).

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With the new iPhone 1.1.3 update you can add Webclips to the home screen, as most of you know. What you also probably know is that the icons for these webclips absolutely suck. Well Pixelbox.net found a super simple way to add custom icons for your webclips. Here are some of the ones I made that you are welcome to use:

A few weeks ago, one of my photographs was the feature image on Concert Attack. I know, not the biggest site in the world, but it was pretty cool seeing something I did in the spotlight on a website with thousands of images to choose from. Here’s a screenshot of it:

You can check out the photo used on my Flickr account here.

Check the site out, it’s pretty cool. It’s not just for uploading pictures you take from concerts, but you can also review concerts, and meet people who like the same bands as you.