Spotbit EXE Magazine Creator

As a magazine editor myself, I found this fantastic tool on the internet. You simply upload your images of each page or add them into a zip file and upload that. Spotbit will then create an exe application e-book of your magazine and add a background to the application. This means that your potential readers will be able to view your magazine without needing software like PDF viewers or flash.

The produced application includes great visual and sound effects to simulate a hard copy magazine. You can turn pages, magnify (by simply right clicking)., skip to pages like contents as well as being able to input a page number and it goes straight to it.

The service is totally free and is perfect and produces relatively small filesizes, my magazine The Computing Expert for example was only 9.9MB in good quality colour. PDF files are much bigger. Head over to www.spotbit.com to start producing your magazines or take a look at an example of the service used for Simnor Computing's magazine The Computing Expert.

Simon North, October 2006

World's Highest Website Review

What! The World's Highest Website, I hear you say. Well, yes the world's highest website. What a great idea. This wacky site claims to be 11.769 miles high, I haven't actually measured it, but I do believe the creator behind this masterpiece. You can however if you get bored after the first couple of minutes, simply press Ctrl and End or you could just get hold of the scrollbar and pull it down to the bottom.

So how was this made, well the creator didn't sit there for hours, weeks, months and input lines and measure every mile of it, it is actually created by using CSS, which is a website standard used mainly to style webpages (fonts, backgrounds etc.) There isn't much more I can say about it than if you have a spare day or so take a look and scroll to the bottom, otherwise just take the elevator. You can find it at www.worlds-highest-website.com.

Simon North, December 2006

Froogle Price Comparison Review

Froogle is a Google Inc. website designed at comparing prices of items on the internet, it is still in beta stage currently (early 2007) and is the perfect resource for finding products on the internet.

You can filter your searches depending on what you are searching for, for example I searched for laptop and I could filter it by price, stores, seller ratings, and capacity of hard drive. It took results from a wide range of vendors especially Google Checkout merchants.

It gives you an image of the item, a description, a product rating (if it has been reviewed), the seller and price of the item. You can order them in relevance, ratings and price. You can also view the list in grid view rather than list view, grid view gives you the image, link and price.

By clicking the item, you will see a full description and full details and specification of the product, all still on froogle.

This service, as I've said, is still in beta so it is improving continuously, but it is one of the best shopping site on the internet at the moment. Worth a look? visit http://froogle.google.com and start shopping today

Simon North, October 2006