Andy Budd reported yesterday about mapsurface , a new site statistics tool that does all the others do, but with the difference that it shows the data live on the site without the admin or statistics-interested visitors having to log into a backend editor.

I really like what I can see on Andy’s site and signed up for a test drive. However, I really hope that there is a chance to password-protect the stats, as for now it is a good blogger or web admin “pat our own back” tool, but will be hard to sell on the market.

Nearly every client I ever had wanted statistics tools, hardly any did anything useful with the collected information, but what all agreed on was that they didn’t want their competitors to see their stats.

Therefore it’d be a clever move (unless that is already anticipated in the full version) to allow for different levels of access – with a preliminary log-in on the site.

You can test mapsurface on the developers blog: Glenn Jones on his very own mapsurface or sign up for a test run on http://www.mapsurface.com.

The clever people who brought us Backpack and Basecamp strike back with Campfire which is essentially like having a chat in an Instant Messenger with several people, but with a fixed URL and logging of the conversation.

This could be a cool replacement for phone conferences for companies like the one I am working at – as the line quality to the India office always keeps you guessing what the other person meant.

I’ll give it a whirl…

via datacircle

Jeff Han is doing some research on Bi-manual, multi-point, and multi-user interactions on a graphical interaction surface and watching the 17MB demo reel got me hooked on the idea. The accessibility of it of course is not mentionable, but how cool would it be to sort your digital pictures by dragging them with your finger or even use this interface for card sorting exercises resulting in an XML sitemap?

Good news for all who like Commodore 64 games and bad news for office productivity: At c64s.com – classic Commodore 64 games online you can play all the classics you played instead of doing homework in your browser (as Java objects).

As I finally arrived in 2005 when it comes to mobiles (my girlfriend dropping my old one being the main initiator) I found a game for Nokia Smartphones that looks like nothing but is highly addictive and has that “Tetris” simplicity: Roto is a free J2ME game, and asks of you to put all the corners of a floating object on rectangles of the same colour to make the rectangles disappear. Sounds easy, and the first few levels seem ridiculous, but the game shows its teeth later on. You cannot turn the object, you can only accelerate and move it in 4 directions and bounce it off the edges of the screen. It is a fullfy fledged physics simulation and behaves accordingly. Good time waster for a while.

Microsoft (no, I will not link this one) have shipped a beta of Internet Explorer 7 . It looks quite funky and requires XP SP2 to run. The catch is that it actually replaces your old MSIE6 (hey we all want that), which can be a real issue for testing. You can install the MSIE6 standalone alongside, but allegedly this might cause problems.

Therefore it might be best to install the MSIE 7 standalone version instead.

As for taking the new shiny MSIE for a ride, there is a test case collection going on at the CSS discuss wiki.