The other things [25022008]

We do have a habit of saying how busy we are at the Labs, to the extent that it's almost a little obnoxious. We do, in fact, occasionally find time to craft software that is not for particular paying clients, but has a wider audience.

Fridge, our Facebook app, is an example of this. That was a fun project, and the reception has been really rewarding. I worry about the commercial trajectory and privacy implications of Facebook, but in developing Fridge I gained a high regard for their technical platform.

By far our most popular project is Tabulate, released in October last year, for iPhones and iPod Touches. It gives you a slick interface for, well, power-browsing in multiple windows with MobileSafari. Tens of thousands of Apple device owners are using it.

Also for iPhones, released by stealth and only shortly after Tabulate, is Kapow! -- a digital comic book viewer. I think only about three people in the world use it, but they seem to love it.

On the weekend we released another project that's been in (mostly weekend) development for a month or so: Castanaut. In technical terms this is a Ruby DSL for writing executable scripts that control input and application interaction during screencast recording.

In layman's terms it's a way you can take the screencast notes that you're already writing down on paper before recording, double-click them, and have a screencast saved and ready for publishing. It's kinda freaky.

The many tentacles of Inventive Labs

So, we've had a recent proliferation of subdomains here at the Labs. Two of them may interest you:

• Gadgets: this is where we put the publicly available goodies we develop.
• Wisdom: a more frequently updated stream of mostly technical but occasionally humourous objects that preoccupy us.

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