Meet graph.tk, a great utility if you forgot your graphing calculator

Website: graph.tk.

It does nothing more and nothing less than you’d expect it to. Simply put, it graphs functions of all different kinds!

The interface is beautiful not because it has a thousand buttons, but because it is so simple and straight to the point. Here’s what you see when you load up the website:

In case you're wondering what that function in the right hand top corner is, it's a derivative.

You can add almost an infinite number of functions, and toggle their display via the colored checkboxes. And this isn’t your ordinary Cartesian coordinate grapher; it can even handle polar functions and inequalities! The controls are very intuitive: use your scroll wheel to zoom in and out, and left-click + drag to pan around. There’s even a screenshot option built-in to the page so that you can take a picture of your beautiful graph! The equations are displayed as you would expect to find them in a mathematics textbook (with LaTeX), and for you tech geeks, it’s built with HTML5 and it’s open source.

The only caveats to this otherwise awesome web app are that you can’t find points of intersection or roots of a function so easily… but that’s where your high school/college algebra skills come in!

I would give this app an overall rating of 9/10 (10/10 if only it had tools to find intersections/roots), and I highly recommend it to anyone who needs a quick graphing calculator because they’re too lazy to go downstairs and get their backpack.

For more information, visit their about page.

This is a really awesome drawing tool

The above image was produced with a lot of random mouse strokes and messing around on a program called Flame.

The program was designed by Peter Blaskovic, an artist and graphic designer from Slovakia. Here’s how he describes it:

Flame is a painting program, it belongs to my ‘I am Artist’ experimental project. I think with tools which inspires you, everyone can be an artist. more>>

It’s true, anyone can be an artist. Any random mouse gestures will make awesome light-painting on this web application. It’s a program with a very easy learning curve. Its interface is simple, yet very functional and customizable. If you want to save your image as a JPEG, there’s a button for that.

You can see some of the trippy things you can do with this and Flame Painter, the desktop equivalent here.

And that’s not all. Explore the website, and you’ll find a lot more cool things like interactive animations and other painting tools. Have fun!

Screenr (a.k.a. magical screencasting)

Screenr is a web-based screencasting application. Here’s what they say on their homepage:

Instant screencasts for Twitter

Now you can create screencasts for your followers as easily as you tweet. Just click the record button and you’ll have your ready-to-tweet screencast in seconds.

I first heard of Screenr from a forwarded email and decided to try it out. I had been looking for screen recording software for ages, so when I saw Screenr, I was interested.

Features

Screenr was not a disappointment like other screen recorders I’ve seen. It doesn’t:

• Plague you with advertisements
• Add an annoying watermark on to your screen recording
• Require forty programs to download and install just to make one program work
• Have a million buttons that leave you thinking “which button do I press?”
• Expire because it’s a free trial

What it does is simply amazing:

• Nothing to install (provided that you have Java and a web browser)
• Simple to use
• Records everywhere, not just on the web browser
• Allows voice-over narration
• Pause and continue
• Choose the size and location where you want to record
• Publish online automatically in full resolution
• Screencast plays back on almost all operating systems, even iPhone OS
• Download screencasts in a movie format

There’s only one downside to this program: The maximum length that you can record is 5 minutes.

Final rating

9.5/10. I highly recommend this software for those of you who have been digging for screen recording software with no success. This program really made my day, and I’m sure it will make your day too.

A few April Fool’s Internet pranks

Cows that don't produce milk? I wonder what they DO produce?

Google's name changes to Topeka (so photoshopped)

A visual guide to Opera 10

Just a few of the many new features in Opera 10:

Opera 10 has a sidebar featuring widgets, mail, notes, and much more

Mousing over a tab shows a preview of that tab

100/100 on the Acid3 Web Page rendering test

Of course, there are a few bugs.

You can search from the address bar or the search bar

Right-clicking a web page brings up this context menu

Opera 10 comes with a very stylish RSS feed reader

Speed Dial is highly customizable and provides quick access to your most viewed sites

The tab bar can be expanded to show previews of webpages

Opera comes with widgets

The search bar supports multiple search engines

Opera’s preference dialog makes the browser highly customizable

The main window

Opera 10 has the most advanced statusbar of any web browser

Opera 10 is the latest installment in the Opera Browser series. It features the Presto 2.2 rendering engine, an accelerator for loading web pages on slow connections, customizable skins and many more that make this browser such a versatile web surfing application.

Unfortunately, it can be very complicated to customize Opera, since there are so many buttons and drop-downs to digest, but once you get the handle on this great web browser, it will integrate seamlessly into your online life.

I give Opera 10 an 8.5/10 rating and recommend it to anyone who hasn’t tried it out yet.

Reblog: IE6 No More! Popular Web Companies Start Project to Kill IE6

This article first appeard on Mashable: The Social Media Guide under the title “IE6 No More! Popular Web Companies Start Project to Kill IE6” by Ben Parr and has since been edited by Deathgleaner for use on this blog.

We’ve made no attempt to hide our belief that Internet Explorer 6 must die. IE6 is an ancient browser that does not support many of the major innovations of the last 8 years. Yet it is still used by 15-25% of Internet users – and that fact alone is holding us back from a new area of web applications.

Luckily, we’re not the only ones that feel this way. Twitter users and the Digg community both rallied behind our battle cry. But now a high-profile group of startups, most funded by the well-known early stage venture firm Y Combinator, have started their own initiative, IE6 No More.

The simple website provides a very concise case for why the Microsoft browser must be abandoned to promote innovation on the web. It then provides a call to action: embed a line of code that will tell your website visitors still using IE6 to switch to a modern browser.

Here’s what you would see on a website that has the code implemented:

The campaign is led by the website creation company Weebly with the support of about a dozen popular websites and startups. At last count, the startups include: Justin.tv, Disqus, Posterous, Reddit.tv, Divvyshot, Buxfer, Twitluv, Digital Dandelion, Happn.in, Defensio, and 31bits.com.

While it’s great to see companies taking a stand against the broken browser, we can’t help but wonder whether this type of campaign will make any impact, given that many users of IE6 are only using because of work/IT restrictions or are in underdeveloped countries. David, co-founder of Weebly, gave us his thoughts on the matter:

We think we can have a huge impact: For those users that are just unaware they are using an old browser (mothers, grandmothers), we’d like to encourage them to upgrade and have a better experience using our sites. For those users in corporate environments, we’d like to start putting pressure on the IT department to upgrade — the more users who complain about seeing the prompts (especially if coming from the top), the more pressure the IT department will have to either upgrade IE 6 or install Firefox side-by-side with IE 6 for compatibility reasons.

These startups are fighting an uphill battle, but nobody said killing IE6 would be easy. If you want to support their movement, be sure to check out their website.

Review: Firefox 3.5

Firefox 3.5, the long-awaited mega-upgrade to the already awesome Firefox browser by Mozilla, just came out today at around 8:00am. Within about 3 hours, Firefox 3.5 had already been downloaded a million times in the United States alone.

I have been eagerly awaiting the release of this new version of Firefox, and when it came out this morning, I didn’t hesitate in downloading the update. Now that I’ve been using it for a while, here are some of the things you can expect:

Logo Redesign

At first, I didn’t even see any changes to the Firefox 3.5 logo. But if you look closely, you will see that there have been a few color modifications, especially in the tail of the fox. It looks much more rich than the old logo.

New Interface

For the eagle-eyed users, you will notice that the borders of the navigation bar buttons have gotten much skinnier, which saves just the tiniest bit of space, but it’s worth it. Mac users will also notice a slightly different loadin bar in the status bar.

The tabs don’t look too different, besides a “New Tab” button that can’t be removed. I think it’s also defaulted to show the tab bar even when you only have one tab on.

Your add-ons’ interfaces may look different too, just because of Firefox’s new interface. The add-ons themselves haven’t changed.

History and Private Browsing

Finally, Firefox introduces Private Browsing. Safari was the first browser to introduce it. Private browsing allows you to surf the web without anyone knowing. This is especially helpful if you’re using a public computer. In History, there’s also a “Forget this site” function when you right-click a website. The function deletes all the items in the history that link to that particular site. It’s like a super-charged delete function. And, if you want to clear all your history or just part of it, you can clear history within 2 hours, 6 hours, and so on.

Video and Audio

Firefox now has video and audio support, meaning that instead of having to download video/audio to play it, you can play it right in your browser. Firefox now supports .ogg formats of video/audio.

JavaScript

The JavaScript performance has definitely been accelerated, although it’s not quite the 2X faster that Mozilla claims. It’s closer to 1.25-1.5X.

Bugs

Your add-ons may clash with each other. For example, TwitterFox and ScribeFire will leave some “residue” on each other if you open them simultaneously.

For existing Firefox users, I recommend that you upgrade immediately and for people who don’t use Firefox yet, I highly recommend it, with a rating of 9/10.

IRTC

The IRTC, or Internet Raytracing Competition, is a computer-generated still image/video competition. Users submit their computer-generated images or video to the website for all to see, based on a topic for a certain period of time. Then, a panel of online judges decides for the best still image or video. The competition has been running for over 11 years. There is some very diverse work on irtc.org.