I’m sure we have all sent an email that we have regretted. Were you one of the many people who thought it was a good idea to send that email begging your gitlfriend/boyfriend to take you back or telling your boss exactly what you think of them after a few drinks? If so Google may have developed the product for you. Mail Goggles is an extension to Google mail which forces users to take a series of sobriety tests when trying to send those late night emails. ‘And what better way to verify if you’re in the right state of mind to send an email than by giving you a simple maths puzzle to solve?’ the official Google blog said.

Mail Goggles gets you to answer maths questions before you send an email

‘By default the tool is only active between 10pm and 4am on Friday and Saturday, as that is the time you are most likely to need it.’

This new feature is being tested at the moment and if the pilot is a success we could see this being a standard feature of Google Mail. Once enabled the user will be able to adjust the ‘danger zone’ to suit their needs.

Similar ideas have seen the first breath activated mobile phone which will only let you use your phone if your blood alcohol level is below a certain level.

The much anticipated launch of Adobe’s CS4 product range and Flash Player 10 happened today.This brings with it many exciting new developments.

Creative Suite 4

Whatever you think about the logo (and the price), the products in the new CS4 suite bring some major improvements. There’s the content-aware scaling in Photoshop, which somehow identifies the key parts of an image, and scales the bits around them. As well as more advanced 3D editing tools, improvements to smart objects, and increased non-destructive editing abilities.

I’m also glad to see the back of the annoying floating windows, with the introduction of a new tab-based unified UI accross all products. Plus there’s much closer integration with the former Macromedia products (Flash, Fireworks, and Dreamweaver). While CS3 went some way towards this, they only had half of a product cycle to do it, but now they’ve had a full one it should be air-tight.

Flash Player 10

The thing I’m most excited about however, is the introduction of 3D to flash as I mentioned in a previous post. This is a significant advancement and something that many of us have been awaiting for a long time. Not to mention the introduction of After Effects-style motion path editing and inverse kinematics tools.

All of us at IE are keen to embrace new technology, so expect to see some great new projects from us in the near future.

I stumbled across a cool website called Wordle earlier and couldn’t resist trying it out.

From their website: ‘Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.’

Here is a ‘Wordle’ I created using keywords from our studio management system. Based on the tags we give each and every project at IE, a cool display like the one below is generated.

A wordle generated using tags we give our work

You can even give Wordle a website URL and it’ll generate an image using feeds automatically discovered in the page:

Generated from our news and blog feeds

Head on over to Wordle and have a go!

At the Future of Web Apps conference last week I went to a very interesting talk by Suw Charman-Anderson, a social software consultant, working with companies in the UK and US on social media and Web 2.0 projects.

Suw highlighted some scary facts about email, including:

• 38% of people get more than 100 emails per day
• 13% get more than 250 emails
• 22% of people spend more than 4 hours a day on email
• 35% of people say they check every 15 minutes, but when observed actually check every 5!

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Here at IE we pride ourselves on being up to date with exactly what is happening in the industry. For this reason the last two days have seen members of the web team down at Excel in London attending Europe’s leading conference on web applications, Future of Web Apps 2008.

A packed schedule of talks from some of the biggest names in the web industry including Kevin Rose (Digg), Blaine Cook (formerly of Twitter) and of course Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Continue reading