A new bunch of apps are available on the Jolicloud directory this week:
Quake Live is the online version of Quake III Arena, id Software‘s fast-paced, action-packed first person shooter from 1999. It’s still the same game, enhanced with aesthetic improvements and tweaks to game balance and anti-lag tech. A compulsory tutorial level for first-time players is used to assess your playing skills, and ensure that you will not be overwhelmed by superior players unless you choose to!
Quake Live requires a plugin to run in your browser but we are automatically setting it up for you during the one-click install so you can enjoy the game right away on your netbook! By the way, this plugin is frequently updated by the team behind Quake Live, we will make sure that you always have the latest version available on Jolicloud.
Yet another take on the “make a game out of places you visit” application, Gowalla’s colorful and well designed interface is a serious challenger to Foursquare. Created by the Texas-based startup AlamoFire, Gowalla rewards you for visiting extraordinary and everyday places. Upon visiting these locations, the service places stamps on your ‘passport’, similar to when you’re traveling abroad. Being fully GPS-enabled also means that users can check in anywhere, even places that aren’t registered to a physical address. Crowdsourcing locations has allowed the game to rapidly spread to 4,000 cities worldwide.
Alternative mapping service MapJack offers less coverage than Google Street View, though much better image quality. On The Road lets you create a geotagged travel diary, including a marked map and a dynamic timeline of entries, which can be updated from your mobile phone.
Brooklyn-based Hot Potato is a micro-messaging app that lets users converse about events, or whatever is happening that people want to share. The difference with Twitter or Facebook, where individuals broadcast to their friends and followers, is the collective storytelling that takes place in real-time: By following an event, and posting related photos and comments, you end up talking to both your friends and interesting people you don’t know yet. An iPhone app should be made available very soon.
The Ellerdale Project is a real-time search platform powered by semantic technology, meaning that it mines tweets and RSS to identify topics, messages and articles that link together based on content. For now you can only see topics on the site and not search by keyword. However you can check who and what is trending at any given time in sports, politics, music, style and other categories, and access related articles, tweets and images in one click.
Also bringing meaningful results to your search, Ångströ is a service that helps you discover and share new information about professonals you care about, and social search engine Knx.to indexes information on ‘everybody you know’ from multiple social networks and groups it together in one place. Rippol is another intelligent discovery engine that helps users find videos they would personally enjoy, using machine learning and real-time ranking.
Music app 8Tracks focuses on 8-track playlists to discover new tunes and artists; Memoov lets you create and share animations in minutes. Goaruna provides unlimited free space to store your files online, and offers the possibility to send files of up to 100MB.
A collection of 88 high-quality full-length documentaries produced by PBS Frontline, the award-winning investigative journalism series distributed in the US and dedicated to political, social and criminal justice issues.
The Iron Curtain Diaries is a great site that explores the 7,000 kilometers of border which, 20 years ago, separated the West from the Communist block. Book lovers community site BookRix lets you read, rate and rant away on books.
We’ve also added ColorJive, an app to virtually paint your home a different colour, and Composition With JavaScript, a creative app to deconstruct Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Black, Blue And Grey. Shift the lines and change colours to create your own.
Enjoy Jolicloud!
12:17 am
Nice apps this week, thanks for putting the effort into making the Quake live app work from the get go.
You guys are doing a great job! :D