ChromaHash - Demo Video

On a webpage, password fields obscure your input with star's to mask them from shoulder surfers. At times, even the users are not sure if they have typed the password correctly. Chroma-Hash is an experiment that displays a variety of visualization like background gradients or background. After sometime your would recognize the gradient that should appear for your passwor, and when the wrong gradient appears, you know that you mis-typed the password.

Chroma-Hash takes an MD5 hash of your input and uses that to compute the visualization.
The MD5 hash is non-reversible, so no one could know what your password just from the colors.

Here is a demo video of how ChromaHash works

FlashPlus - Version 1.5.3 Released

FlashPlus 1.5.3 was released a couple of days ago and it seems to getting decent adoption. There were some interesting bug fixes and a good amount of code re-factoring.

One important feature that was added was support for Silverlight media,  HTML5 canvas and video tags. Silverlight was very similar to the way flash works in the extension. Just like flash has a wMode parameter, we would have to change the windowless parameter for Silverlight. HTML5 Video and canvas were even simpler. Three lines of code, and they work good.
For canvas, you can open this or this.To check out the extension on the video tag, you could use this, this or even this youtube page. Apparently, these two additions seem to make the name of this extension obsolete. [:)]

There were also a substantial amount of code-refactoring that went in regarding the way, position of media elements on the page are calculated. There is a whole branch dedicated to this. However, we were still not able to fix the issue that arises with this page and will continue to work on it.

There was also refactoring to fix the way new tags were added, to make it more scalable.

Finally, there were a couple of bug fixes also. The first bug fix was correcting the way wMode param was treated in flash. Regardless of its presence, this flag seemed to be set whenever any action was performed on the media, making the flash to play from the start. Now, we set the wMode only if the value is not Opaque.

Watch out for the next releases here, where we plan to release better support for internationalization and the way Media content is handled in iFrames.

Twitteybot - Demo Video

TwitteyBot is a very simple twitter application that lets you schedule your tweets for later. All you do is upload a file with messages and your tweets are scheduled. To showcase its simplicity, I put together this video.

Auto Reply twitter bot with YQL and Yahoo Pipes

One of the features that I wanted to implement in TwitteyBot was the ability to automatically reply to people who have certain search term. Unlike the normal updates that only reach the people who follow you, this could be noticed by people whom you are replying to, thereby having a wider, newer audience. Here is the scenerio.
Searching for a term like "#chromeextensions" would show all the people who are talking about Google Chrome extensions. It would make sense to reply back to them and maybe tell them about something like FlashPlus.

You can have your own bot by changing the parameters of this pipe, copying the "Get RSS" link and configuring it in Twitterfeed.

I created such a bot using YQL and Yahoo Pipes. Here is the pipe that spits out a feed that should be tweeted. Twitterfeed can then be used to convert this RSS feed to tweets for a specific twitter account.
The pipe uses this YQL to find all the tweets that have a certain twitter term. It then follows through a loop where the user is extracted and the advertisement line is added. This is spit out as a feed that is configured into Twitterfeed.
The only limitation is that this method has a limit of 5 tweets every 1/2 hour. I tried using Friendfeed to overcome this limit but friend does not seem to pick up the changes in the RSS feed.

If we make the advertisement text dynamic, we could have a bot that sends out answers from a we service. I created a @questionbing bot that tries to fetch the instant answers results from bing for questions sent to it. Here is the pipe that does this. Try asking it questions like [http://twitter.com/home?status=@questionbing how many days in a year] and you should get an answer.