We have just added an opensearch plugin for search ZoomIn.

You’ll need to click on the following link to install the plugin for IE7 and Firefox – Install ZoomIn Open Search Plugin.

Kudos to our Summer of Code student Mat Campbell-Adams for implementing the plugin.

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We’ve just added the latest postcodes to all the street addresses on Smaps. Now, you’ll be able to keep the postie happy when sending your trade me loot around NZ.

Rod Drury is profiled in the latest idealog. Plugs for Welly, PlanHQ and Well-Railed rails user group. Awesome!

We have been silently watching what happens on our site. You, our community, are an invaluable source of inspiration and ideas. Your positive feedback makes us feel good and your bug reports and requests for new features keep up too busy to ever rest on our laurels.

One of the guiding principles for the redesign of ZoomIn was to make the information accessible through a pyramid. We wanted people who come to our site to start at the top of the pyramid where we present little but most relevant information. So when you search for an address, a place or a tag you get instant results shown on the map. As you become more interested in the places which you visit you can use various links on the site to travel to the base of our information pyramid where we show full details currently known about the given place.

We have realised that sometimes walking up and down the pyramid can be quite an effort so we have provided you with a teleport device which gives you instant access to frequently used functions without having to go all the way to the bottom of the pyramid.

The above screenshot illustrates the new search result panel. We have 3 results there. “Cool Store Gallery” and “Chow” are unexpanded and “Midnight Espresso” is expanded (hint: you can expand results by clicking on the icon). Once a result has been expanded you have instant access to functionality which lets you add your own information to that place. In this example you can add your own rating, tags or leave a comment about “Midnight Espresso”.

If you search for an address, as in the following screenshot, you will also have the option of adding a new place at that address. This is useful for adding shops to a shopping mall, lookout points to a national park or even to add locations of your utility sheds on your farm.

We hope that you will find these little improvements quite helpful. Let us know what you think. Happy Zooming!

- ZoomIn development team

NZ has finally got iTunes. Its not the cheapest on the block, Warehouse are offering new CD’s like U2 18 singles for $22.99, its $23.99 on iTunes and $34.95 at real groovy!

Given the razor thin margins for the music retailers, I expect to see a couple of music chains closing in 2007.

So when are we going to download movies

Finally had enough of all the spam, and switched all projectx emails over to hosted google mail platform. Its been relatively painless, a few changes to the dns and it was working.
Note to Google: Better address aliasing would be appreciated.

Tale of two speakers

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<font size=”+1″>I once worked for a company this big !</font>

Nat Torkington and Rod Drury in action at the Creative HQ Summer seminar. More pictures and write up on the Summer of Code blog shortly.