We just helped our pals at SMITH Magazine to launch a new branch of their ever expanding network of personal storytelling sites. The newest addition is a print and online collaboration between SMITH and AARP Magazine, collecting six-word memoirs from seniors about life, death, and most importantly, food.

We're always happy to work with the folks at SMITH. They were doing the wordcount thing way before Twitter made it hip.

Oh great! Another super cool pixel programming framework just launched. There goes my weekend.

Flixel is a set of ActionScript classes that make creating games a lot easier. I just poked through the code for the sample game, and it looks brilliantly simple. I am very, very excited to play with this code.

Check out the code for doing collision detection between all the objects in your game! 4 lines!

//collisions with environment FlxBlock.collideArrays(_blocks,_bullets); FlxBlock.collideArrays(_blocks,_botBullets); FlxBlock.collideArrays(_blocks,_bots); FlxBlock.collideArray(_blocks,_player);

(Don't miss Gravity Hook and Fathom, also built using Flixel)

UPDATE: I spent some time hacking on the demo code and was able to create this: a version where you can draw the map with your mouse as you play. NEAT!

Over Memorial Day weekend, I finally got a chance to work a little bit on the next version of do.Oh, our super simple todo list application. do.Oh quietly launched in 2006, and has been running virtually without update since then.

The tagline of do.Oh is "Now with fewer features." Our initial idea was to create a todo list that did not have the clutter of modern "task management systems" that cause you to spend more time managing tasks than actually doing things. No tags, no due dates, no calendaring, no categories, no sub-lists. You put something on your list, then you do it. That's it.

But there are a few key features we want to add! So the task has become designing an interface that allows these new (and awesome) features to live alongside the extremely simple list interface without distracting you from the tasks at hand.

Right now, we're experimenting with simple keyboard shortcuts that open up implicit information spaces that otherwise hide behind an ellipses or small button. The key is to leave the list interface mostly undisturbed until you absolutely need one of the more advanced features, at which point they appear magically before you.

Here's a screenshot of the prototype I built last night to test some ideas. The "advanced options" bubble appears around the selected task when you hit the Tab key on your keyboard. While the bubble is open, several other keyboard shortcuts become available.

Michael Buffington has created a Javascript library for creating dynamic isometric pixel grids, complete with the ability to navigate an player avatar around the grid. My brain is currently exploding with ideas for using this in games and art and user interface design. It might even find its way into PixlPinchr.

When I saw WolframAlpha, I knew I was going to have a lot of questions I wanted to ask it. So I made a Firefox search plugin. It looks like this:

Hey Lifehackers! Check out the other things XOXCO makes like a way to get random reruns from Hulu or a Twitter bot that tracks the DJIA. And snag our feed to get Fresh Clickables in your inbox.