Developer

Unity is the engine used to design, build, and deploy GooBall, one of my favorite time-wasters. What’s interesting about Unity is the development kit runs exclusively on OS X, but you can create games for Windows and Mac. Rarely do we Mac folks get such a deal.

OverTheEdge, or OTEE seems dedicated to making a low-cost yet powerful alternative to game dev tools, which tend to be for the PC only. Oh how I wish Apple would buy 3ds max. Sigh. Some interesting notes in the final release: Unity can create games-in-Widgets. Sweet.

At any rate, I’ve played with it, and I’m impressed. OTEE’s slogan is "Games, Made By You!" and they mean it. Unity is a quick study for anyone familiar with 3ds max or Blender. The documentation is spectacular, and will get you up and running in no time.

Perhaps the most revolutionary thing about Unity is the price: just $250 for the Indie license, and $999 for the Pro. This is introductory (read: early adopter) pricing though, so get it while its hot.

Everyone loves Flickr, right? Love Flickr or not, they have some sharp minds working hard to bring you a (mostly) rock solid web application. Adding features to an application with such an enormous userbase can be tricky. At Future of Web Apps 2008, Flickr’s Cal Henderson is presenting on “The Application of New Features to an Established Application.” Enjoy it live, or come back to it later.

As part of our continuing coverage from this huge day of presentations at Future of Web Apps 2008 in Miami, we’re liveblogging Kevin Marks presentation on The Future of APIs.

Leah Culver founded Pownce with her friends Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka. Pownce is a “social messaging” service which allows you to share updates, files, links and more with your friends, and (now) provides a robust API to work with your data. Here are the rough cut of our notes from her presentation at FOWA 2008.
Leah takes the stage, fiddles with slides.

Shows the “three forms of Pownce” desktop, mobile and web.

Explains the differentiation of Pownce, having “types” of messages.

Still trying to figure out what Pownce is, just like Twitter is. Microblogging, etc.. Leah calls it “social messaging”

“What is my web app” - Ask yourself what is your value? Web, mobile, rss?

“Your web app is your ‘rules’, some call them features or limitations.. they’re rules. Just like a board game”

On slide: “These things define an application”

“Your application is defined by the rules which make your game”

There’s a continuing theme of users owning their data. So far all the speakers have mentioned this in some way or another. Shh, don’t tell Zuckerberg.

On slide : API’s “consume, produce”

“I’m going to use your data.. I’m going to play with it” Surveying the audience for who is using which APIs.

“Giving easy ways to consume your data gives people incentive”

“I guess I’m supposed to talk a little bit about the future” , “I’m no psychic”

“I think there will be a lot more of little apps talking to each other. A lot more interop”

Hosted environments are on the rise. Anticipating what the developer community wants.

We’re moving away from “web pages”

There’s a lot of interest in building desktop applications for things that were formerly just a website.

“I’m done making predictions.. we’re going to talk a little about the past”

“We had a poor API”, “We’re sorry”. “I wanted to build functionality” “I feel we’ve let down the developer community”

Announcing the Pownce API 2.0.

“Versioning our API was the biggest non-mistake we made”

“The future of your application should be APIs” “Do it. Do it now.” “If you can build your whole service as an API, and think of your site as just a view” “You’ll save yourself a lot of headaches later”
Question: How do you think Pownce was affected as a result of a poor api? “I think it hurt momentum. A lot of people wanted to work with us” “You can always launch another version”

“It’s not the API, it’s the value” “Even if you have an audience that is not all developers, it’s the stuff that people make with it” “If you don’t have it there, people aren’t going to make any stuff!”

“We’ve considered a white label Pownce, or an open source installable Pownce”

Google is gearing up for their 4th year Summer of Code 2008, where students developers get paid $4,500 to write code for various open source projects over the summer, starting about May 26 and ending around August 11.

Students are paired with mentors, (a group running open source projects), such as Mozilla Foundation, Drupal, OpenOffice.org, Wikimedia Foundation, One Laptop Per Child and Google, to name a few from the 2007 program.

To qualify as a student, you have to be enrolled at a college or university as of April 14, 2008 and no, you don’t have to be a computer engineer major to apply, but it is helpful to know how to code. Sorry to those who hail from Iran, Syria, Cuba, Sudan, North Korea and Mynamar (Burma), who are ineligible to participate due to U.S. law.

Google is expecting over 130 organizations to be paired with over 900 students for 2008. The goal of the program is to inspire students to work on open source projects, and to help open source projects recruit more developers.

Applications for mentor organizations are being accepted March 3-12, 2008 and student applications will be accepted March 24-31, 2008.

Looking for a powerful text editor for all your writing and coding needs? Look no further than TotalEdit 4.1, a multi-featured text editing tool created by Independence Software.

TotalEdit offers a wealth of programming features, including syntax-coloring, code-folding, line-numbering, and many other hyphenated features. TotalEdit also includes a number of one-click edits, so you can quickly switch upper case to lower case or swap tabs to spaces.

And yes, for those of us who never even placed in our school spelling bee, there is a spell checker.

The newly released version 4.1 adds the ability to install TotalEdit on a portable USB key for use across multiple machines and cleans up some character rendering bugs. To open TotalEdit from the USB key, simply double-click on TEditStd.exe, and away you go.

Total Edit 4.1 is free, as in air, and Windows only.

While we’re not particularly used to hearing the words “free” and “Microsoft” in the same sentence, the software behemoth does offer a number of free utilities for download on its website. For example, there’s SyncToy, Power Toys for XP, and Photo Story. Now Microsoft is also offering free downloads of its commercial developer tools. The only catch? You need to be a student in college or graduate school.

The programs available include:

• Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
• Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition
• SQL Server 2005 Express Edition
• Expression Studio
• XNA Game Studio 2.0
• XNA Creators Club Online

Students can download full versions of these applications. They aren’t limited versions of the full software like Microsoft Accounting Express. The promotion, which Microsoft is calling DreamSpark is available to any student no matter what their area of study. But right now the deal is only good in 11 countries: the US, UK, Canada, China, Germany, France, Finland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Belgium.

You’ll need a Windows Live ID to participate. And Microsoft will take steps to verify that you’re really a student, so you need to enter the name of the school or institution that can confirm your status before you can download your program.

[via TechCrunch]

We’ve written before about Quicksilver, the indispensable launcher app that lets you quickly get to any file on your Mac with just a few keystrokes. Quicksilver is a nice-looking piece of software, but the default interface fits a lot better with the overall look of Tiger than it does with Leopard. Fortunately, German designer Julius Eckert has created some impressive new skins that are particularly well suited to the latest version of OS X.

Bezel HUD is a sleek, compact improvement on Quicksilver’s built-in bezel interface. The translucent black look will be familiar to users of HUD-based applications like Twitterrific. Because the design is modeled on an element of Leopard itself, it feels like part of the operating system, which is exactly how Quicksilver is meant to feel.

Eckert has released a second interface called Showcase, built to take advantage of the larger icons in OS X 10.5. Although it takes up a huge amount of screen real estate compared to Bezel Hud, Showcase is perfect for showing off Quicksilver to the uninitiated. It displays your icons at their largest size and reflects them against a black backdrop, which is visually striking and makes it easy to see exactly what you’re doing in Quicksilver.

We love the interface work Eckert has released so far, but we’re even more excited about what’s next. Eckert has posted screenshots and a demo video for SilverFlow, his upcoming Quicksilver UI based on OS X’s Cover Flow feature. His sense of how Leopard apps ought to look is so impressive that it’s hard to believe he just got his first Mac in December.

User Script Compiler is a tool that creates a Firefox extension from a Greasemonkey script. So why would you want to do that? The answer is simple: for the mass majority of Firefox users that fear associating anything called “Greasemonkey” with their computers, and who panic at the mention of “scripts.”

Intrepid techies such as Gina Tripani of Lifehacker have worked to make Greasemonkey scripts more digestible (her Better Gmail is a selection of scripts wrapped in a simple Firefox extension). Now, with the User Script Compiler, there is a way for all users to easily convert Greasemonkey scripts into the one-click simplicity of a Firefox extension, with no programming experience required.

Converting a Greasemonkey script into a Firefox extension does take a bit of legwork–but we’re confident all you Download Squad readers could do this in your sleep.

First, you’ll need to track down your installed scripts. They’re in your Firefox profile, under the “gm_scripts” sub-folder. Or, if you’d prefer, you can skip the search and download any script from the online script repository.

Next, you need to change the file extension from .js (Javascript) to .txt (plain text). After you’ve changed the extension, double-click the file to view the code. Copy and paste the code into the User Script Compiler and hit “Generate.”

Voila! Your new Firefox extension (.xpi) is complete. To install in Firefox, simply drag the new extension onto the Firefox interface and follow the prompts.

[via makeuseof.com]

Brad Fitzpatrick, the developer responsible for Livejournal and OpenID is up to it again. This time, he let us know on the Google Code blog, that the API for Social Graph is now available.

Social Graph is an API that functions like a Pagerank for social relationships. The idea is that when you join a new social network you don’t have to manually add previous relationships because it can populate your list based on your connections from other networks, your blog, or the web.

Social Graph works by indexing sites that use the XFN (XHTML Friends Network) and FOAF (Friend Of A Friend) open standards in order to gauge relationships between people.