Zigging while others are Zagging

I keep getting the feeling that some kind of sea change is going to happen on the net - some combination of technologies is going to remix into something amazing. What form will it take? Well, it will allow people to connect in ways they could never do offline. There will always be something new to discover every day. There will be new ways to express yourself and create something unique. There will be a way to share what you have created with people you can be sure of will have some interest in it. You will be able to see who's interested in you and your creations. There will be no central control, and the emergent properties of this 'thing' will be amazing.

I know what it's going to look like, but darned if I know what it is...

Platform Engine for Game Maker

I haven't talked much lately about GameMaker, but that doesn't mean it's not still one of the best game making applications in my book. You simply cannot beat the power, simplicity, and great UI that makes this tool perfect for quickly making 2d and semi 3d games. The link above is to a platform engine similar to mario which allows you to create your own platform games pretty easily. Give it a shot (after downloading GameMaker) and see for yourself.

JSEclipse - a powerful javascript editor for Eclipse

Eclipse is by far the most versatile IDE I've ever used. I have been using it as my primary editing tool for over 2 years now and while it's clunky in some ways (come on, FTP? SCP?) it's extremely powerful in other ways. I stumbled across a great new plugin for it called JSEclipse - which is a free add on for editing javascript. What's cool about it is the ability to autocomplete javascript variables based on previously defined prototypes. Give it a shot and see for yourself...

Yahoo Releases Yahoo UI Library

I am extremely excited about this announcement! Yahoo has released to the world an amazing set of javascript libraries to enable you to build AJAX / Web 2.0 apps. These arent just some random collection of scripts. They are hard-core cross browser functions that are being used on real Yahoo projects. From the site:


The Yahoo! User Interface Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, HTML and AJAX. The UI Library Utilities facilitate the implementation of rich client-side features by enhancing and normalizing the developer's interface to important elements of the browser infrastructure (such as events, in-page HTTP requests and the DOM). The Yahoo UI Library Controls produce visual, interactive user interface elements on the page with just a few lines of code and an included CSS file. All the components in the Yahoo! User Interface Library have been released as open source under a BSD license and are free for all uses.


In addition to this, Yahoo's also released a set of Design Patterns . It's like someone giving you a huge set of Legos and a big pile of Lego instructions. All you have to do is put the pieces together and build something cool! I've been using these libraries for over a year now, so if you need any help or have any questions about the libraries, feel free to email me.

Also there is a blog now from the folks at Yahoo creating these libraries - the yuiblog.

coComment - add conversations to your blog

From Mashable.com comes great praise for a new web service site called coComment. It allows you to add trackable comments to your blog and lots of other bells and whistles. I'm about to try it out myself.