Today's Question:  What does your personal desk look like?        GIVE A SHOUT

SEARCH KEYWORD -- 2011



  PopCap’s 10 rules for commercial failure in mobile games development

PopCap, the company behind social gaming hits as Plants vs. Zombies and Bejeweled, has a way of doing presentations at conferences. Last year’s Social Gaming Summit presentation was insightful in the sense that developers were advised to postpone trying to make money from their game until there is some serious traction. At yesterday’s London Games Conference, PopCap’s presentation was equally remarkable. During a brief presentation David Bishop (Senior Game Designer) ...

   Game design,Rules,Smart phone     2012-04-16 13:25:27

  ECMAScript 6 looks promising

I am quite excited about ECMAScript 6, after watching David Herman’s talk at YUIConf 2011. I am especially looking forward to seeing some of these features landing up on V8 soon, so that I can use it on node.js. These additions will solve many common sources of frustration that newcomers face when working with JavaScript. Although the spec is not expected to be finalized till 2013 (so says David in the video), a lot of these features are expected to hit Chrome and Firefox much befor...

   ECMAScript 6,JavaScript,new feature,let,template     2011-12-07 03:21:40

  Silicon Valley won’t dominate the tech world forever

Yesterday  I published a piece about Newry in Northern Ireland, which is looking to help boost its economy by encouraging a startup ecosystem. A little later, a post entitled ‘You will not be the next Silicon Valley, please stop trying‘ appeared over on Pando Daily, in which the author decided pull a bunch of Irish stereotypes out of the bag to attack the idea. Now, I could detail everything that’s wrong with the article, but the comments there do a perfect job of rippi...

   Silicon Valley,Domination,Technology,Startup,Trend     2012-02-13 05:21:57

  Coming full circle

Experts often end up where they started as beginners.If you’ve never seen the word valet, you might pronounce it like VAL-it. If you realize the word has a French origin, you would pronounce it val-A. But the preferred pronunciation is actually VAL-it.Beginning musicians play by ear, to the extent that they can play at all. Then they learn to read music. Eventually, maybe years later, they realize that music really is about what you hear and not what you see.Beginning computer science stu...

   Expert,Life cycle,Work,Begin,End,Cycle     2011-10-30 12:18:33

  Windows 8 first impressions: It's a game changer

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- The PC needs saving. With Windows 8, Microsoft believes it has the magic cure.It just might. I've been testing a consumer preview version of Windows 8 for the past week, and it's unlike anything I've ever seen in a PC operating system.The stunning "Metro" interface just begs you to touch and interact with it. Beautifully designed apps, ultra-simple navigation, and instinctive commands make it hard to believe Metro came from the same company that brought us Windows Vista...

   Windows 8,Hands on,Game changer,Impression     2012-03-17 04:26:54

  VIM Plugins for C/C++ developers

Following up on my previous post on Essential Vim Plugins for Web Developers, I have decided to tell you about the awesomeness of the C / C++ plugin for Vim in this article.Now to get things going, let’s start by thinking what are the basic stuffs that you would be carrying out as a C / C++ developer? Include header files, some functions, loops, conditional statements and a main function. These are some repetitive boring tasks that you would rather have someone else do it for you. We...

   Plugin,Vim,C,C++,developer,Vim for C     2011-09-28 09:23:55

  How to forcibly eject a CD/DVD from a MacBook Air USB SuperDrive

So you've got a DVD stuck in the external USB SuperDrive that connects to the MacBook Air? And you've tried hitting the magic Eject button on the keyboard to no avail?And you've tried drutil tray eject at the command-line? And you've tried booting with Option held down and clicking eject? And you've tried plugging the drive into other machines (Macs, Windows PCs, Linux machines) to no avail?What do you do?Clearly you hit the physical eject button, right? Every DVD drive has one of those. On the ...

   Apple,Macbook,USB Drive,Ejection     2011-11-17 08:39:56

  Apps and web apps and the future

Dave Winer: Why apps are not the future: The great thing about the web is linking. I don’t care how ugly it looks and how pretty your app is, if I can’t link in and out of your world, it’s not even close to a replacement for the web. Let’s set aside one thing right away. The browser is an app. Text editors, outliners, and web servers are apps. And, without them, there’s no web at all. Somebody has to write these things. That implies APIs and more tools ...

   App,Web app,Future,Difference     2011-12-14 07:10:43

  Web design trends in 2012. What’s new?

It’s no surprise they call them trends, become they come and go. Maybe you don’t want to take them with the constant changes in web design you sure don’t want to be left behind, do you? Nobody can predict the future of web design, but we’re already seeing small changes to the newer designs and I bet we all want to be part of the movement. Most of the changes in web design are subtle so we need to focus mainly on the concept behind each trend. We will exemplify e...

   2012,Web design,Trend,Slab,Typography     2011-12-16 09:31:27

  Sequencing the Startup DNA on LinkedIn

What makes entrepreneurs different, and where do they come from? Are they born or taught? Are they unusually mobile in their careers? Does geography play a role? Do mentors and relationships matter?Numerous studies explore these questions by surveying hundreds of entrepreneurs. At LinkedIn, we take a different approach, on a different scale. By sifting through more than 120 million public profiles, we can analyze tens of thousands of startup founders’ [1]profiles – and find co...

   Startup,Linkedin,Experience,Tips,DNA,Seq     2011-09-07 10:38:58