Placebase – commercial maps.google-style provider
I’d love to see someone from Placebase comment on their abilities relative to the TechCrunch online maps roundup. From what I’ve seen, they compare pretty well, which means companies who want to have their own, branded, ad-free, fully supported map integration need look no further!
Shared Source .Net CLI – ONLY FOR WINDOWS
Eric Albert notes that Rotor used to support Windows, FreeBSD and Mac OS X, but is only supporting Windows in its latest incarnation. Rotor is Microsoft’s shared source .Net implementation.
Now, I don’t think Microsoft has any real obligation (or business reason) to port .Net to other platforms, but I wish they would, with no strings attached. With a lot of help from Sun, they managed to really hurt Java’s chances for becoming a contendor for Windows GUI apps and, to make up for that, I’d really appreciate it if they made it super easy for .Net GUI apps to be cross platform.
Kids Programming Language
KPL is a programming language built by Jon Schwartz and others. KPL is featured in this 45 minute Channel 9 video.
I learned a lot about the language and the programming environment from the video. Here is some of that information. Sorry if I got anything wrong. I didn’t take notes.
KPL Version 1 (currently available)
- Based on .Net.
- The IDE is based on Visual Studio. Lots of Visual Studio functionaliy is available, simplified, including code block collapsing and auto-complete.
- Sprites, motion and input are easy.
- Syntax similar to basic.
- Lots of docs and examples.
- Thriving community of example submitters.
- Needs more girl-oriented content.
KPL Version 2 (coming soon, although most of it was shown in the video)
- Debugging in the IDE (breakpoints, watchpoints, list of all variables in scope and their values).
- Objects and user defined objects.
- Distributable EXEs.
- The KPL libraries will be available to C#, etc and you’ll be able to automatically convert your KPL code to other .Net languages with one click.
- DirectX wrappers – build 3D apps (a 40 line program was demoed with a spaceship flying around in a textured box. Watch the video – words don’t do it justice.) Terrain/character collision is taken care of for you.
- Build your own modules in any .NET language with an SDK, expose that functionality to KPL.
- Control an aimable camera over USB.
Amazon Product Previews – AJAX for Associates
Amazon recently introduced a feature called Product Previews for people who are using their Associates program. It’s pretty cool. Amazon Associates is Amazon’s affiliates system where sites link to Amazon products and banners with a special id in the url which gives the Associate a share of the profits from the sale of the linked products. With Product Previews, links to Amazon can now have rich popups when the links are moused over. The popups contain a product image, a buy now button, review information, etc. Note: you can move the preview window around. Doing that will ‘pin’ it to the page until you hit close.
Basically, the normal link format for Associates hasn’t changed: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/
INSERT_ASIN_HERE/INSERT_ASSOC_ID_HERE. The difference is that you add Javascript to the bottom of the page. So, all your old links to amazon products will automatically be given the Preview treatment.
For instance: Naked Conversations (book), Tron (dvd), Palm TX (pda).
During this beta period, only 50% of visitors to your pages will actually see the Previews – this is so Amazon can see if it’s helping or hurting business.
The code snippet to add the Amazon Product Preview to your site is here: snippet.txt. The official docs are here.
John Tokash 