It’s getting crazy out there.
No, I’m not talking about the shopping scene. I was at Target last night and it was very tame.
I’m talking about the blogging / gaming / tech world. Some examples:
- Second Life now has a virtual collectible card game.
- Sony released a ‘viral’ marketing campaign that forgets all the learnings made by similar campaigns over the course of the past several years.
- Chris and Ponzi read their vows from UMPCs (congrats, BTW!)
- A big web conference turned into a political rally, totally robbing the attendees and speakers of what they came for.
- Amanda Congdon on ABC – NICE!
Well, at least there are some sane people this week:
- Alex King mentioned CodePress – an online code editor with syntax highlighting.
- TechShop has a bunch of classes scheduled (including laser cutting and mig welding).
- FOX News visited JKOnTheRun!!!
- Firebug 1.0 continues to impress. Its JavaScript profiling system saved a couple of coders at Homestead a bunch of time today!
- Gmail can now be used to read your other POP3 accounts.
- Sean put together a Triklits-based status board. His construction photos are here. I’ve been meaning to do something like this with my set. My code so far is here.
Ok, yeah. Even the sane stuff is pretty wild.
Spore Interview
There’s a great interview at PC Gamer with Morgan Roarty of the Spore team. The primary topic is the vehicle editor, but there’s also bits and peaces about the status of the overall game. I hope they are merciful and release a demo at the beginning of next year so we don’t have to wait till mid-07 to get our hands on it.
Firebug 1.0 beta
The new version of Firebug is awesome. Joe revved it to 1.0 beta and there are a ton of new features and lots of nice improvements. If you write or debug Javascript (AJAX include), CSS, or HTML, Firebug is a must. I can’t find the release notes, but here’s a list of what I think is new after a few minutes of testing:
- New font (smaller and more readable)
- The breadcrumb of the selected dom item (during inspection) is now interactive. You can highlight and select any ancestor of the currently selected item.
- The inspected item now has a graphical depiction of its box model (‘layout’ in the right pane).
- All CSS lines in the CSS tab and the Style tab of the inspected item can now be toggled on and off just by clicking them.
- Editing the CSS and HTML now seems smoother somehow – before the feedback didn’t seem as immediate.
- The net tab gives a graphical representation of requests to the server. And it’s not just XMLHTTPRequests anymore – it’s everything.
- You can turn firebug on for one site only, now, rather than for everything. Nice.
It’s the little things!
It seems that Google Reader recently changed their UI to show the number of unread items in a feed when you mouse over it in the feed list. That’s great news! Now I can uninstall the greasemonkey script I wrote to fix this myself. Basically, the problem was that if the title of the feed was too long, the unread number would get pushed out of the feed list pane.
Adobe Kuler – Find and create great color schemes!
Greg is right! Adobe Kuler is excellent and a lot of fun! The comments in the lifehacker post on the subject are filled with other color scheme apps, too!
John Tokash 