We started with the existing Jake2 Java port of the Quake II engine, then used the Google Web Toolkit (along with WebGL, WebSockets, and a lot of refactoring) to cross-compile it into Javascript. You can see the results in the video above — we were honestly a bit surprised when we saw it pushing over 30 frames per second on our laptops (your mileage may vary)!
At the moment you have to build from source and mess about a bit, but fear not, I followed the guide on OSNews by Kroc on our MacBook Pro and it worked quite well, yet to try it on Linux.
Well finally Google has released Chrome 4.0 and with it extensions support amongst the many other features which finally brings some much needed juice to the browser. I’ve been running Firefox and Chrome simultaneously (Chrome for gmail & google apps, firefox for daily browsing) but I have a feeling I may change to using Chrome full time now.
Some cool extensions to try (most are from Firefox)
Xmarks Bookmarks Sync – I’ve been using FoxXmarks to sync my bookmarks for a while now, so its only natural I install this for Chrome. You can also stick with the standard Bookmark sync via Google which you’ll need a Google account for.
Chromed. There’s lots more if you’re into Facebook, Twitter and all the other fancy things these days, even one for uTorrent! Download the latest build and give things a go!
PS. You don’t need to restart Chrome to install extensions either!
Had a nasty issue with jQuery + jSON + IEx just now – still at work because of it!
This bit of code works perfectly fine on Firefox and Chrome:
function onUnitsModified() {
$.getJSON("<%=Url.Action("GetTotalUnitCount", "ProjectReaper")%>", null, function(result) {
if(result > 0)
// Do stuffs here
}
});
return true;
}
But in IE we’ve come to realise that the first hit is successful, future json requests ones are not hitting the ASP.NET MVC actions (I put a breakpoint). You could append a time stamp to get rid of this annoying caching bug, but alternatively you can use the ajaxSetup options to disable caching.
function onUnitsModified() {
$.ajaxSetup ({ cache: false});
$.getJSON("<%=Url.Action("GetTotalUnitCount", "ProjectReaper")%>", null, function(result) {
if(result > 0)
// Do stuffs here
}
});
return true;
}
Darnit! Hope someone else doesn’t waste their time trying to fix this now
- Revamped user interface
- Boosted speed from the new Opera Presto 2.2 engine, giving it a 40% increase from the previous version when running web applications (such as Gmail)
- Opera Mail has seen various improvements
- Opera Turbo, designed to increase browsing speed for those on slower Internet connections
- An inline spell checker, to help catch mistakes when typing in entry forms
- Thumbnail tabs which are resizable
- Speed Dial has been given personalization features
Download a copy or read up on the new features in this release, the site’s being hammered right now by the looks of it? I still remember starting out with Opera 5 back in 2001, a close friend designated Opera as his ‘porn browser’, purely because of the tabbing and speed (not to mention lightweightness ) of the browser.
The moment we’ve all been waiting for, Mozilla has released the final version of Firefox 3.5 (which was originally slated to be 3.1). Amongst the highlights include the new Gecko 1.9.1 rendering engine and (from their release notes):
Available in more than 70 languages. (Get your local version!)
Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
Support for new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, <canvas> text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.
A few weeks ago saw the launch of Wolfram Research Alpha, a natural search engine which could do some funky things. Now Microsoft have stepped up from their previous attempts – Ms Dewey (Janina Gavankar, who’s quite a hottie! reminds me of Tiffany) and now we have the final release of Bing (aka codenamed Kumo) which is going to be a behemoth search engine.
In either case, its an interesting take on the ‘aging’ way we search for what we want and seems to go onto the concepts that came with the Wolfram Alpha. When it actually comes out – still shows as coming soon for me, we’ll have to see.
Steven Wolfram of Mathematica fame (and pure genius) has launched Wolfram Alpha, its a ‘computational knowledge engine’ and quite a cool tool too! Taking on the big giants Google and Yahoo, Live etc, this bit of kit allows you to search using natural language.
Let me demonstrate, suppose you want to know who the prime minister of Bulgaria is, it will not only give you the answer but also some background information on the person.
Not only can you ask formal questions, but you can even give it some mathematical problems to solve.
Got told by a co-worker about this today, a news site that searches, scrapes and analyses news items for you. wotnews.com.au, even has a Google Alerts style notification system to get told when interesting news items trickle through. Whats really impressive about this little beauty is that its written by a very small team and is packed with functionality.
Say we want to know more about the Sun being acquired by Oracle item from yesterday, query it. You’ll get a bunch of highlights for the month regarding the two keywords, and the latest articles aggregated over the internet. It even has Twitter integration to findout the latest goss.
While it seems to be still in its infancy, this web-application (and the AI behind it) will surely improve over time bringing some very interesting utilities for gathering news. Who needs Digg.com now apart from the memes and references to PedoBear?
The web framework behind it I was told is Django (which I’ve toyed around with) and the front-end makes heavy use of CSS Sprites as seen on this graphic.
Learn about CSS Sprites
You can learn more about CSS Sprites via these links:
As posted and you would have no doubt have heard, Google has entered the bra-ow-sar wars with their own take on how the web should be with Google Chrome. They just released the first beta for Windows XP / Vista today so go on and download a copy.
First impressions : WOW! Its ridiculously fast – taking Digg and PageFlakes as a benchmark – and the memory footprint is quite a lot better (23Mb) than the Firefox (68Mb – Safemode), Opera (41Mb) and Internet Explorer (52Mb) counterparts. As expected, each tab is a new child process to the main Chrome process, so closing a tab instantly releases the resources held by the child process.
Instructions on grabbing the sources – sucking it down the tubes as I write – is available on the Chromium website.
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