Seapegasus Blog

Friday March 09, 2007

Something Funny For the Weekend

Before I'm of for the weekend, here two cute links I found: Satai found this insane Apple-vs-PC ad cartoon on youtube. Steve Jobs finally loses it. ;-)

Another youtube find is this cuuute video game, Little Big Planet. It's like an arcade game version of second life. It scrolls left to right, but it's 3D with a backdrop and physics... The avatars look like beanie babies, muhahahaha... And why do the avatars' thinking bubbles look like iPhones?! There's a second part where you can see cool physics interaction and the actual gameplay while the characters run throught the level.

PS: What the...?? Posted by seapegasus ( Mar 09 2007, 05:06:33 PM CET ) Permalink

Aren't You the Guy Who Wrote That Cool TechTip?

You sit at home hacking new innovative code. You encounter a stumbling block. You fiddle around and ta-daa, you find a clever solution! Likely there are other Java developers who have the same problem. The best thing would be to write down the steps and publish them on your blog, so others can find it. But then it happens that you don't have time to flesh out the list of steps, and you don't want to post it to your blog half-finished, and then you forget about it, and zonk, the poor idea never finds its way to the community. :(

I mean, sure I try to post all the little tricks I find, but I know I skipped some... So to save more nifty solutions for posteriority, James came up with a great project: The Community Docs. How does it work?

Have a look at the "Community Docs in Progress" and "Community Docs Contributions" tables to see what has already been contributed this month, and what people have already submitted as work in progress. Impressive, considering this project was only started this month!

If you have a tech tip to share, or any clever process you discovered while working on your project, get in touch with James. Then just add a line to the "in progress" table, and create a new wiki page to write your draft in.

• What if you only have a basic list of steps? No problem, put it up on the wiki, and we will flesh it out later.
• What if you think your English isn't good enough? Don't worry, we can proof-read it and help you find the right words -- the content is what counts.
• What if you'd rather write in another language than English? Sure, go ahead, you can contribute tips in any language the community speaks!
• What kinds of content are excepted? Basically, any! It can be plain text from your blog or your javadoc, a series of screenshots or diagrams, a list of steps or sample code, a translation of an existing document, an FAQ answer, a screen cast (Flash demo) or a video tutorial (like the NetBeans videos on youtube, did you check those out?)...

PS: Your name will be on it, so if a future employer googles your name, he can see your good work! :)

New News Are Good News

When you go to the netbeans.org frontpage or the community index, and click on "all news" or "archive" respectively, then you will see the new news archive. It contains community news, front page news, and at the top right, you also find direct links to the latest newsletters.

Until recently, non-techie articles -- such as interviews, podcasts, dream team projects, polls, competitions, and event reports -- never appeared on any central index. After they scrolled off the front page, they could only be recovered via the site search. Not very userfriendly when you stop by to see what the netbeans community has been up to! Now they found a new home. :-) We will probably add one or two more categories such as "polls and competitions" or "awards and reviews" to structure the articles better. What do you think?