Monthly Archives: June 2007

Steam jumping on the social networking bandwagon

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Beginning in July, Steam users can set up their own personal Steam pages and profiles, create and join groups, schedule games with friends, review who they’ve played with, see how well everyone played, chat with groups, chat via voice, and more. These new community services and features can be used with all Steam games, which include new releases and classic titles from leading publishers and independent developers.

Valve Announces Major Update for Steam

While this may seem like YASN (Yet Another Social Network), this one actually makes sense.  Steam has expanded in size recently, taking on Capcom.  And Counter Strike is still one of the most played network games.  Giving players the ability to create an identity within the Steam network that is more than just their name, is a good idea.  I imagine we’ll soon see widgets that can be used on blogs, iGoogle & Desktop aps to display game scores & rankings.

ReSharper 3.0 released

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JetBrains have released ReSharper 3.0, but I think they may have to re-brand it, as it now has extensive VB.NET support too:

ReSharper is proud to enable Visual Basic .NET development, providing full support and a host of productivity features. Visual Basic developers will be sure to enjoy a truly enhanced Visual Studio experience thanks to ReSharper’s quick navigation and search, all the important code refactorings, full-fledged code assistance, code completion & generation, code templates, and a lot more.

Maybe they can call it ReCLR or ReNetter or something like that…

FeedDemon Prefetch rocks

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Finally got myself a laptop (well, got work to get me one anyway..) and so I’ve not got a use for FeedDemon’s Prefetch feature.  It is now officially My Favorite Feature™.  With a 1 hour train trip out of the city I’ve got a fair amount of time to kill & I’ve already gone through my bookshelf twice!  About 10 minutes before I left work I did a final refresh of all my feeds and then set the pre-fetch running.  With all my feeds (~200) it took a little under 5 minutes to finish. 

A few things to note:

  • It will take a while if you’re on a slow connection and/or you have a huge number of unread posts.
  • It’s probably a good idea to go into offline mode after the pre-fetch is finished so that everything that’s unread is fetched.  It would be annoying to have something else come in a minute before you leave and you have to wait until you get home to read it.
  • If you use a synchronised news bin, setup a non-shared news bin to dump stuff into until you’re back online again. (It would be nice if synced bins just cached stuff until you went online, like it does for marking items as read).
  • It defaults to loading only 5 links per feed item, which means that for posts like the del.icio.us auto-posts, all you’re likely to get is the 1st link and it’s tags! You can increase this number, but it will also increase the amount of time it takes to load. It would also be handy if you could specify some domains for the pre-fetch to ignore (del.icio.us, Technorati, etc.).

This really is an awesome feature that highlights again for me the advantage of having a client application to do this, rather than, say, Google Reader.  Even with Gears installed, Reader can’t do this.  If you find yourself offline on a long commute, FeedDemon is a winner.

Halo 3 multiplayer maps video

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The 7th Columnist has video of 2 multiplayer maps for Halo 3 – Epitaph & Last Resort (aka Zanzibar Mark II). They look brilliant. 

He also has a full video of the Gamekings interview with the Bungie guys.

I love the soundtrack, the way it slowly builds up from a haunting choral tone and then breaks into the Halo theme, I really need to get a 360!

Windows Live Writer WordPress Plugin

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After the release of the 2nd beta of Windows Live Writer, one of the other changes I noticed was that the blog side panel was now customised for WordPress.  It had a little WordPress icon & it knew where the admin page was located.  This, I discovered, was due to the fact that WLW now has an API for customising this panel with a manifest file. The WordPress.com blogs already have one done for them, with custom buttons to their comments & stats, but I figured, why not the rest of us WordPress users too. 

So I have a very beta plugin that will generate a wlwmanifest file for your blog.  It utilises a lot of the imagery from the WordPress.com one, so I hope they don’t mind.  You can download the plugin here. Here’s the page for it on WordPress.org.

This is very much a case of me working out an idea.  If you have any suggestions for what this can do, please leave a comment.  I’ve got a couple of ideas, but we’ll see how it goes.  It’s all together possible that this may be in the pipeline for the WordPress core, and that would be great.

[inspired by Tim Heuer's subtext version]

Microsoft Removing Office from MSDN Subscriptions

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From the MSDN Subscriptions blog:

Effective June 30, 2007, MSDN Subscriptions will no longer be offering any activation versions of Office 2003 and Office XP from MSDN Subscriber Downloads or on media. We are working with the Office team to provide non-activation versions to replace these editions, and wanted you to be aware now so that you may download any needed Office 2003 and Office XP bits from MSDN Subscriber Downloads before they’re removed later this month.

Please note that the existing Volume License versions of these products will continue to be made available on MSDN Subscriber Downloads for MSDN subscribers who purchased their subscriptions through our various Volume Licensing programs.

Interesting. I’m not quite sure what the motivation is here.  Were they not seeing enough purchases of Office 2007 because everyone was downloading them from MSDN?

FeedDemon 2.5 has been released

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Nick Bradbury announced the release of FeedDemon 2.5 last week, and it’s got some great new features that make this the #1 RSS reader hands down. The ability to pre-fetch content from pages linked to in feed items is amazingly useful for people on the move, and with the release of Google Gears at the Developer Day, it shows that Nick was on the right track with realising that offline mode is still important. As Aaron Boodman said in his Gears presentation at the Australian Developer Day, you’re offline more than you think.

The ability to have syncronised news bins is very nice, but having a publicly available RSS feed of that bin is simply brilliant.  I’m using it to publish my link blog (thanks for the plug Nick!). 

Also, because FeedDemon syncs with NewsGator, you can now get a list of what items are being linked to by everyone, not just your own local popular topics.  It’s sort of like Tailrank or Techmeme for subscriptions. 

I’ve been running the pre-release version for a week now with no complaints (Actually, I’ve been running the beta versions all the way since 2.0 was released, but anyway).  Go get it here.  Great software, it really is worth the small cost, and for my needs walks all over an online reader like Bloglines or Google Reader.

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Windows Live Writer beta 2 is out

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You can download it here.  Very nice, very clean, the Live branding is obvious & I think I like it.  The ability to embed an image from a URL & not just a local image that needs uploading in great, and you can now select multiple categories, and trackbacks actually work now (as opposed to just putting the text ‘(array)’ into the field in WordPress.

I’ve been hanging out for this update for ages.  I just checked & my insert a bible verse plugin works, but the layout looks a little screwy.  I’ve been meaning to release an update soon anyway.

[via Duncan Riley]

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