Although I’ve never imagined myself downloading and using it, I’ve always kept an eye on BumpTop. BumpTop is an interesting piece of software: it replaces your usual desktop with a 3-D desktop that literally tries to mimic a real, physical desk. With real, tangible objects that you can manipulate.
BumpTop makes the items on your computer’s desktop more like their real-world counterparts. Icons and folders are assigned a virtual weight based on the amount of memory they take up and their importance to you. You can move them by click-and-drag, or fling them across the BumpTop space. The program determines their importance based on how often you use them, but you can also alter that by hand. Read more…
This here is the future of gaming, folks. One day in the not-so-distant future, we’ll be playing games on our browsers – without any plugins of some sort.
Played Quake Live before? If you haven’t I suggest you do it – it’s an excellent port of Quake Arena with better graphics, and you play on your browser. However, it uses a plugin, so it’s not exactly the most optimal way to play games on your browser. Same goes for Flash-based games like Farmville.
So what if you can play Quake 2 on your browser – with no plug-in needed? All you need to do it woud be HTML 5 and WebGL. And Google has pulled it off, apparently. Check out the video demo:
They started off with Bytonic Software’s Jake2, a Java port of the open source Quake engine. From there, they re-compiled the engine using the Google Web Toolkit (also OSS), created a WebGL renderer to display the graphics, moved multiplayer communications from UDP to WebSockets (part of the HTML5 spec), and bolted on an emulated filesystem to allow game and preference saves.
However, I’ve looked for the download link in the Google Code page. I can’t find it anywhere. Read more…
Well, this was unexpected. Nokia and Intel, the companies behind the Maemo Linux-based OS for Nokia Internet Tablets like the Nokia N900, and the Moblin Linux interface for netbooks, have announced that they’re merging the two projects to form one operating system designed for netbooks, tablets, mobile devices, in-vehicle entertainment systems, and internet-connected televisions.
The new OS will be called MeeGo. While nobody has any idea how the new OS will look like or how it is going to run, they have announced that the first version of MeeGo will be available by the end of March. The Nokia N900 will be compatible with MeeGo. Applications from the Intel AppUp Center and Nokia Ovi Store should be able to run on the platform. The Linux Foundation will be hosting the project. Read more…
As much as I love Ubuntu Linux and all its open source glory, I really am not a fan of the current logo and the color scheme. Come on, brown. I understand that they took the current design inspiration from the word Ubuntu’s African roots, but that particular shade of brown they used isn’t exactly the most enticing thing to see. Read more…
I have to admit, I like playing around with my computer’s settings whenever I get myself a fresh install of Windows. Since Windows XP’s default blue Luna theme isn’t really much to look at, I usually install the Zune theme first before anything else. However, Windows 7 was so amazing that I actually decided to keep it vanilla for the longest time.
Until now I haven’t tweaked Windows because I actually love how the Superbar and all the other changes work. I can say that this is the first version of Windows I was practically very satisfied with. Read more…
