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Filed under: Fun, Games, Time-Wasters, Web

The Walls are Not Cheese - cheesy Time Waster

The Walls are Not Cheese is an old-school pixelated platform game. It's so old-school, in fact, that your character is a square. While the graphics may not be that detailed, the gameplay is pretty entertaining: you shoot your way through soft walls that make you suspect the game's title is a lie.

Blasting through the walls gets you into new rooms, but your ammo is limited.To replenish your shooting power, you have to suck up the debris from the walls (not cheese?) that you've previously demolished. Jumping over pits and tangling with enemies is par for the course, as in any platform game.

If you're the cheating type, you can make The Walls are Not Cheese a little easier by digging a tunnel in the floor or ceiling and using it to avoid the obstacles in each level, but it's more fun to play it straight.

Filed under: Business, Commercial, Social Software, Web

StackExchange lets you build a knowledge exchange platform for a pretty penny

StackExchangeKnowledge exchange site Stack Overflow and its cousins Super User and Server Fault created quite a stir when they were released by noted developers Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood. And though it should probably have been obvious, in the process of building out these niche sites, what they had actually done was build a knowledge exchange platform.

Now that platform, called StackExchange, has been released to the general public to build their own knowledge exchange sites. That is, if you're willing to pay a monthly minimum of $129US.

That's right; the smallest plan that is available right now would cost you $1,548US yearly. I hate to make this story about the pricing, but given how outrageous it is, it's hard not to. As someone who has struggled to launch sites, it seems to me that the only people that would choose this platform for a fledgling site would be people with money to burn. Now, Joel and Jeff are smart guys. Maybe they've simply figured out that people with money to burn are the best customers.

Another surprising thing about StackExchange is that of their four plans, only the most expensive one allows you to actually host the site on your own premises. That plan costs $2,500US per month - for the privilege of using your own bandwidth!

There's no doubt that StackExchange is a powerful platform. And anyone that claims they can reverse-engineer it in a weekend is insane. It's the kind of platform that you would love to see generating interesting little sites all over the place dedicated to tight niches like woodworking, late 60's Mustang restoration, DIY plumbing, or even whistling. But the pricing model that is being used threatens to make StackExchange virtually irrelevant -- to everyone online except for Spolsky and Atwood, that is.

Filed under: Fun, Games, Time-Wasters

Push is a quirky, challenging platformer - Time Waster

The platform game, centered on running and jumping action, has been around so long that's it tough to introduce new innovation to the genre. Push is a Flash game that manages to twist platform conventions by introducing a force field effect that you can use to push part of the terrain and clear a path for your character. The controls are a bit difficult to manage, and the graphics are very basic, but Push is a good time waster because the harder levels are really challenging.

The object of each level is to reach a yellow goal square by running, jumping and pushing. There are plenty of ways to die: you can fall, you can accidentally get squished if you let go of your force field at the wrong time, or you can hit obstacles. The problem is that you run and jump using the arrows keys or WASD on the keyboard, but you push by pointing and clicking. The combination of keyboard and mouse controls was frustrating, and ultimately turned me off before I beat any of the hardest levels. If you have the patience, though, Push will reward you with 75 different maps and a terrain editor that lets you build custom levels.

Filed under: Fun, Games, Time-Wasters, Web

Rabbit Wants Cake: rabbity, cakey Time Waster

Rabbit Wants Cake seems like a pretty simple game at first glance. There's a rabbit, there's a cake, and there's a pretty basic platform-style level set up between them. If your rabbit were Mario, he'd have that cake in a jiffy. Unfortunately, your rabbit is remote-controlled. You can't just run and jump him over to the cake in real time, you have to record a program for him and watch him play it back.

If you were ever so good at video games that you could do the moves in your head without even looking at the screen, you're ideally suited to get this Rabbit a cakey reward. For the rest of us, though, it's kind of tricky to imagine how your pattern of lefts, rights and jumps will look when the little rabbit actually tries to pull them off. The saving grace is that your arrow-key moves can be adjusted with the mouse if they don't work out the first time. You can change the distance and timing of your moves by dragging them around and adjusting their duration, unless you're playing in expert mode. In that case, good luck, because 25 levels is a whole lot of cake for one little rabbit.

Filed under: Internet, Video, Web services, Google, web 2.0

YouTube launches API for uploading videos from any web site


One of the moves that has made YouTube successful is the ability to embed YouTube videos on any site. Now YouTube is going a few steps further and giving web developers tools that will let users upload and edit YouTube videos from any web page.

What that means is you can essentially build a web page that lets visitors upload videos of kittens and puppies doing cute things, send video responses to one another, edit their video metadata, and never ever have to click through to YouTube, even though all of the transcoding and file hosting is taking place on a Google server.

Web developers can also customize the look and feel of the YouTube video player using a new Javascript API.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Filed under: Business, Design, Developer, Blogging

LinkedIn gets a beta facelift and developer platform

LinkedIn gets a beta facelift and developer platformLinkedIn, the professional networking site, has released new features, including a homepage redesign and developer platform. Sure this is going to be a little more useful to business users, but does LinkedIn need to expand and focus outside the business sector to make things stickier?

LinkedIn's new focus seems like an effort to emulate what Facebook has had with outside web applications. The new LinkedIn beta homepage provides customizable modules that display network updates in a dashboard format. This allows users to potentially be more productive by showing what contacts are up to, what news is most important to colleagues and questions and answers from your specific industry with the use of familiar feeds. But why stop there?

People that do business together and are connected via outside interests could possibly do a lot more on the site if more personal based modules were available. However, this is just the beginning of a component that is part of Google's OpenSocial developer platform so we will have to wait and see what becomes of it.

Nonetheless it's great to see that LinkedIn is growing...mind you slowly, and cautiously building upon their platform. Will it manage to pull back business users that slipped away to Facebook for more personal networking with these developments? Could it possibly ever attract younger users?

Filed under: Business, Design, Developer, Finance, Fun, Internet, Utilities, Productivity, Web services

Yahoo! concocts a spicier new version of Widgets and Konfabulator

Yahoo! concocts a new version of Widgets and Konfabulator

Yahoo! has launched an updated version of the Yahoo! Widget Engine and gallery. Yahoo! Widget Engine 4.5 has the same look and feel on your desktop as version 4.0, but there are some changes in the way widgets are created and organized.

First, Yahoo! has retooled its online widget gallery to give you more information about what each widget does. Users now also have a quick view of the most downloaded, highest rated and newest widgets, and can share Widgets directly with friends on IM, email, a Yahoo! Widget badge, del.icio.us, Digg and Reddit.

Second, there's now support for Flash and HTML based widget design. Yahoo! has also teamed up with the NBA to vote on All Stars, RockYou to create and watch slideshows on the desktop, and the Netvibes UWA will now be available as a Yahoo! Desktop Widget from the Netvibes Ecosystem. And if you still aren't satisfied, Yahoo! Finance has also improved their powerful stock Widget.

Check out a screeenshot of the new RockYou Yahoo! Widget after the jump.

Read more →

Filed under: Business, Design, Developer, Finance, Internet, Web services

FreshBooks gets API'd

freshbooks releases apiFreshBooks rolled out their API yesterday, a little early it seems as they were outed by TechCrunch.

FreshBooks is an online tool that users can create, send and manage invoices, track time and accept payments with. This new API will allow developers and businesses to integrate the FreshBooks billing platform into a variety of services and solutions they may offer, allowing for a little streamlining to take place.

The FreshBooks API support materials include an update blog, scripts, samples and examples. There is also a forum to guide developers along the way in creating their timers, planners, and widgets.

Gallery: FreshBooks

  • FreshBooks Invoice report
  • FreshBooks Invoice Service item
  • FreshBooks Project with assigned staff and task hours
  • FreshBooks Client Invoice
  • FreshBooks Client info

Filed under: Design, Developer, Internet, Utilities, Web services, Apple

Developing applications on the iPhone with Morfik

morfik iphone developer platformThe iPhone isn't even out yet and there are scheduled conferences, iPhone specific applications and now an iPhone developer's platform.

A company called Morfik has created a platform that will give developers the ability to build applications on Apple's new iPhone. This new platform is said to be the first of its kind, and usually the first ones to market hit it big with consumers. Morfik has said that its WebOS AppsBuilder will be able to make web applications that are optimized for Safari running on iPhones. Don't have a technically included background? Morfik will also enable everyday users a way to make their own AJAX powered web applications with writing any code.

Morfik already has one application ready for the iPhone called ichess. http://ichess.morfik.com

It's been said that Google Gears and Adobe's AIR could also be big with iPhone developers.

Filed under: Business, Developer, Internet, Web services

BEA Web 2.0 applications for business slated for July

BEA web 2.0 applications for businessBEA Systems, known for its leading enterprise infrastructure software, is getting set to launch its suite of corporate search and collaboration products. These three new applications look ready to help businesses with some Web 2.0 technologies including RSS feeds, tagging, and mashup platforms. Hey, enterprise business, here's your chance to roughly equal the kind of community building web interfaces that 20 somethings are pumping out from their basements.

Although integration efforts have been extremely slow for many businesses, it will be interesting to watch the effects these different integration options have with a number of useful 2.0 applications.

Filed under: Developer, Internet, Web services

Nike.com redone with Adobe Flash

So this may a little off our beaten path (no pun intended), but Nike has redone their site using Adobe's Flash platform. This is the first major re-load of Nike.com since 1999 when it opened its web doors and welcomed you to "just do web it." Many of you are Nike fans, but even if you aren't, it is worth checking out the sweet effects Nike has going for them. Mostly the site consists of a Apple-like essence that includes a dual-angle top and bottom wet-floor video effect that really gives you the feeling that you are in a room with shiny walls, floor and ceiling. This new idea organizes the Nike universe well and makes everything easy to access. Maybe there is more to this Adobe Flash stuff than we all thought. I always knew it was something special, I don't know about you. The site was done by a real pro, and it looks great.

Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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