Monthly Archives: December 2007

Next-Gen Game Costs: A Burden on Development

  By davidjr | December 30, 2007 - 11:20 am | General
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According to BBC, an average PS3 game costs nearly $15 million to make – and that’s before any marketing is done for the game. Not only is this bad news for gamers, as it almost ensures our store shelves will be stocked with sequel after buyer-recognizable sequel, but it’s also bad for developers, who could go belly up after one unsuccessful title.

I guess next time I have to pay 60 bucks for a game I won’t complain so much. Of course the console manufacturers (who also run the publishing channels for the games on those consoles) COULD make it more worthwhile to publishers by giving more of that 60 bucks to back to the development houses….

read more | digg story

Using GrowlMail and Leopard

  By codethought | December 30, 2007 - 1:23 am | Mac OS X
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Evan Shoenberg has built a new Leopard-compatible version of the plugin for Mail.app that shows new messages via the Growl notification system. It’s aptly named, GrowlMail. You can download the latest version here:

http://evands.penguinmilitia.net/GrowlMail-rewrite-r4729.zip

If you have Growl installed, you should be able to install this update, run Apple Mail, and see the GrowlMail preferences pane.

Growmailprefs

However you might find after installing Growlmail that you can’t see this pane. In that case, close Mail, and enter the Terminal app and run the following:

	defaults write com.apple.mail EnableBundles -bool YES

	defaults write com.apple.mail BundleCompatibilityVersion -int 3

After that everything should work as expected.

Safari 3 Adblock

  By codethought | December 26, 2007 - 5:46 pm | Mac OS X
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For Safari 3 you can now get an AdBlock utility just like the one available for Firefox. The only challenge is getting it installed correctly. And no, the documentation that comes with the Safari 3 Adblock isn’t correct (at least not as of release 2r3). So after doing some digging I found out how to make this tool work in Leopard.

First, download the latest copy at http://safariblock.googlecode.com/files/SafariBlock2r3.dmg

Install it into /Library/InputManagers

Then issue the following from Terminal:

	sudo chown -R root:admin /Library/InputManagers

	sudo chmod -R go-w /Library/InputManagers

After that you should be all set.

My first impressions are that – while page times slow a bit during loading, it seems overall a pretty stable extension for Safari.

Landon Fuller’s Java 6 for Leopard – First Looks

  By codethought | December 2, 2007 - 9:53 am | J2EE, Java, Mac OS X, Programming
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If you’re a Java developer with a Mac you’ve probably heard that Java 6 isn’t available from Apple yet. And Apple’s not talking about when it will be available. You’ve probably also heard about Landon Fuller’s SoyLatte Project. After reading Fabrizio Giudici’s blog about his experience getting Netbeans working with SoyLatte I decided to spend a few cycles and try it out.

SoyLatte, given how quickly it’s come together, is excellent. The applications I’ve tried out so far were JBoss 4.0.5 and jEdit.

JBoss – in my brief testing – has so far worked well. No I haven’t tried a full database-enabled CRUD test, but simple JSP-based web apps work fine and JBoss didn’t appear to generate any errors during initialization. The really interesting part is how fast the server is. Pages recompile and display so quickly you don’t see a delay.

As for jEdit.. I’ll let that speak for itself…

jEdit Snapshot

EDIT: 2007-12-02 18:40:13 And here’s the Java SwingSet demo in SoyLatte…

SwingSet Demo ala SoyLatte