These are my links for August 14th through September 4th:

• Downloads (2010-2011 Fall) | CS 193P iPhone Application Development –
• UIPickerView – Creating a simple picker view | iPhone SDK Articles –
• Steve Jobs: Jerry Pournelle Reflects –
• Dreamstime – Stock Photography
• Fotolia.com – Royalty Free Stock Photos
• Evernote software company plans new studio, aggressive hiring in Austin –
• Five Ways to Speed Up Lightroom – O’Reilly Digital Media Blog –
• Does the 1796-97 Treaty with Tripoli Matter to Church/State Separation? –
• Python documentation –
• Why most people don’t finish video games –
• Tracking the Trackers: To Catch a History Thief | Stanford Center for Internet and Society –
• Violet Crown Trail | Hill Country Conservancy –
• South Austin Medical Clinic –
• World War II in Photos – Alan Taylor – In Focus – The Atlantic –
• Understanding & Using Ansel Adam’s Zone System –

http://www.minecraft.net/

A game where you can build anything out of an array of elements… anything, rollercoasters, castles, lava moats, etc. It’s like a world building game, but, every night it gets taken over by zombies and you must survive.

Honestly, it’s a hard game to describe, it has elements of Dwarf Fortress, zombie games, super mario, portal, legos… and many of it’s own unique ideas.

The TF2 dev team seems to be enraptured with it:

http://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=4130&p=1

And, it is pretty fun. I set up a server, and you can join it here:

http://www.minecraft.net/play.jsp?server=bac3b007f5dd5ab5caf7c20f4c1a5ec9

(or you can find it in the list of servers here, named CoFR Minecraft Server: http://www.minecraft.net/servers.jsp )

It is browser based, so no install needed. If you wish to be admin on the server, send me your registered playername and I will add you (if I know you, that is).
If you purchase the game you can play the alpha versions, which have all the new features, but the server is running classic version, which should be free to play.

In fact, I am posting from it now.

I was skeptical, and I wasn’t alone in that feeling, but I only had one day to be skeptical because they only announced this thing yesterday!  (Kudos for keeping it under wraps).

Google Chrome is a web browser built on WebKit, which powers other well known browsers such as Apple’s safari and KDE’s Konqueror.  Google included a cute online comic book to explain the technology here.  The gist being that the web browser uses entirely separate processes to load each separate tab.  This goes beyond simple multi-threading, and gets into OS territory.  They want to do this to eliminate browser hangups from ultiple tasks needing to use the same process.  While this can and will usitilize more memory and processor power, it also allows one to regulate it easier, especially memory-wise.  Plug-ins (when they appear) will also use separate processes.

The comic gets into computer science territory when they explain how they built their V8 from Webkit.  It streamlines object manipulization and pointer calls and other things you can read about there.

I’m impressed.  First off at the ease of slipping into it right from Firefox.  It handles the same keyboard commands I’m used to, and tabs behave much the same.  Two things it does not have that firefox has:

• Memory munching.  Yes, it uses a spearate process and memory space for each tab, but these are confined spaces, unlike Firefox which could eat all my memory if I let it.
• Addons. none. Zilch.  Yeah, it’s a beta, but man I need my add-ons.

The lack of add-ons will make me only piddle with Chrome when I feel like, not use it for a main browser.  For one, I have many that are hard to live without.  And two, Firefox is damn snappy without any add-ons, too, so it’s unfair to compare Chrome until it’s got the same capablities as a fully-loaded Firefox browser.

But the technology is impressive, and obviously since everything is open source, we are going to have a flood of add-ons coming very soon.

As the title says, not much more to say. This is a huge update with thousands of changes across the board, both on the frontend and backend… so pretty much a brand new browser. I’ve tested a few of the builds, but a couple of my extensions wouldn’t work with 3 (yet), so I haven’t used it for my main browsing.  But I love the auto-bookmark search addition, which was my favorite feature of the Flock browser.  Plus it seems alot more snappy, and less memory hogging than Firefox 2.

Mozilla is trying to get a world record for most downloads in a day off the thing. See more at SpreadFirefox.

Firefox 2.0 beta is due to be released tomorrow.

This sort-of feels like an answer shot to Microsoft’s release of IE7 beta. I’ll be honest and admit I did not try the IE7 beta, and I really don’t plan to.

I will try the Firefox 2.0 beta. I have been using Flock since they released the beta of it a few weeks ago, but it’s not perfect, and I do still hold a special place in my (cold, black) heart for Firefox.

New features include a “un-close” tab button, for times when you closed a tab you decide you want back. Also, Opensearch has been implemented into the in-line search. Which may let me get my 1.57…% discount at Amazon again.

The browser has been feature-complete since alpha 1, so don’t expect too many surprise announcements. Honestly, I just want all my extensions to work and for the pages to come up snappy-like.

Flock is a new web browser based on the Mozilla engine. So, it’s a lot like Firefox but also somewhat different. A lot of blog and picture integration is embedded within the base browser. It also features a wide library of extensions. Many of those share the exact name with extensions I use in Firefox everyday, so I’m betting that it’s not too hard to port them over. In fact, the Flock extension page states:

Very soon you will be able to add your favorite extensions and we’ll convert them on the fly for you.

update: they now have the page up for conversions: http://extensions.flock.com/extensions/convert

My initial goofing-off with Flock leaves me very impressed. In fact, I am posting this article from the built-in blog publisher. There are also nifty drag-and-drop abilities to post images on a forum or whatnot. It will automatically upload a picture to flicker for you while you are dragging the image onto a forum, and then paste the correct code there. I would love for the ability to customize that feature with the ability to upload to an FTP instead, but it’s definitely a great idea already. There is also a built-in spellchecker.

The import engine worked extremely well, it imported everything from Firefox in a snap, and my transition to using it was seamless. The extensions library is already impressive. I expected it to be sparse at the beta, but I was pleasantly surprised. Really there’s only a couple extensions that I would miss if I were to switch main browser, but I can’t check that “make this my default browser” box quite yet.