d-log

Thunderbird has gotten some more visible momentum now that Thunderbird 3 has seen the light. Project lead David Asher has some more details on organisational topics for the year 2010:

• field-testing new functionalities in plugins
• New upgrade options for users coming from TB2
• making the organisation financially sustainable on its own

Just like Matt, I would love to see an official Gravatar plugin this year.

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Recently, jQuery 1.4 was released, with a maintenance release 1.4.2 a few days ago. In a move comparable to what we are doing with ImpressCMS release 1.3, the jQuery developers chose the jQuery 1.4 release to be a release focused on speed and cleanup of the codebase. Mostly, just cleaning up the codebase results in quite some speed advancements, so those two efforts are frequently combined.

The changelog for this latest release of the Javascript library mentions performance improvements in many areas : CSS methods, Attributes and many of the most-used functions. However, the changelog also details some backward incompatible changes with previous versions. These incompatibilities can be countered by installing this specific plugin. read more »

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Some time ago, I found this cool plugin for Thunderbird (2.x at the time) : MessageFaces (or on Mozilla Addons). It made email conversations much less impersonal by showing images of the persons that I was having an email conversation with. The beauty of the system was that I didn’t have to do anything: images were gathered from gravatar.com, X-faces, or embedded PNG images.

Then Thunderbird 3 came along, and busted quite a bit of plugins. Sadly for me, both MessageFaces and Lightning, the calendar plugin, ceased to work. read more »

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Eurogamer has a gameplay video of C&C4 on their website, along with a screenshot gallery of what is to be the final part of the Kane story arc. The video shows the game in action, from both sides, both with offence and defence gameplay. How this is going to be implemented in the game itself is of course the important point.

I do hope that the video was sped up a bit, as the game speed shown in the video made me think of one of those nervous coin-up arcade machines, where your only goal is to slap the buttons as hard and as fast as possible.

read more »

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A month or two ago, I came to the conclusion that I was sinning against one of the basic rules of modern communication by having a multitude of blogs, without a very clear distinction between them. I posted family-related news on this blog, along with news about my upcoming 3Mension.com site.

Of course, that’s wrong.

If your goal is to build a brand, you need distinct and clear communication. You can be certain different people will want different types of information when coming to your site. People going to karekiet39 will do so because of family- or home related stuff. People going to the 3mension blog will want to know the latest facts about 3mension, but couldn’t care less if we redecorated the garden last weekend.

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After the merger/takeover between Daz 3d and Gizmoz, many expressed their reservations that the combined companies would continue in the direction the Daz3d community was used to, and was expecting.

Some had doubts about the reason for the merger, specifically because it was indicated that the founder of daz3d would step down after the merger. That, according to them could be seen as a move that Gizmoz was calling the shots, and that Gizmoz only wanted to take over the Daz3d webshop. read more »

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Unity Technologies has hired Brett Seyler, who oversaw Torque engine development for InstantAction and GarageGames, to serve as its VP of strategy. After Brett Seyler announced that he was leaving TorquePowered (former GarageGames), nobody thought he was leaving for a direct competitor.

In the torrent of comments following his blog, Brett indicated indirectly that he already had a next challenge in mind, but he didn’t specify. It was assumed throughout the Torque community that he would follow in the footsteps of his former GarageGames colleagues now at Pushbutton Labs. That company was founded by the former GarageGames owners, after the sale to Interactive corp. In fact, it was at that time that Brett took over daily operations at GarageGames.

The move to Unity3d is both a surprise and a read more »

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The current issue of Linux magazine (#111) has an article about how researchers are using Blender 3D to calculate and simulate the volume of sand displaced when walking on a beach. This demonstrates the extreme flexibility of Blender, and also shows that that flexibility is more and more appreciated by the academic community.

This academic use is also becoming more and more apparent in the different Blender conference schedules, as each year there are very innovative ideas presented there.

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It simply had to happen, with more than 6000 plugins on the official Extend site: the Wordpress main developers are considering a way to lead the users of the popular blogging platform to the best-in-class plugins.

The plugins would be developed by the community, but there will be a specific category indicating that they are considered best-in-class, and that the compatibility with a new release is guaranteed.

The risk with this type of presentation is that the users will limit themselves to those best-in-class plugins, and that many developers read more »

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Box UK has a checklist available that should list the most important steps to take when launching a site. It was previously mentioned at Web Resources Depot. While I agree that you need a good checklist, I find the one presented here too oriented towards the layout and the design. Pre-launch marketing is not mentioned, and we know that’s a very important part of a succesfull initial launch.

Still, it can help to build your own strategy, by building on this document. The original can be found at the Box UK site.

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