KludgeHack

SWF to Xaml Convertor
12 July 2007 in Programming & WebDev | Comments (0)

Seems there’s a new application for SWF to Xaml conversion. Available on theconverted.ca, you can download a free trial. Although the full version is a little expensive ($249), I would keep checking for updates.

This program converts Flash animations to the Xaml format. It accepts files up to Flash version 8. It handles animation, sound and fonts. You drag files in, it generates the results. You can use the command line for automation.

If you want to find some alternatives, Mike Swanson also have one called Swf2Xaml available here.

Index of Silverligh Games
6 July 2007 in Microsoft & Programming & WebDev | Comments (0)

Chris Bowen’s blog have a fresh and great listing of Silverlight Games, you should know about.

Currently the listing is:

• “Dr. Popper” [source] - Burst the matching bubbles, the more, the better.
• “Digger” [source] - Sort of Dig-Dug meets Montezuma’s Revenge.
• “Zero Gravity” [no source available yet] - An addictive and well-made game! A nice example of the possibilities of the platform.
  • Tim Heuer gives some background.
• “Chess” [source] - Your basic chess, but shows how Silverlight 1.1 with .NET fares against a JavaScript-based AI.
• Central NY .NET’s own Andy Beaulieu has written two Silverlight games:
  • “Destroy All Invaders” [source] - A cool mashup with Virtual Earth where you fly over the oblique angle view of a location of your choice while shooting UFOs.
  • “Silverlight Rocks!” [source] - A shoot the asteroids game.
• “Sprawl” [source] - A good demonstration of potential with Silverlight 1.0.
• “Silverlight Maze” [no source yet]
• “Khet” [no source yet] - Requires registration to play.

Keep checking his post, as it gets updated.

Lately there is some kind of burst on making Silverlight content, specially games, and for that I really enjoy seeing that most developers choose to make their code open-source. That only makes Silverlight easier to learn, and adopt.

TrimQuery
4 July 2007 in WebDev | Comments (0)

The TrimQuery engine from TrimPath is a lightweight GPL open-source component that lets you have the power of SQL queries while running in a web browser.

For rich web application developers, TrimQuery makes it very easy to manage local client-side data cache on the browser, instead of caching lots of objects in the browser memory.

The code is very lightweight (around 700 lines of code) and written entirely in javascript, and can really simplify the work of manually writing code to manage data. Brings the power of search, join, group-by, aggregate and sort data in SQL to the web browser.

The core TrimQuery engine is meant to have no critical DOM/DHTML/browser dependencies.

The engine features a SQL-like query language with support for…

• SELECT … FROM
• WHERE clauses
• ORDER BY (sorting on multiple columns, ASC and DESC)
• AS (aliases)
• GROUP BY, HAVING aggregation
• SUM, COUNT, AVG aggregate functions
• self joins
• LIMIT and offsets
• parameterization

More information:

• TrimQuery API
• TrimQuery SQL Syntax
• TrimQuery Downloads
• TrimQuery Community Wiki
• TrimQuery Browser Compatibility
• TrimQuery demo page

Google investing $100,000 per Gadget
4 July 2007 in WebDev | Comments (0)

There is a new fund program at Google. Google Gadget Ventures is a new Google pilot program dedicated to helping developers create richer, more useful Google Gadgets.

Gadget Ventures provides two types of funding:

1. Grants of $5,000 to those who’ve built gadgets we’d like to see developed further. You’re eligible to apply for a grant if you’ve developed a gadget that’s gets at least 250,000 weekly page views.
2. Seed investments of $100,000 to developers who’d like to build a business around the Google gadgets platform.

The details about Google Gadget Ventures are here. Are you qualified? Read the FAQ. Or check the official Google Blog.

Zero Gravity
28 June 2007 in Links & WebDev | Comments (1)

Zero Gravity is a new game created on Silverlight. I post this, not because games in RIA platforms is something new, but because it is the first public game available for Microsoft framework. Check this casual game here. 

The game is closed source, and was built using C#.

“The result is a fun game that has it all: animation, sound, video, quality gameplay, and over twenty levels of cosmic adventure.”