Tag Archives: open source

BitBuilder Game Platform Documentation

Posted on by John Rockefeller

I’m using the Wiki that’s built into the GitHub service for the BitBuilder Game Platform documentation. GitHub’s Wiki is full-featured, easy to use, and plugged right in next to the source downloads and commit history.

For any open source project to succeed, it needs serious and quality documentation. This is where most open source projects fail and it’s an area that I want to put a lot of focus on with BitBuilder. Since it’s a wiki, anyone can help out, and you don’t need to be a programmer to do so. In fact, it might even be better if you’re not as you’ll have a unique perspective trying to get things running.

My goals for the wiki are to have serious technical specifications for each facet of BitBuilder, but more importantly a series of great, simple walkthroughs to get you up and running, building your game quickly no matter what type of game it is (platformer, puzzle, rpg, adventure, shooter, etc.)

When it comes to documentation, what do you look for? What do you need from documentation? What do you hate about documentation? What makes one project’s documentation better than another?

Aptana Color Themes

Posted on by John Rockefeller
Aptana Studio Rules

Aptana Studio Rules

When I develop at home and at work I use Aptana Studio. I purchased a license for myself at home and I use the community edition (read: free version) at work. It’s a wonderful editor with a ton of features and great community. One thing it lacks, however, is a good set of themes, out-of-the-box.

So what, you ask? Just go and download some third-party custom themes from the web!

Pishaw! It’s not that easy. I’ve done a few Google searches but not a whole lot turns up, to be honest. And that’s a shame because I bet a lot of developers are in the same boat as me.

I’ve been tinkering with themes over the past few weeks and I’ve decided to start releasing some on my site for everyone to use. The themes page will grow over time as I continue to release themes. I’d appreciate any feedback you have. The Aptana Themes page is not only for my themes, they also include some of the best themes I’ve found around the web. If you have a theme you’d like me to put up, send it to me and I’ll do just that.

Anyway, without further ado, I present the Aptana Themes page!

New to Elgg? Need help? Come chat on IRC.

Posted on by John Rockefeller

Part of the fun of working on open-source projects is the fact you get to connect with other developers all over the world in a collaborative fashion. Using Internet Relay Chat (IRC), you can connect to other Elgg developers for help or discussion.

If you’re new to IRC, check out the wikipedia article on the subject and download a good IRC client (for Windows) (for Linux KDE).

To connect to the Elgg channel, connect to irc.freenode.org. Then, join channel #elgg.

See you there!

Firefox 3 First Impressions

Posted on by John Rockefeller

I downloaded Firefox 3 today. Just like a gazillion other people. It’s launch day and Mozilla wants to enter the record-books for number of downloads for a software product in one day. Supposedly there is no previous record so basically once the first download finished they were the winners :) Anyway, it was good to drum up some interest in alternative browsers!

The first thing I noticed was how responsive everything was. I’m a web developer — I get used to how long it takes for menus to load and things to happen after I click. I started using Firefox 3 and I have to say they have really raised the bar for browser speed. It used to be that only Opera was this fast. Great work!

Secondly, the “Awesome Bar“: I love it. Looks great, works great. It’s similar to Google Desktop’s search field in that you just type a few keywords of what you’re looking for and it’ll show you any sites that you’ve been to that match those keywords. Handy. We are definitely moving away from people actually knowing the domain your business is at. We know we’ve reached the turning point when browsers stop including an address bar entirely or when businesses owners don’t even know their own domain names :)

Finally, a new feature has been added on my Bookmark Toolbar that contains the top 10 most visited websites. This could be good or bad depending on your browsing habits ;). For me it’s really handy. Gmail is in there, Dzone, Digg, Synnema. Awesome.

I have to say I’m really impressed. The difference between Firefox 1 and 2 really didn’t hit me much but the difference between 2 and 3 is monumental. You really have to use it yourself to feel the difference in speed.

If you’re reading this post on June 17th, 2008, then head over to Firefox.com and help raise the number of downloads today by 1!