A game in Silverlight – since I can’t read Chinese, I’m not sure what it’s all about, but it looks decent, and doesn’t seem to spike my CPU when playing.

I don’t understand the point of the demo/game that’s there and it seems to be impossibly difficult (as you can see from the screen shot).

Try it here:

http://silverfuture.cn/

Found via Silverlike.

As best as I can determine, here are the functions of the various features along the bottom:

Update: The comments have a better explanation of what the various items along the bottom do in the “game.”

If you enjoy our post, feel free to subscribes to our rss feeds

Michael suggests…

It’s easy to look at the world today and say that web applications have won. This is web developer arrogance. Stupidity is to think that web applications have won because web applications are superior to desktop applications. Smarter, but probably still arrogant developers would point to web applications as disruptive technologies. This involves admitting that web applications are inferior, but good enough, and present enough other "cheaper" advantages to compensate for their inferiority.

To understand why the "web apps have won" claim is dubious. There are definitely a lot of awesome web applications out there. Many of them were created back in the mid/late 90′s, The "features" of these applications were the key to applications, not the user interface. Now these days, most of these web applications offer APIs/web services/RESTful interfaces/whatever you want to call them. In many cases it is possible to build desktop applications that tap into the same features as these web applications. However, this was certainly not the case 10-15 years ago.

If a vendor could make installing and updating applications as seamless as web application models, I believe they’d have a goldmine on their hands.

Ease of deployment is what makes web applications rock. It’s not their functionality, or rounded buttons, or big text boxes, or gradients.

You don’t need to write a web application like the often praised 37 Signals’ applications (such as Basecamp) to have a well received application. It’s not because it’s a web application. It’s because they put in the features and functionality that customers need. If they’d written the same in a desktop application, and it was as simple to deploy and use, I’d argue they’d be just as successful.

If you enjoy our post, feel free to subscribes to our rss feeds

http://closure-compiler.appspot.com/home

Compress your javascript files using Google’s Closure Compiler.

I tried a quick experiment using Jquery 1.3.2 development edition, using the “advanced” mode of the compiler:

As a comparison, Jquery from jquery.com (here) is compressed to 55.9KB minified and 19KB gzipped.

Google’s Chrome Compiler shaves off one KB or so. Not bad.

If you enjoy our post, feel free to subscribes to our rss feeds

Sweet!

• Longer battery life for Kindle (Global Wireless): You can now read for up to 1 week on a single charge with wireless on. Turn wireless off and read for up to 2 weeks.
• Built-in PDF reader: Your Kindle can now display PDF documents without losing the formatting of the original file. Send PDF documents directly to your Kindle (via your @Kindle address) or drag and drop PDF files from your computer to your Kindle (when connected via USB). Learn more.
• and a few other things …

Get it here manually, or wait for the auto update.

Kindle 2.3 Update

I immediately added a few manuals for cameras, etc. – things that I take on vacations with me that I occasionally wish I had the manual for. I had converted them using their free service before, but it left them a mangled mess too often. The Nikon D300 manual for instance, is very readble now on the Kindle.

Thanks Amazon for this upgrade!

If you enjoy our post, feel free to subscribes to our rss feeds

I downloaded the open source build of Google’s Chrome operating system from gdgt here and then tried it out in Vmware Workstation 7 running on Windows 7 x64. (It didn’t work the first time I tried it as my fresh Vmware installation required a reboot, which I hadn’t done).

Biggest shock is that they included Flash Player:

Even on my quad core though, it’s barely usable. There aren’t any “vmware tools” for the environment, so my experiences I’m certain don’t represent any real world scenarios. There’s no audio support either, so it’s not useful either.

Apparently, other things are broken as well:

Using CTRL+ALT+T, you can access the terminal. For example, here’s the list of processes running:

Other than that, there’s not much to see. It’s just a browser. Yawn.

Maybe it will become clear why this is such a great thing – but for now, it’s just not clear. It’s probably a good thing that it won’t be ready for a year, as I’m sure that the market overall isn’t ready for a device like this. And if the price difference isn’t much between this and and a Win7 powered netbook, why bother? Even if it can cold start in 7 seconds, I can return from standby on my current laptop in about 2 seconds ….

Are you interested in Google Chrome OS?

If you enjoy our post, feel free to subscribes to our rss feeds