Google App Engine

Appengine is fresh and buzzing, check it out if you havent heard of it yet. If only it was not working for python only. I dont need to tell you what is the language of Web, do i?:)
Also Salesforce and Google integration got some fresh news.

Amoba going opensource

I have published my gomoku (5 in a row) game as a free-to-take project on sourceforge. I was not touching the source since 2004 now, and i dont plan to develop further myself. If anyone finds it interesting, or just wants snippets from the code, feel free to use it, it is licensed under GPL.
The latest executable is still available from my homepage, or from sourceforge itself. Sourcecode is available in SVN repo.

Zend Framework and Smarty

I am about to start a new project based on ZF, the library looks like a beast to be tamed at first sight, i still need to learn a lot about it. I was doing some preliminary investigations how to use Smarty with its Zend_View component. A lot of info on the web looks outdated, but i found a great blog here (and old version here). Jani is a young Finnish developer-jedi, and i really like his writings about ZF and templating engines, just to list a few of them:

• Different PHP template engines
• Introduction to Zend_Layout (updated for ZF 1.5!)
• Client-side validation with Zend_Form

After all, i am still not sure which way to go. Shall i force Smarty as a View extension? Shall i completely leave out View component, and use Smarty manually from the controllers? Shall i forget Smarty and stick to the default View and Layout components in ZF using the ugly php syntax?
During my investigations, i also came across the blog of Matthew Weier O'Phinney, who is an actual developer of ZF, so it might be worth keeping an eye on him:)

CSS Naked Day

Tomorrow is CSS Naked Day. Strip all your styles from your webpage, if you dare! I think i won't be that bold, but its an interesting initiative from Dustin Diaz, and so far some 700 sites have joined.

Becoming ZCE

Ok, so here is what kept me busy last week. Now i am officially Zend Certified (PHP5) Engineer :)

Adobe AIR for Linux (Alpha)

Adobe published their first version of AIR for Linux. It lacks some features yet, but worth trying out.

Save the developer + css support in IE

I recently came accross this site. Great to spread the word amongst people stuck with IE6. Although i am not that big fan of IE7 either, and i would definitely change the order of the recommendations.
[UPDATE: the above link was removed. Read on here.]

Why IE6 sucks? There are many issues, just to grab one, it is poor CSS support. Related to this there is a new doc from Microsoft showing the css selector support in running versions of Explorer. That might be useful to check one day.

Photoshop Express

Adobe just released their long awaited Photoshop Express. An in-browser image manipulation solution that is supposed to have some similar feel/functionality to the desktop version. While the resemblance is quite weak, there are some nice things you can do in the Flex-based Express edition. To upload your own photos you need to register, but a test-drive is available.

Acid3 fever

Just one day after Opera passing 100/100 on Acid3 appeared in the news, Safari team also announced Webkit to be passing the test. Apparently the test was also changing in the meanwhile, but they are both doing pretty well anyways. What about Firefox? Well, due to the upcoming release of version 3, it is not a subject of interest at the moment.

[Source: Ajaxian]

A new guy in WYSIWYG-town

Honestly i havent heard much about jTagEditor before, but apparently it got renamed as markItUp, and checking out their examples, all seems fine.
It is based on jQuery and intends to be a lightweight editor that you can use to produce normal html code, but you can squeeze out bbcode, wiki or markdown syntax as well.

Google docs goes offline

Hopefully this one is not an April fool's joke. Pretty soon we will be able to edit our documents while not connected to the Internet. More details and demo video here.