Things I did last week – 4 Jan 2011

Gonna try a new thing here, every week I’m going to post up a quick summary of what I’ve been up to tech wise. Hopefully you find something useful in here.

Lightworks Beta

I tried out the beta of  Lightworks, the newly open-sourced video editor from EditShare. It seems amazingly powerful and the UI is very pretty. Unfortunately I had a hard time with its concepts of bins, racks and edits. I continuously lost things and getting clips onto the timeline (stripview) seemed really clumsy. I think I may have to go back and RTFM on this one :)

Node.js

I watched an introduction video on node.js, it has some very  interesting concepts,  I then got distracted creating a simple MUD using node (as you do). It works very nicely but JavaScript sure has a lot of quirks when try do advanced things like “classes”.

Wikipedia

I created my first Wikipedia article, it is an entry on 4LW. I also did some digging into downloading the content of Wikipedia (it’s big) and the cool WikiReader device. I figure having the contents of Wikipedia would be very handy post a civilization destroying event.

Actually I’m thinking that  a cool project would be to use something like OneBeep to continuously stream the contents of Wikipedia over shortwave radio. Not quite sure how I would broadcast the bootstrap instructions so that people/aliens could tap into the feed however.

Android Apps

I spent some time updating my Android app entries in the Android Market. For some reason you now have to upload a 512x512px icon along with the app, so I took the opportunity to rework some of my icons (hooray for Inkscape) and released new versions of my apps. I also added a “Share” menu option to ScanPaste so that you can now share the scanned barcodes with other apps.

I’m also did some work on my Android games. Currently Frakt is the one that is closest to completion out of the 4 I have on the boil. I think I’m going to focus on it and use it a technology testbed. I’m using the very cool AndEngine to power the games.

Lego Digital Designer

This is a great app that lets you build virtual Lego models, create build instructions and even place an order for the physical bricks to build your design. I was hoping to order a bunch of armed Lego men for use with Brikwars but it became very pricey very quickly. I might have to scour some garage sales or Trademe instead.

Links from Twitter

Links I posted on Twitter in the last week: