Author: Joe

Categories
Video Games

Professor Layton and the Curious Village

Professor Layton and the Curious VillageIf you enjoy challenging puzzles, then you must try Professor Layton and the Curious Village on the DS. The game is a series of over 120 puzzles set in an adventure style game. Many of theses puzzles are difficult, very difficult.

The European art style is reminiscent from old European cartoons from the 70’s and early 80’s. It works really well for the theme. Very cool, you get better at solving the various puzzles as you play through. Though I still am terrible at the ones where you have to decide who’s telling the truth, seem to better at the one’s involving shapes or math.

Categories
Development

Adobe AIR

Adobe AIRStarted fooling around with Adobe AIR a bit. Here’s the description of what it is from Adobe: a cross-operating system runtime that allows you to leverage your existing web development skills (Adobe® Flash® CS3 Professional, Adobe® Flexâ„¢, HTML, JavaScript®, Ajax) to build and deploy Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) to the desktop. AIR enables you to work in familiar environments, to leverage the tools and approaches you find most comfortable, and by supporting Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, and Ajax, to build the best possible experience that meets your needs.

To sum it up, it allows web developers to write desktop applications using the skills they already know. So that’s really cool. The AIR Developer Center has a ton of useful info.

Categories
Development

YUI 2.5.0 Released

The cool developers at Yahoo! just released version 2.5.0 of the Yahoo User Interface. They’ve added six new components:

There’s also major improvements to DataTable Control and the Slider Control.

This looks to be a very cool release, can’t wait to see what I can hack together with these new components.

Categories
Video Games

The Legend of Zelda Phantom Hourglass

LinebeckJust finished up the Phantom Hourglass for the DS. Is was a very good game, extremely innovative use of the stylus, dual screens and the microphone. The game is completely controlled with the stylus, which really worked well. Having to draw notes on the map at certain points was a really cool idea.

The art was similar to the cartoony style found in the Wind Waker. The art really worked well on the DS, some of the finest graphics I’ve seen on the DS. Excellent game, it’s clear why most sites chose it as 2007 handheld game of the year.

Categories
Movies

Rambo

RamboWas hanging out with the Shepherd this afternoon and while thinking of something to do, he remembered that he had some movie passes that were due to expire soon. It would be just wrong to let something free go unused. So the big decision of what film to witness was now upon us.

After seeing that Rambo was showing at 3:50, without a moments hesitation it was decided that the film Rambo would be seen on this day. I grew up admiring and hoping to grow up to be a one man killing machine like John Rambo since Rambo: First Blood 2 came out back in 1985 (hard to believe it was that long ago).

The movie wasn’t that bad. By no means was it a great film that I would recommend that you must see, but it wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be. Granted it was one of the most violent films I’d ever seen. I couldn’t begin to try to count how many deaths occurred in just an hour and a half, but for an action film it rarely got dull. My favorite scene of all was when he detonated the WWII English bomb with the claymore. It was Rambo carnage at it’s finest.

Categories
Development

Site Redesign

Decided to redesign the this site. I tend to lean towards dark colors with my personal stuff, but decided to try using some brighter colors for a change. So I picked some colors from a favorite t-shirt I used to wear back when I went to Belhaven. It’s still a work in progress, but I figured it was close enough to begin switching over.

I’m using the Zend Framework to interact with the YouTube Data API. It’s really awesome to work with if you’re a PHP developer and I’ve been relying on Zend a lot recently in many of the newer projects I’ve been working on. If you notice anything that seems broken or out of place please let me know as there’s still plenty of stuff I’ve got to finish up.