Bitwise Magazine

Codelobster 3.5 Free PHP IDE

A new version of the Codelobster PHP IDE has just been released

Friday 4 June 2010

While I must admit that I am not a regular PHP programmer, I have used Codelobster in the past and found it pretty impressive. What’s more, at a total cost of nothing it could hardly be better value!

New in this version: Facebook plug-in: Autocomplete for Facebook JavaScript SDK Autocomplete for Facebook PHP SDK Autocomplete for FQL (Facebook Query Language) Autocomplete for FBML (Facebook Markup Language) Context Help for Facebook Core APIs CakePHP plug-in: Autocomplete for CakePHP Core Helpers Autocomplete for CakePHP Core Components Autocomplete for CakePHP Core Behaviors Drupal plug-in: Upgrade for support latest versions Plus: FTP improvement SFTP support Editable templates for new files Search&Replace dialog improvement New black color scheme was added HTML links navigation Full feature list and download at: (...)

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The Essential Guide to Flash Games

Book Review

Thursday 3 June 2010

(Building Interactive Entertainment with ActionScript)
By Jeff Fulton, Steve Fulton
$49.99 / £39.49
http://www.friendsofed.com/book.html?isbn=9781430226147
http://www.computermanuals.co.uk
(authors’ web site): http://www.8bitrocket.com/book
ISBN-10: 1-4302-2614-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-4302-2614-7
600 Pages

What a great book this is! Don't be deceived into thinking that, since it is a book about games programming, it must necessarily be trivial. It isn't. I've read many books on ‘serious' programming topics that are much less informative and well structured than this one. In the course of twelve chapters, the authors guide you through all the essential details of creating and interacting with graphic games programmed in ActionScript. Along the way they create a reusable ‘framework' of classes and methods which can be employed by the games you create. They explain how to do animation and event-driven programming, how to use audio and graphic assets, perform ‘collision detection' (e.g. when a missile hits its target) and much more. While this would obviously be of (...)

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SnagIt 10

Screen capture made better

Tuesday 25 May 2010

SnagIt 10 $49.95 / £37 Inc VAT
Techsmith: http://www.techsmith.com/screen-capture.asp

In Windows it's easy to take a screenshot. Press PrintScreen to grab the whole screen or ALT+PrintScreen to grab the current window. So why would anyone need a special ‘screen-grabbing' application such as SnagIt? SnagIt comes in two parts: the capture tool (bottom right) and the image editor (behind) There are, in fact, some very good reasons. SnagIt goes way, way beyond the built-in capabilities of Windows. Not only is its screen-grabber vastly more capable than the good old PrintScreen key but it also comes with a feature-rich image editor to let you enhance, resize, annotate your grabs and save them in a variety of different formats. Anyone who writes for books, magazines, technical documents or web sites knows that screen grabs are invaluable for illustrating your (...)

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Tweeting At Last

OK, so I finally gave in...

Friday 21 May 2010

I’ve been on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and various other ’social networks’ but, up to now, I have never ’tweeted’.

Yesterday, I finally gave in. It turns out that even my older and (I had always thought!) less trendy brother (I believe he still wears elastic-sided winkle-picker shoes) is on Twitter. So I decide the time had finally come to throw in the towel and get tweeting. No idea what I'll tweet about. The restriction to 140 characters per tweet seems rather onerous. As regular readers of my ramblings here and elsewhere will no doubt know, once I get started, there ain't no stopping me. A Facebook friend reminded me that I have already had good practice at writing in bite-sized chunks as I have been a long-time contributor to a couple of Facebook story-writing apps which limit authors to contributing three words at a time; then another writer has to write another three words and so on. Ah (...)

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Adobe Flex in Visual Studio 2010

Latest Amethyst release

Monday 3 May 2010

As some of you will know, I have a life beyond the confines of Bitwise...

In fact, most of the last two and a half years have been taken up with my company's development of a Visual Studio IDE for the Adobe Flash Platform (including the Flex framework). Well, we just put out our first pre-release version for VS2010. More news here: http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Flex-In-Visual-Studio-2010.

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Flash Decompiler Trillix 4

Compiled ActionScript decompilation

Saturday 1 May 2010

Flash Decompiler Trillix 4
SWF/FLA/ActionScript conversion tool
$79.95
Eltima Software: http://www.eltima.com/products/flashdecompiler/

Most .NET users are probably familiar with .NET Reflector, a tool that peers into compiled .NET assemblies and displays their contents as human-readable C# or Visual Basic code. Flash Decompiler Trillix 4 is a similar tool for Flash developers. It peers into compiled SWFs and displays their contents as ActionScript. This may look like my original ActionScript source code but it isn't. It is Flash Decompiler Trillix's reconstruction of the source code based on the information in a compiled SWF file. Flash Decompiler Trillix lets you browse to a SWF using an integrated disk explorer then simply drag the file into a task pane to view its code ‘decompiled'. Typically this will show a tree-structure mimicking the original project structure with ‘folder' nodes for the various (...)

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Essential C# 4.0, 3rd Edition

Book Review

Friday 16 April 2010

Essential C# 4.0, 3rd Edition _by Mark Michaelis
Addison-Wesley Professional
$49.99 / £36.99
pages: 984
ISBN-10: 0-321-69469-4
ISBN-13: 978-0-321-69469-0
http://www.informit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0321694694
http://www.computermanuals.co.uk

The new third edition of ‘Essential C#' is a thick book that covers a lot of ground. In essence, this aims to describe all the principal features of the C# language from the basics (yes, it does have the traditional ‘Hello World' program) right through to the advanced ( ‘Event-Based Asynchronous Pattern' anyone..?). The book is well structured with each chapter devoted to a clearly defined topic whose various ramifications are illustrated by a little ‘mind map' on the first page of the chapter. For example, the chapter on Exception Handling shows a ‘map' with ‘Exception handling' in a box in the middle with numbered branches sprouting out from it: 1) Multiple Exception Types, 2) Catching Exceptions, 3) General Catch Block, 4) Guidelines and 5) (...)

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Camtasia Studio 7

Professional screencasting tool

Tuesday 13 April 2010

Camtasia Studio 7
$299 / £220 (inc VAT)
TechSmith
http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp

Camtasia Studio is such a mature, feature-rich product that it becomes increasingly difficult to imagine what new features are left to be crammed into it. The most obvious change to the new version, Camtasia Studio 7, is the redesigned user interface. This look much slicker than the previous release. It also incorporates some new tools and resources. The video editing environment is divided into three main areas. As before, the video preview is on the right of the screen and the timeline runs across the bottom. It is in area at the top-left of the screen that most of the major changes have been made. This area now contains a stack of tabbed pages which makes it much easier to switch between functional areas of the software. Previously many areas - devoted, say, to narration or (...)

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Spam Kills The Beaver

The fatal consequences of junk email

Monday 29 March 2010

The BBC web site has a, to my mind, rather sad article about the end of an era for a Canadian magazine which, for the last 90 years, has been known by the name of one of Canada’s most recognisable and endearing creatures.

The Beaver, alas, is no more. Canada's venerable history magazine will henceforth be known by the altogether less memorable (and really rather dull) name, “Canada's History”. And all because spam filters object to its previous name! I have heard before that some spam filters have problems with the names of English towns, due to certain substrings which they contain (the BBC mentions ‘Scunthorpe' as being particularly problematic) but I had not previously realised the dangers of names derived from the animal world. Spam is an ongoing problem for all of us. I personally have Spam filters set on my PC up in Outlook and a couple of Spam-blockers also set up on the server - one of which requires emailers to respond to an automated message before their email will be (...)

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Introducing .NET 4.0: with Visual Studio 2010

Book Review

Tuesday 16 March 2010

Introducing .NET 4.0: with Visual Studio 2010
By Alex Mackey
ISBN13: 978-1-4302-2455-6
ISBN10: 1-4302-2455-X
$39.99 / £31.49 (eBook Price: $27.99)
APress: http://www.apress.com/book/view/143022455X
Computer Manuals: http://www.computermanuals.co.uk

Normally, you might think that a 0.5 update to a piece of software is no big deal. In fact, the update from .NET 3.5 to 4.0 is a very big deal indeed. Moreover, not only are the changes to the .NET Framework substantial but so too are the changes to most .NET programmers' IDE of choice, Visual Studio. In this book, Alex Mackey takes on the task of covering all the essential details of .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 for a target audience of .NET 3.5/VS2008 developers. The assumption of a target readership with .NET and VS experience is important to note. There is no way that any author - or any team of authors - could begin to do justice to the vast scope of this IDE and framework in a book of just over 400 pages. Instead, Mackey sensibly concentrates on what is new and what is (...)

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SWF & FLV ToolBox 4

Flash video conversion utility

Monday 15 March 2010

SWF & FLV ToolBox 4
Flash-to-Video Conversion Utility
$39.95 (on offer - regular price is: $55.95)
Eltima Software: http://www.eltima.com/products/swf-tools

Videos and animations in Adobe Flash format seem to be everywhere you look these days - whether it be cartoon badgers or YouTube videos, you can bet your bottom dollar it's Flash. But Flash isn't the only video format you'll ever need. There may be times when you want to use a video with software that doesn't support Flash. Or you may want to convert a Flash into AVI for viewing in Windows Media Player. You may even want to create an animated GIF for you web site based on frames in a Flash movie. Whatever your reasons, if you want to convert Flash videos to another format you have a problem. And that is exactly the problem that Eltima Software's SWF & FLV Toolbox is designed to solve. Using a simple user interface it lets you open a Flash format video and simply convert it to (...)

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Pro Silverlight 3 in C#

Book Review

Friday 5 March 2010

Pro Silverlight 3 in C#
By Matthew MacDonald
ISBN13: 978-1-4302-2381-8
ISBN10: 1-4302-2381-2
Print Book Price: $49.99 / £39.49
eBook Price: $34.99
APress: http://www.apress.com/book/view/1430223812
Computer Manuals: http://www.computermanuals.co.uk

Silverlight is Microsoft's browser-based ‘rich internet application' technology and it is a competitor to Adobe's ubiquitous Flash. At almost 800 pages in length [1], this book looks as though it should be a fairly comprehensive guide to Silverlight 3. Well, I'm not really sure than even 800 pages is enough to do justice to all of Silverlight 3 and the various tools and technologies that underpin it. Even so, this book provides a pretty thorough introduction to Silverlight development. Its twenty chapters cover topics ranging from the fundamentals of design and layout through to more specialist topics such as ASP.NET, web services, data binding and multithreading. The author's assumption throughout is that he is addressing programmers rather than designers and that their (...)

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Gibraltar 2

Logging Software

Thursday 4 March 2010

Software for collecting diagnostic information from remote sites.

Available from www.gibraltarsoftware.com.

Price: Hub $499; Agents are free

There are two ways to debug applications. The obvious one is to use a debugger. This is great while you are developing the application initially, but once the application is out in the wide world, it's not too hot. How do you debug a client application in Paris if you are in San Francisco? And so, there's a second way – ‘instrument' the software. ‘Instrumentation' at its simplest is scattering print statements like “I'm here” at various places in the code. More useful instrumentation records entry into methods, loading of modules and can have quite sophisticated levels of tracing that are dynamically switchable. In .NET there actually is the basis of an instrumentation system – the Trace call. This, for example, outputs a message to the console (...)

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Amethyst Flash IDE Edge Release

Now with ’live’ view

Wednesday 17 February 2010

Those of you following the progress of my company’s Adobe Flash IDE, Amethyst, might be interested to take a look at the latest ’edge’ release.

It's still in beta but getting ever closer to the full final version now. This new release has a 'live mode' in the visual Design workspace which lets you 'activate' all the controls. That means that radio buttons can be checked, text entry fields can have text entered into them and rollover buttons change colour (etc.) when the mouse hovers over them. This is pretty darn' cool, if I do say so myself! Anyway, more information over on the SapphireSteel Software blog: http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Live-Flex-Design-Amethyst-update

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Beginning Silverlight 3

Book Review

Tuesday 16 February 2010

Beginning Silverlight 3
By Robert Lair
ISBN13: 978-1-4302-2377-1
ISBN10: 1-4302-2377-4
Print Book Price: $39.99 / £31.49
eBook Price: $27.99

APress: http://www.apress.com/book/view/1430223774 Computer Manuals: http://www.computermanuals.co.uk If you are new to Rich Internet Application development with Microsoft's Silverlight, this book promises to “teach you the fundamental concepts and techniques” which you will need to get started. At just over 300 pages in length (the web site states 500 pages but it is actually numbered up to page 335 including the index) this modestly-sized book is divided into thirteen chapters that take you from the basics of designing and coding browser-based Silverlight applications using Visual Studio 2008 right through to discussions of more specialized topics such as data-binding, styling and animation. Before you start, you will need to install a suite of Silverlight Tools for (...)

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Chip and Pin Secure? Think again!

Time to go back to cash maybe?

Thursday 11 February 2010

I have to say I’ve never been enthused by ’chip and pin’ credit card verification. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that, shortly after my bank introduced this technology a few years ago, several thousand pounds mysteriously vanished from my bank account.

That money went via a telephone booking for a hotel in America (I was in Britain at the time) to a name not associated with my card and with no address being on record! So much for chip and pin. It simply doesn't work over the phone. But if you make a purchase 'face to face', as it were, chip and pin must be secure, mustn't it? The chip in your card is unique and your 'pin' verification number is known only to you so what could go wrong? Quite a lot, it seems. Researchers at my old University have come up with a simple machine that fools chip and pin readers into accepting any verification number you care to dream up. But maybe the devices needed to fool the cards are super difficult to make and require teams of propeller-headed boffins and huge stacks of money? Nope - alas not. (...)

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Ruby In Steel 1.5 Released

With updated JRuby debugger

Monday 8 February 2010

Ruby In Steel is my company (SapphireSteel Software)’s Ruby and Rails IDE for Visual Studio.

This latest release updates our support for the Java-based Ruby implementation, JRuby, which is now a very good, mature product with a decent Windows installer. The Ruby In Steel editor and integrated console supports multiple versions of Ruby: 1.8.x, 1.9.1 and JRuby 1.4. In addition, we have two debuggers - one for Ruby 1.8 and another for JRuby 1.4. Ruby In Steel 1.5 supports named Build Configurations so you can quickly swap Ruby interpreters for running or debugging by selecting a configuration name from a drop-down list (as shown above). More on the SapphireSteel Software web site: http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Ruby-In-Steel-1-5-Released

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CodeHealer For Delphi - Exclusive Offer

Delphi code analysis tool at almost half price

Monday 1 February 2010

SOCK Software is offering a limited time special deal of CodeHealer 2.6 for Bitwise readers at a cost of only $199. This represents a massive saving of $180 off the regular price ($379).

CodeHealer is a powerful code analysis tool which can find and fix many errors and redundancies in your Delphi code. It works with all Win32 versions of Delphi from Delphi 5 onwards and with Delphi For .NET from versions 8 to 2007. We recently reviewed the latest version of CodeHealer HERE. To buy CodeHealer at this special price just use the coupon code BITWISE26 at the checkout when ordering from the SOCK Software Web site at http://www.codehealer.com. This coupon code is valid immediately and will expire on March 31 2010. CodeHealer can find and fix many Delphi coding problems

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iPFaces - Mobile App framework

A simple way on the iPhone?

Friday 29 January 2010

Edhouse has released version 1.1 of iPFaces project, the framework for simple creation of native, form-oriented network applications for mobile devices (iPhone, BlackBerry, Mobile Java).

The company says that iPFaces aims to screen the programmer out from the mobile platform itself, and transfer the entire application logic to central application server level. Developers with experience with one of the supported Web technologies (ASP.Net, Java, and PHP) may start working with iPFaces virtually immediately. For more information, see the project web site at http://www.ipfaces.org.

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CodeHealer 2.6

Updated code analysis tool for Delphi

Tuesday 26 January 2010

CodeHealer 2.6 $379
SOCK Software
http://www.socksoftware.com/

There is more to writing good, clean, reliable code than just, well, writing it. No matter how careful you may be, no matter how much testing and debugging you may do, it is almost inevitable that occasions will arise when errors, ambiguities and unused bits of code will somehow creep in.

Here I have analysed a Delphi project with CodeHealer. The possible problems are listed at the bottom left and the code to which they refer is shown on the right. Here I have highlighted an unreferenced function and I am using the ‘Heal' menu to have it automatically commented out. If you happen to be a Delphi programmer, SOCK Software's CodeHealer may help you to find and fix a number of potential problems that would otherwise be extremely difficult to track down. I reviewed CodeHealer 2.1 a few years ago. The latest version, 2.6, is an updated version whose core functionality and user interface is broadly similar to that earlier version so, if you are unfamiliar with this product, you may want to take a look at my previous review. In brief, CodeHealer is a stand-alone code (...)

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