Bitwise Magazine

Beginning Rails 3

Book Review

Thursday 7 October 2010

Beginning Rails 3
By Cloves Carneiro Jr., Rida Al Barazi, Cloves Carneiro
ISBN13: 978-1-4302-2433-4
ISBN10: 1-4302-2433-9
Print Book Price: $39.99 / £31.49
eBook Price: $27.99
APress: http://apress.com/book/view/1430224339
Computer Manuals: http://www.computermanuals.co.uk/scripts/browse.asp?ref=109558

Just when we were getting used to Rails 2, along comes Rails 3. And along comes this book to explain the things you need to know in order to use it. Bet let's go back one step. Maybe you've never used Rails before? Maybe you've been given a job that requires that you use Rails 3 and you don't even know where to begin. Well, this book is for you. The publisher describes ‘Beginning Rails 3' as being “particularly well suited to those with little or no experience with web application development, or who have some experience but are new to Rails”. The authors make it clear at the outset that the aim of the book is to cover the most important features of Rails rather than explaining advanced techniques. With this aim in mind, it begins with a quick overview of the Rails (...)

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Bokeh 2 Review

Photoshop plugin

Wednesday 29 September 2010

Bokeh 2
Alien Skin Software $199
http://www.alienskin.com

Bokeh 2 is a Photoshop-compatible plugin which adds similated lens-blur or ‘out of focus' effects to selected areas of images. Its effects can range from subtle to extreme. For example, you might add very mild - almost imperceptible - blurring around the edges of a photograph in order to emphasize the central region. Or you could create an exaggerated streaked blur to simulate a ‘zoom in' effect for dramatic impact. The first thing you'll notice is that Bokeh 2 has a range of ‘special effects' which were not in Bokeh 1 (reviewed previously). While Bokeh 1 does blur and vignette effects in various combinations, Bokeh 2 also does motion effects to add spins, spirals and zooms radiating out from the central ‘focussed' area through into the surrounding blurred (...)

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Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Unleashed

Book Review

Tuesday 28 September 2010

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Unleashed - $59.99 / £43.99
by Mike Snell , Lars Powers
SAMS
http://visualstudiounleashed.com
http://www.computermanuals.co.uk
ISBN: 0672330814
ISBN13: 9780672330810

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Unleashed provides a fairly thorough overview of the fundamental features of Visual Studio 2010 Professional edition. In other words, it covers the core development tools and technologies of Visual Studio but it does not cover the additional features of high-end editions such as Visual Studio Premium and Ultimate. Nor does it have much to say about Team Foundation Server (which was covered in some detail in the book's previous edition for VS 2008). The book is divided into five sections. Part 1 is an introduction to VS 2010, including an overview of its many tools, windows and menus, for anyone who's never used Visual Studio before; this is followed by a lightweight introduction to programming .NET with C# or VB (C++ and F# are only mentioned in passing). (...)

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Artensoft Photo Mosaic Wizard

Create collages of images

Friday 17 September 2010

Artensoft Photo Mosaic Wizard
$49.95 (personal use); $95.95 (commercial use)
http://www.artensoft.com/

Artensoft Photo Mosaic Wizard is a program that creates images from a digital ‘collage' of hundreds of smaller images. This is, it has to be said, rather a specialised type of image processing; if you've never felt any urge to create mosaic images this software probably won't be of any interest to you; but if you do need to create mosaics, this could be exactly what you are looking for. In order to create a mosaic you need to use a minimum of 1,500 different images (5,000 or more being recommended). Unless you are an incredibly prolific photographer, you may not have sufficient images ready to hand. To get over this problem, Artensoft has two archives of images that can be downloaded. One archive contains an assortment of images, the other contains images relating to world (...)

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Morfik Morphs with Altium

Adding the ’visual’ to AJAX

Thursday 16 September 2010

We’ve written about Morfik AppsBuilder, the visual design environment for creating AJAX applications several times before.

News was announced today of the acquisition of Morfik Technology by Australian global software company, Altium. Altium says that its objective “is to help electronics designers expand their role from designing the electronics in devices to the larger role of designing and engineering web-based ‘device ecosystems'.” These may be “actual electronic devices, connected via the Internet, along with cloud-based software applications that run on this platform.” Altium will continue Morfik's existing business model, which sells software tools and subscriptions for building web-based applications, for Morfik's existing customers. http://www.morfik.com (...)

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AC3D 6.7 - 3D modelling software

review

Tuesday 14 September 2010

AC3D 6.7
$79.95
http://www.inivis.com
Available for Windows, Mac OSX (10.4 and later) and Linux

The latest version of AC3D, the low-cost 3D modelling software, has gained a few useful new capabilities including support for the Collada file format to exchange objects with other software or import models from Google's 3D Warehouse. We reviewed version 6.0 of AC3D four years ago. In the intervening period several point updates have been released adding features such as an iPhone Development Library, improved texturing and support for export of models into Google Earth (see the AC3D forum). Features new to the 6.7 release include improved Windows 7 and 64-bit support; arrow keys now nudge the selection in the Texture Coordinate Editor; Render to Texture plugin now included; Knife plugin included with all versions, plus various other fixes and minor changes. Essentially, AC3D (...)

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Adobe Flash Platform in Visual Studio

Amethyst IDE Launches Today

Monday 30 August 2010

SapphireSteel Software today shipped Amethyst, the Adobe Flash Platform IDE for Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2008 and 2010.

For more information, follow these links... Amethyst Launch Announcement Infoworld News Story Tim Anderson's First Look at Amethyst Dr Dobb's item on Amethyst

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Adobe Flex 4 Training From The Source (vol 1)

Book Review

Friday 27 August 2010

Adobe Flex 4 Training From The Source
Volume 1
byMichael Labriola; Jeff Tapper; Matthew Boles
$44.99 / £36.99

Adobe Press
ISBN-10: 0-321-66050-1
ISBN-13: 978-0-321-66050-3

This combined book/CD package provides a series of step-by-step tutorials which explain the fundamental features of Adobe's Flex 4 framework and aim to guide the user through the creation of a variety of different types of application. The Flex 4 framework is the latest version of Adobe's class libraries and tools for application development using the ActionScript language and Flash. Flex is a complex object-oriented framework which supplies numerous ready-to-use components as well as code for manipulating various types of data and structures such as strings, Dictionaries and XML. The Flex 4 framework is significantly different from its predecessor, Flex 3. For example, it has a new hierarchy of ‘skinnable' visual components in addition to all the components supported by Flex (...)

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Alien Skin Bokeh 2 PhotoShop Plugin

New release

Tuesday 24 August 2010

Alien Skin Software today announced the immediate availability of Bokeh 2, the new version of its lens simulation plug-in for Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom.

Bokeh provides a wide range of creative focus effects and accurate lens simulation in a simple interface. Photographers use Bokeh to draw attention to their subject by manipulating focus, vignette, and depth of field. “Bokeh has grown beyond lens simulation into a creativity tool, especially with the addition of motion blur,” said Terence Tay, the architect of Bokeh. “Now photographers can get sophisticated focus effects without the hassle and expense of using tilt-shift or special effect lenses.” Pricing and Availability Bokeh 2 sells for $199 USD. Owners of Bokeh 1 may upgrade for $99 USD. Online or physical delivery is available through the Alien Skin website at www.alienskin.com. Free upgrades will be automatically sent to purchasers of Bokeh 1 who (...)

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Resolver One: Python-programmable spreadsheet

When formulas are not enough!

Wednesday 18 August 2010

Resolver One $99 / £66
http://www.resolversystems.com

Once upon a time, the dominant spreadsheet was Lotus 1-2-3. These days it's Microsoft Excel. While Excel has added on a whole load of things that were not in 1-2-3, the essential way of working remains much the same: you enter numbers into a matrix and do calculations with formulas placed into cells. Resolver One does things differently. It treats a spreadsheet as a fully programmable tool. You can control it using the Python language. And while it allows you to enter formulas into cells, those formulas are not just isolated commands; Resolver One translates them into Python code. The user interface has two main sections. The spreadsheet area looks just like any standard spreadsheet with its matrix of cells. Beneath this (or, alternatively, to its right) is the coding pane. This (...)

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New Delphi, New RAD Studio

Coming soon...

Wednesday 11 August 2010

I cut my programming teeth on Borland’s Pascal programming software.

It all started in the early '80s with Turbo Pascal. When their visual Pascal product, Delphi, was launched in the '90s, I was one of the first people to use it - and I loved it! Delphi - and various other Borland programming products - is now owned by Embarcadero. A new suite of software, RAD Studio XE, is due out real soon. This will include Delphi, C++Builder, RadPHP (a visual PHP system) and Delphi Prism (a .NET Pascal system for Visual Studio developed by RemObjects). For a first look, go here: http://www.embarcadero.com/rad-studio-xe-preview.

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Amethyst Visual Studio Flash IDE - RC1

Just released

Saturday 31 July 2010

It’s been almost 3 years since my company began work on Amethyst and we are finally very close to shipping the final product...

Amethyst is a Flash/Flex/AIR/ActionScript visual design, coding and debugging environment for Visual Studio 2008 and 2010. It has all the things you'd expect from a VS IDE - drag+drop, click+code, IntelliSense, drilldown debugging, customizable code formatting, refactoring and so on. Anyway, if you want to find out more or download the release candidate, head over to the SapphireSteel Software web site: http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Blog/article/amethyst-release-candidate-1

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The Death Of Books?

The Life Of Kindle...

Wednesday 21 July 2010

Yup, it’s official! Books made of paper bound in cardboard (or leather if you have the money) are now a thing of the past. Amazon has announced that digital books, to be read on its hand-held ’Kindle’ reader are now outselling hardbacks.

I guess I might as well pulp all the waste paper that's cluttering up my bookshelves. It's old technology, outmoded, yesterday's dross. From now on, my life will be lived vicariously on a screen. Here I sit at my computer all day, reading words on a screen. In the evening I'll turn on the TV and look at people on a screen. If I want entertainment, I can play games on a screen. I can phone people and play ‘apps' on a screen. And finally, the last piece in the jigsaw, I can read books on a screen! OK, let me be honest here. I don't own a Kindle, I don't own an iPhone and I rarely watch TV. But I do like, love, adore, roll over on my back and kick my little paws in the air for the sheer joy of reading books. Books to me are not disposable items - browsed today, forgotten tomorrow. (...)

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Free Web Sites - grab one now!

If you can find a name

Saturday 10 July 2010

Once upon a time if you wanted a web site you had to be geeky enough to know stuff like HTML, CSS, JavaScript and FTP. Then along came the free blog services such as WordPress and Blogger - and suddenly anyone could run their own site.

But blogs are limited to, well, blogging. If you don't want to blog, you don't want to write HTML and you don't want to pay a company for the privilege of hosting your site, what are your alternatives? One is called Jimdo. You can sign up for a free Jimdo account at http://www.jimdo.com and start creating a real web site with separate sections for pages of text, pictures or videos, a contact submission form, a guestbook - even an online shop. And yes, of course, a blog too if you wish... The nice thing about Jimdo is that the site design tools are all ‘live' in the user interface - that is, once you log in, you can add or delete sections, enter text and restyle pages right there in the web site. You don't have to log into an ‘administration' back-end to make changes and (...)

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Flex 4 Cookbook

Book Review

Friday 2 July 2010

Flex 4 Cookbook $49.99 / £38.50
by Joshua Noble, Todd Anderson, Garth Braithwaite, Marco Casario, Rich Tretola, et al.
O’Reilly Media http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596805623
Pages: 768

Adobe's Flex 4 framework introduces a number of significant new features so the updated version of this book (the previous edition was called, unsurprisingly, The Flex 3 Cookbook) is very welcome. In fact, this is not merely an ‘updated' version of the last edition. It is a substantially different book. In particular, those sections dealing with the visual component library are often almost completely new or hugely rewritten. This is because they describe Flex 4's ‘Spark' controls which are quite different from Flex 3's MX or ‘Halo' controls and they often need different techniques and methods when using them. Chapters dealing with visual design and manipulation of Flex components have undergone a major rewrite. In fact, often whole chapters from the Flex 3 (...)

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Will You Pay For News Online?

The Big Times Experiment

Friday 2 July 2010

Today, the UK’s well-known Times newspaper started charging people to read online. But will they pay...?

Let me say right up front that I won't. The Times was, until recently, one of the online news sources which I read fairly often. Others includes British newspapers such as The Guardian and The Telegraph, American papers such as The New York Times and Washington Post, broadcasters such as CNN and The BBC - and a whole bunch of bloggers. When The Times announced, a couple of months ago, that it would soon be charging, I stopped reading it. That is, I stopped when it was still free. The reason being that I asked myself whether I thought the Times was so much better than all the free sources of news that I'd be prepared to pay. The answer I came up with was a decisive No. So, like the habitual smoker who finally decides to quit, I did it there and then rather than deferring the pain. (...)

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Flash & Flex Developer’s Magazine - free download

July Edition

Thursday 1 July 2010

If you write programs for The Flash Platform, you are sure to find articles of interest in Flash & Flex Developer’s Magazine.

This is a high quality, free PDF-format magazine published monthly and available from: http://ffdmag.com/. I've contributed an article to this issue, explaining some of the differences between Flex 3 and Flex 4, particularly in reference to the parent/child relationships between containers and the controls they contain. This has been one of the problems we've had to solve in order to make the drag-and-drop designer in my company's Flash Platform IDE work with both Flash 3 ('Halo') and Flash 4 ('Spark') controls. If you have any plans to use Flex 4, the article may save you some time and grief...

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Alien Skin Releases Exposure 3

Image Processing Plugin

Tuesday 22 June 2010

Alien Skin Software, a company specialising in image processing and art-effect plugins for PhotoShop and compatible software, has today released the latest version of its photograph enhancement tool, Exposure.

Exposure 3 lets digital photographers apply traditional camera effects to their images. Over 500 presets aim to emulate the look of photographs taken using specific types of film stock and exposure effects. Alien Skin claims that this new release is much faster than the previous version. For my review of the last release, Exposure 2, see HERE. For information on Exposure 3, visit the Alien Skin Software web site: http://www.alienskin.com/exposure.

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Visual C# 2010 Recipes - A Problem Solving Approach

Book Review

Tuesday 15 June 2010

Visual C# 2010 Recipes - A Problem Solving Approach $54.99 / £43.49
By Allen Jones, Adam Freeman,
ISBN13: 978-1-4302-2525-6
ISBN10: 1-4302-2525-4
1016 pages
http://apress.com/book/view/1430225254
http://www.computermanuals.co.uk/

I generally like the ‘recipes' type of book. I certainly don't have the patience to study a 1000 page programming book in strict sequence from page 1 to page 1000. And, to be perfectly honest, I can't think of any programming books that really merit that kind of study. Unless you are learning to program from scratch every book will undoubtedly contain many things that you know already and don't want to read about all over again! Programming recipe books are for people like me who want to dip in and find specific information quickly. Visual C# 2010 Recipes is just the job. It contains 17 thematic chapters covering everything from broad ranging topics such as ‘Application Development' to tightly focused subjects such as ‘Security and Cryptography' and ‘Using (...)

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Stuff that’s entertained me this week...

Stuff’n’Nonsense on YouTube

Monday 7 June 2010

Some blogs make a habit of posting lists of more or less random links to things the blog’s author happens to find of interest. I’ve never done that. But, hey, there’s a first time for everything...

So this week, here are a few videos which, for one reason or another have helped to while away the time.... First, a funny one... Then a banned one... One for fans of ‘60s music (and Petra the Blue Peter Dog)... One for fans of Bollywood.... And finally, one for fans of British comedy... YouTube never ceases to amaze me. Until a few years ago, most of the clips above would have been almost impossible for most people to track down. Their presence on YouTube is largely thanks to enthusiasts who find, record and archive video clips and make them available to the rest of us. Wonderful! I've uploaded a video of my own to YouTube this week. As it is by no means as entertaining as any of the clips above, however, I'll omit it from today's list. Maybe I'll get around to my (...)

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