I am pretty sure you have already played an archery or bowman game once in your life. This online flash game is probably not what you are expecting though. There is no target. The objective is to throw your arrows directly at another opponent!
Good thing about the game is that it is not very addictive. Once you kill the computer a couple of times it gets boring. You can spice it up by aiming at specific body parts…
There are good chances you already came across the term “cloud computing” once or twice, even if you don’t completely grasp the meaning of the term. If that is the case, check out this article on Business Week titled How Cloud Computing Is Changing the World. It gives some good examples of how cloud computing is starting to shape the way companies do business, and individuals interact with IT. Here is a small quote:
The term “cloud computing” encompasses many areas of tech, including software as a service, a software distribution method pioneered by Salesforce.com about a decade ago. It also includes newer avenues such as hardware as a service, a way to order storage and server capacity on demand from Amazon and others. What all these cloud computing services have in common, though, is that they’re all delivered over the Internet, on demand, from massive data centers.
A pit-stop on the Wikipedia article for cloud computing can help also. This is probably one of the most important shifts that we will see on the coming years, so make sure to understand it.
Over at TechCult there is a list with 20 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Stick In Your USB Socket. You think you saw them all? A USB Ghost Radar? A Barbie USB Driver?
Man, these people are either cretive geniuses, or they have nothing better to do. Probably the second option…. Anyway head to the full article and check out the 20 items. I am considering buy a couple of them. the laser guided rocket launcher would rock on if I was still working inside an office.
My friends introduced me to this game called Winterbells, and I want to share it with you as well. The game’s rules are simple. You will assume control of a cute little rabbit and jump from bell to bell (and the occasional bird to double your score). But be warned, this game is very addicting, as you aim for a literally skyrocketting score.
I recommend playing this game when you’re bored from work or fed up with assignments. It is will help soothe you, what with the mild snow, the white bells, and the adorably cute rabbit. The soundtrack is not bad either, so check it out.
Adobe AIR showed a lot of potential during its period of public beta but unfortunately had very few applications that really took advantage of the technology. Thankfully over the last month or so we have begun to see some impressive and useful applications being released.
Here is my pick of the current offerings:
A favourite of many Alert Thingy started as a FriendFeed application but has since added support for Twitter and the ability to upload photos to Flickr. If you are a user of these services then you will love being able to access the services from within the same interface and window.
This is a great little application, although obviously it will only appeal to a small group of you. Using the virtual fretboard like below you can find any scale for a range of options including root notes, scale types, number of strings, number of frets and tunings.
This information can be found elsewhere online, but I don’t know one other resource that freely provides this information in a way that rivals Guitar Scales for simplicity and functionality.
“Klok is a tool intended to be used by individuals, like myself, who have a need to track the time they spend on projects, tasks or anything else for that matter.” If you find Klok to be a bit more complicated then what you need, I recommend Timecloc which is much simpler and is essentially a stop watch, although you can still add different projects.
“ReadAir is an OSX Themed Desktop Client for Mac or Windows. Built with Adobe Air” and available for download from Google Code. I wasn’t actually aware of this one till today due to it not being listed in the AIR application directory. DailyApps discovered it and ran an article about it yesterday.
Twhirl is another Twitter and FriendFeed client. Its main feature is the ability to be signed into multiple Twitter and FriendFeed accounts simultaneously. It has a tool for shortening URLs, you can update Pownce and Jaiku, upload pics to TweetPic and use TweetScan to search for tweets.
pwnceshotI really wonder what the future of Pownce is. Successful startups all generally have one specific focus that can generally be summarized in one word or phrase. Google is search, Twitter is micro-blogging, Flickr is photo sharing and so on. Pownce seems to have a little of everything and as such is making little headway in any.
However If you are a Pownce user however then this application is a must; you’ll find it a great deal easier staying up to date on your contact’s latest notes, files and photos etc. An option I feel is lacking is the ability to minimize to the system tray.
This is one of the first, and still one of the best, AIR applications. It’s impressive in that it really goes beyond replicating an online service on the desktop and instead extends and enhances the experience. Not only does it look great, but Ebay Desktop takes a far more graphical and interactive approach with the browsing, tracking and buying and selling of items.
Drag and drop functionality, instant search results and a real time clock that counts down to the end of the auction are some of the features in this app. If you are even an occasional Ebay user its worth giving Ebay Desktop a try.
Google Analytics is a favourite of many bloggers as it provides easy access to all your Analytics data and profiles from your desktop. It’s attractive and extremely useful if you use Analytics on a regular basis. (You can also get Google Trends on your desktop with XeGTrends)
The iPhone for sure shook the mobile industry, but now people are claiming that it will also affect the mobile gaming one. Time just published an article on that line titled Can the iPhone Rule Gaming?.
The numbers they present are pretty interesting. Here is a quote:
The cell-phone gaming market is ripe for the picking. While millions of people play games on the portable Nintendo DS and Sony PSP every day, fewer than 10% of cell-phone users in the U.S. do the same on their phones, according to Nielsen Mobile. What’s more, the average cell-phone gamer spends just $8 a year on new games, versus an estimated $45 a year for users of the PSP and $65 yearly for DS players.
I certainly can see the average money spent by mobile gamers on the rise with the introduction of the iPhone, but I don’t see it threatening the market of Nintendo DS. Nokia has tried in the past with N-Gage, and we all know how it went…
Hardcore mobile gamers don’t buy the iPhone (they are supposedly younger and don’t go around locking themselves in a 2 year phone contract), and hardcore iPhone users only play gamers occasionally while on the run.
In the future when mobile phones converge with personal computers more heavily we might see phones becoming game platforms, but I don’t think this will happen over the next year.