How far can you travel?
Ever wondered how far you can travel in a certain time, say walking or cycling?
Mapnificent shows you the area you can reach walking or cycling from any point in a particular city in a given time. It is available for major cities in the US and world wide. The “Crocodile walking on two legs”, well I think that’s what it looks like is how far you can travel from Sandileigh Avenue in Didsbury, Manchester where I lived 25 years ago. London and Manchester are two of the cities covered by Mapnificent.
The site was created by a 24 year old Berliner and provides a JavaScript API (Warning- Techy Stuff!) so if you want to create a layer of distances travelled on your own site (using Google Map’s of course and are familiar with JQuery, you can do it. You can even vary the walking or cycling speed values used. It’s an impressive demo of his web skills. It can run a bit slow at time, but is quite impressive.
iPhone App Review – Tiny Tower
Imagine the classic Sim City game in a tower block but drastically simplified; no power lines, or zones to build and you control the type of businesses that go in.
That’s Tiny Tower in a nutshell. You build up a tower block, paying for each new floor which become progressively more expensive. Then residents move in to the residential blocks and you assign them to work in the available jobs, hopefully getting them to their dream job. Businesses pay coins which lets you buy more floors etc.
It’s a classic two currency freemium game like many on Facebook. Coins are the income that you get from activities and pay for most stuff and you still earn them while not playing. Bux are the currency that you can buy with real money that speeds up things. Play free and it takes time, pay and it’s quicker. Your money, your choice. But it’s a very engaging game and definitely worth a look.
TactileCRM Offers free single user for life
Tactile CRM is a web based contact and sales management system for small businesses and departments. If you’re an individual looking to manage your sales contacts, track customer enquiries and sales leads then this is free for you. Obviously you don’t get as much as paying customers but you do get 250 Contacts, 20 Opportunities, 10MB File Storage and Email Support and they’re hoping that you will find their service of use to you enough for you to upgrade to paying customer.
You can try out their premium features for 14 days without needing to provide your credit card; it’s not a try on but a genuine offer.
Illyriad- Free Strategy Game
At first glance, Illyriad is a Lord of Ultima/Travian clone and it certainly falls into that genre. But it’s a little bit different because
- It’s JavaScript, no Flash or Silverlight. You can play it on an iPhone! (Been there done that!)
- It’s British (Well done chaps!)
- No server resets.
I have a fondness for games of this ilk and this is very well done indeed. Lovely looking graphics, it’s responsive and not difficult to get into with a great get you started tutorial. It’s also a bit more complex through the vast number of things to upgrade, so greater breadth of play.
It has one minor flaw compared to Lord of Ultima (which must be it’s main rival) and that is the queue limit for building; it’s just two things. LOU gives you six at a time or 15 with a premium upgrade. Once you get multiple cities (I’m not there yet) it should become more interesting but I think the city building could do with being faster.
It’s built on the freemium model so you can play it for free or spend cash to buy “Prestige” which you can spend on resources, speeding up production etc.
Other game features are a lovely world map, a comprehensive research system, magic, alliances. If you’ve played LOU, you’ll feel right at home here. I play it using Chrome (I found it in the Chrome web store) and it’s fast, bug free and very nicely implemented. I think I can sum it up as being a game I would have loved to have designed/programmed.
I’m Worse Off than You
This is a curious but interesting website created by a mate of mine (who I knocked out of the poker last night- Sorry Pete!). It’s a forum on various methods of making money or avoiding being scammed out of it. One of the most popular sections is the link to various free online competitions, particularly from TV channels (in the UK).
It’s getting quite popular because it’s updated daily. You can see competitions from today. (September 19th). Go take a look!
ZBar – Free Barcode and QR Code Reader iPhone App
Many newspapers use QR codes for providing competition entry URL details and of course all printed publications tend to have Barcodes on them holding their ISBN number.
This free iPhone App is an implementation using an open source Barcode/QR reader (written in C). It lets you scan a Barcode say on a book and provides a Google and Amazon search of that Barcode (presuming its an ISBN etc). QR codes can provide a url so this can extract that it so you can view it or send it to yourself via an Email. ZBar is easy to use (just take a photo or use an existing photo). The only slightly fiddly bit is holding the iPhone so it can pick up the Barcode and that takes a bit of manoeuvring but you do have a guide rectangle to help you. QR codes seemed easier to pick up.
In the screenshot above I scanned a Wikipedia page on my computer containing a Barcode and likewise one for a QR code and you can see the url for that page as well as a Barcode from a book. It works very well. Recommended.
Link (To iTunes)
Free Mailing List (Up to 1,000 emails a month)
Sending out bulk email is quite a perilous task these days. If you send out email from a server then there’s the challenge of not getting switched off by your provider. Or somebody might consider what you are sending is spam and if you get onto a spam blacklist then your email might not get delivered. Even then you have to deal with bounces due to delivery problems and these are all time wasting events. Hotmail for instance used to have a problem with Yahoo email and would bounce it for no good reason.
So running an email list has its problems. The best way these days is to pay for it and you can certainly do that but if you send under a 1,000 emails a month to less than a thousand recipients (e.g. 2 emails a month to 500 or less) then these people will send them free. Obviously you get more if you pay but it’s not expensive anyway. If you want to send fancy html emails then designing and creating them needs done and they provide that free as well.
Notepad++ – Completely free Notepad Replacement
The basic Notepad that comes with Windows is very simplistic. In fact even Microsoft brought out a better version (Wordpad) back almost 10 years ago. WordPad supports Unicode so can display foreign characters without any problems. But both are still pretty lacking, but despite that you do hear of people who have built websites using notepad. This is masochism on the same order as doing serious artwork using Paint!
Notepad++ is loosely named after the programming language (C++) that it is written in and is at heart a programmers text editor. It has lots more commands, including a Macro facility that lets you record, save and replay sets of commands to do repetitive jobs. It has a powerful set of find and replace options and lets you switch easily between different text file types. It also comes with a large set of syntax handling files so that it can colour code and highlight syntax for many programming languages.
A plugin system lets programmers add new extensions and this page on Sourceforge has a long list. This includes an FTP client so if you want to build websites at least it will be easier to make changes to pages on the server.
Overall if you are looking for a decent free text editor on Windows, this is recommended.
Smartlooking Gratis Document Reader issuu.com
There are a number of free document reading sites on the web – scribd.com, google docs and wepapers.com but I think this one issuu.com is the nicest looking. You can upload documents (500 pages max and 100 mb) in PDF, Doc, PPt, wpd, odt and others. Everything is free and they have fairly generous traffic and storage allowance. Of course you can pay and get more.
You can scroll through long documents very quickly using the picture links on the bottom of the reader. The reader is pretty good. It’s Flash driven and displays a two page spread that you can zoom in on by clicking. The example above is PC Computing. Down the right hand edge is a list of similar magazines, a nice touch. I could spend weeks on this site and probably will!
That viewer can also be used for showing your documents via links on your own website, and again it’s free. They have an example website ismartlook.com that shows three sets of documents: a sailing pdf, a powerpoint presentation sailing the Cape Horn and 5 x MS Word Newsletters that you can view in your browser.
Learn Programming with Microsoft Visual C# 2010
My full-time job is programming and I use the paid for version: Microsoft Visual Studio. It has multiple languages (C#, C++) and many features that even us professionals rarely use.
Microsoft Visual C# 2010 is a cut down version that just supports the one language: C# aka CSharp. It’s the 3rd in a line starting with 2005 then 2008, and coincidentally released in those years or a few months either side.
Of all the current programming languages, C# is a lot easier to learn that say C or C++, about the same as Java but a little more advanced. You can’t run Visual C# 2010 on any platform except Windows Vista or Windows 7 but there is a very similar free system for Linux/Mac called Project Mono. However C# on Windows is far popular than C# on Linux. Plus there’s an extra freebie if you want to learn games programming. Microsoft XNA Game Studio is a separate 50MB download that installs into Microsoft Visual C# 2010 and gives you the option of creating games.
This is not something you’ll master overnight but it can be a lucrative career and there is plenty of advice, tutorials and source code on the web. XNA is also what you can use to write XBox 360 and Windows Phone 7 games in.