Kev's Development Toolbox

Sony’s ‘Home’, a ‘SecondLife’ on steroids has been delayed until 2008. It was originally due to launch Fall ’07 after being in an invite only beta for several months. Sony has decided to delay it’s launch for quality reasons.

Home is expected to be the PS3’s HD, multiplayer, virtual-world, online community, which is fully integrated into the PS3. This will allow users to browse a virtual world and interact with other online users, but also in addition allow users to publicize and browse their game achievements like a virtual trophy room, and interactively browse and share their multimedia content hosted on their console, as well as participate in online multiplayer games hosted within the Home virtual world.

Romain Guy and Chet Haase, who during the past couple of Java One conferences have stunned the development community with just what is possible with Swing and building superb looking desktop applications in Java, have published a new book, Filthy Rich Clients. The book gives walkthroughs and code examples of some of the techniques they have used to build their example demo applications.

You can find online demos of the Aerith application in a few places online, including here, and the source code and additional screenshots are here.

Jobs announced a price drop on the iPhones last week from $599 to $399, upsetting the early adopters who all ran out to buy one on day 1. Smart move to drop the price, but maybe not too smart this closely after they were launched? The price is at least now more realistic. Apple are also reportedly offering $100 back to anyone who paid the full price prior to the price drop.

IBM have announced that they will be adding resources to help with the OpenOffice project, the open source alternative to Microsoft’s Office suite.