Kev's Development Toolbox

July 13, 2006

Microsoft to roll out retro games for XBox via XBoxLive service

Microsoft are planning on releasing classic arcade games for the XBox for download via the XBox Live service. They will be releasing 1 game a week each Wednesday, and each game download will be from $5 – $10.

This is a neat idea, but seems like a steep price to pay for games that are already available via arcade game collections (they are on the PS anyway, I’m not sure about XBox).

Meanwhile we’re still waiting for the PSOne backcatalog to become available for download for the PSP, which was announced a few months back

July 12, 2006

Source available for one of the coolest JavaOne demos (ever?) – the Aerith mappping app

The team at Sun Swing labs responsible for putting together one of the best looking and coolest JavaOne Swing demos (possibly ever?), and possibly the best looking Swing app ever, have released their source code on java.net – check here for the project page.

The app itself is a ‘mashup’, a combination of web services to provide a single application. The app uses Google Maps, Flickr, and Yahoo’s geocoding webservice to allow you to create and share slideshows of road trip photos.

This in itself is a pretty neat application, but the major selling point of this app is that it is a truely awesome looking Swing application. If you haven’t seen the screenshots, go to the site above and check it out, because this will blow away all your misconceptions about what a Swing app looks like and what is possible with Swing.

July 12, 2006

Secuirty updates and support end for Windows 98 and ME

Microsoft have ended support for Windows 98 and ME, and as of this week will no longer be providing security updates or patches.

This shouldn’t be a big deal to most people, but according to this article on TheRegister.com, more than 70m people are still running 98 on their PCs.

July 12, 2006

Groovy JSR-06 released

Groovy JSR-06 has been released, which is the final step before a Release Candidate release – in other words, we’re getting close to a final 1.0 release of the Groovy scripting language.

If you haven’t checked out this language yet I urge you to do so… for simple development related tasks where you just need to knock something together quickly, Groovy’s simplicity cannot be beaten.

Check here for a list of changes and additions in this latest release.