Just packed up a new version of GUtil.
This update(2.1.6) has some minor changes, including the Orkut address change and the Personalized home name change to iGoogle.

You can get the new version here.
Don’t know what GUtil! is? Read about it here.

I just found out today that the folks at Blizzard finally decided to publicly announce that they are working on the next version of Starcraft. I mean, that was to be expected, 10 years have passed since Starcraft appeared and it looked like they were never going to give us a sequel.

The good news is that all the wonderful races are still here. The bad news is that the Zerg, Protoss and Teran are alone, no other races have been announced.

The official site has screenshots, movies and information about the next release of Starcraft. The website also hosts an extremely good game trailer, in good old Blizzard style and quality.

I for one can’t wait to play Starcraft II, although I think I’m gonna have to buy a new PC.

The game will be released sometime next year (or so they say) and a beta will be available at the end of this year.

Until then, see you on Battle.net (in the rare occasions when I have time for a quick game).

Finally the weekend! I know it’s Sunday, I just lost one day .
I had a ruff week, not that all my other weeks are all that okay, but this one was a .7 on my “when it’s time to move to another company scale”.

Anyway, last night I thought I’d find a nice way to spend today, so I went out and bought a Tycoon style game – Activision’s “Donald Trump’s Real-Estate Tycoon” that is.

It’s a good game, featuring some of 1999′s best technologies . I recommended it with all my heart because of it’s wonderful gameplay and the nice feeling when you win.

Here’s a screenshot with the game menu:

Tomorrow I’m hitting the workplace again, earlier than usual, to fine-tune the thing that I’ve been working on and put it in production, so wish me luck.

As openclipart.org is down, I am going to publish my clipart here.
All my clipart is released in the Public Domain, so feel free to use it however you find fit. I will of course upload it to OpenClipart after they fix it .

This is an ancient anchor clipart created using Inkscape 0.45, which i really recommend as it’s the best open-source vector graphics editor available on Windows.
Enough with the blabber, here is the clipart.

Gif version

PNG version

Download SVG

If this helped, have a look at some more free anchor clipart.

Yesterday, at JavaOne Sun announced it’s OpenJFX project, backing up the new and shiny JavaFX product family.

JavaFX is Sun’s new product family based on Java technologies aimed at the Rich Internet Application market. What is strange is that JavaFX seems desktop and mobile device-oriented, no information about web browsers or browser integration. Of course, the possibility to use it in applets remains, hope it will be lite.
JavaFX is more similar to Java WebStart than to RIA technologies like Flash/Flex but the demos on openjfx.dev.java.net look damn good to me, even as standalone applications.

JavaFX Script is the cherry on top of JavaFX. It’s a statically typed scripting/programming language intended for rich UI’s that can work with Swing, Java2D and Java3D and it’s superb.
If you ever read about F3, well this is it, in it’s “production ready form”.

Just look at how easy is to fill an area with a linear gradient:

fill: LinearGradient {
x1: 0
y1: 0
x2: 1
y2: 0
stops:
[Stop {offset: 0, color: green},
Stop {offset: .5, color: new Color(.5, 1, 0, 1)},
Stop {offset: 1, color: green}]
}

you can call me nuts, but I just love it.

The best part is that JavaFX Scripts will run on JavaFX Mobile, bringing us the power to design applications that will run on both desktop and mobile devices in a polite write-once Java fashion.

For a little example of JavaFX‘s shiny look, here are some demo screen shots:

Just waiting to see how JavaFX affects the RIA world. Flex would better watch out .

Links:
http://www.sun.com/software/javafx/ – JavaFX home
https://openjfx.dev.java.net/ – OpenJFX home