| Page 6 of Page 13

Adobe and Apple: The feeling is mutual

October 21, 2010May 6, 2018 Prasad Ajinkya3 Comments

I was on Google Suggest, and it’s wonderful what little insights you can get on how and what are people searching for – go figure!

Google Fonts!

June 18, 2010January 2, 2018 Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment

Came across Google Webfonts, decided to try it out on this blog.

Instructions are pretty simple, as long as you are using CSS on your site. Otherwise you will be forced to CSSify your site first before implementing Google’s webfonts.

Include the Google Font definition in your head section, and simply update the “font-family” attribute in your body CSS definition to the desired font family.

Pretty simple and elegant. Trust Google to come up with this.

PS – A friendly visitor also pointed me to this guide on fonts.

Kongregate: A collection of games

June 9, 2010May 6, 2018 Prasad Ajinkya2 Comments

For those of you who do not have the bandwidth (internet or time) nor are hardcore gamers there are not many games (unless if you count the ones Facebook has to offer like Mafia Wars and Farmville).

Worry naught, Kongregate is here!!

The entire site is based like a game, and it is a collection of flash based games. RPG, Strategy, Multi-player, Adventure, you name it, you got it. Even for a hardcore gamer, I got addicted to quite a few games on this site.

A warning for office-goers though, you might get addicted to playing games!

Automating workflows

May 27, 2010February 10, 2017 Prasad Ajinkya3 Comments

So you are stuck with submitting lots of data over and over again through a long web-based forms … sigh!! Wondering whether this can be automated.

You have entered into this community based competition where people register and vote on different entries (you see a lot of these competition these days … crowdsourcing the judgement to the community … another brilliant way out of making judgements!!), how do you win when your entry is hopelessly late and others are way ahead??

Well you see, all of these are workflows, and especially on a web environment they can be automated. The IT industry already does this, through regression testing. When they have to test and re-test the same thing over and over, they finally realized that an automated testing tool needs to be built which can do this task. Plus, we want to do this for free, right … enter open source.

I was tinkering with the open source regression testing tool, called Sahi and I realized the beauty of this application. Consider these scenarios –

A friend has participated in a competition. It is a crowdsourced competition where users register and vote for their favorite entries. Hmmm … all you need is a set of valid email-ids and voila!! From 500 votes to 2500 votes in no time!!
You are part of a web development team and in charge of testing all the minute details. The changes in the scope are coming left, right and center … you have to keep on testing the application repeatedly. Well, now its a one time thing!! Create different scripts for each functionality, and voila!!

Basically, if you are creative enough, and wherever there is a need to do something repeatedly, you can use this tool. Also, be on the lookout for captchas, I dont think it works with them.

Facebook monetizes

April 24, 2010December 8, 2017 Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment

Facebook keeps changing its layout, looks, etc ever so slightly and so constantly that most users do not even notice the changes … until it hits them smack on the head. That’s what I like about these FB Apps, revisit the games after 3 months, and the game has also evolved … it has got more items, more plots … somehow it has become more interesting.

That’s why when I started playing Hero World, I couldnt help but notice that instead of having micro transactions through pay-pal or some such payment gateway, the game also had Facebook credits as a currency source. On further digging, I found that Facebook is offering users to buy Facebook Credits. Users can then exchange these credits with different applications.

Instead of carrying out micro transactions within games, now we can carry them through Facebook itself. Good to see a definitive revenue stream other than eyeballs and ads.

Edit: After seven years, revisiting this post in the December 2017. Facebook now boasts of a robust advertising model.

Age of the Game Cloud

March 10, 2010February 4, 2017 Prasad Ajinkya2 Comments

It was the summer of 2005, I was in the quest for knowledge in the mostly empty libraries of IIM-Indore. That’s one of the main reasons to be there, if you don’t want to be disturbed, then the library is for you … nobody goes there :-)

I found Soft War by Larry Ellison. It was an interesting read, but throughout the book, there are potshots at Microsoft and the personal PC concept. Oracle says that the era of the personal PC is over and its time everything moved onto the web with machines as dumb terminals. Although I agreed with most of the things he was saying, I could not fathom how could the PC fade into oblivion? One of the main reasons why I thought this not possible was because of games. As a gamer, I thought that PCs are here to stay, games require too much hardware support to have a successful online game.

Five years later, I stand corrected and oh so much humbled! With games like WoW, 9 Dragons, Silkroad, Eve Online, League of Legends, DotA, most of the game titles which we know are planning (if not already) a MMO version of their game. What really makes sense to the game companies is the ease of distribution and control they get over the piracy that soon ensues after a successful release. Add to that a pay-per-use business model that is inherent to the cloud architecture, and organizations really stand a chance to make a thriving profit. I am thanking the stars because creators are looking at replayability as one of the critical success factors in making an MMO.

I still have some nagging doubts about the cloud (I guess because of a ~~higher~~ lower total cost of ownership), but its there to stay, for games to go online and create a variety of possibilities. I wonder when people will start having company reps within these games ala social media.

Update:

Read this post after 7 years. This is now a reality, so many games are running on the cloud and require you to be online these days.

How to