Daily Bits

Best Online Flash Games: Winterbells

by

My friends introduced me to this game called Winterbells, and I want to share it with you as well. The game’s rules are simple. You will assume control of a cute little rabbit and jump from bell to bell (and the occasional bird to double your score). But be warned, this game is very addicting, as you aim for a literally skyrocketting score.

I recommend playing this game when you’re bored from work or fed up with assignments. It is will help soothe you, what with the mild snow, the white bells, and the adorably cute rabbit. The soundtrack is not bad either, so check it out.

8 of the Best Adobe AIR Applications

by

Adobe AIR showed a lot of potential during its period of public beta but unfortunately had very few applications that really took advantage of the technology. Thankfully over the last month or so we have begun to see some impressive and useful applications being released.

Here is my pick of the current offerings:

1. Alert Thingy

A favourite of many Alert Thingy started as a FriendFeed application but has since added support for Twitter and the ability to upload photos to Flickr. If you are a user of these services then you will love being able to access the services from within the same interface and window.

2. Guitar Scales V2

This is a great little application, although obviously it will only appeal to a small group of you. Using the virtual fretboard like below you can find any scale for a range of options including root notes, scale types, number of strings, number of frets and tunings.

This information can be found elsewhere online, but I don’t know one other resource that freely provides this information in a way that rivals Guitar Scales for simplicity and functionality.

3. Klok

“Klok is a tool intended to be used by individuals, like myself, who have a need to track the time they spend on projects, tasks or anything else for that matter.” If you find Klok to be a bit more complicated then what you need, I recommend Timecloc which is much simpler and is essentially a stop watch, although you can still add different projects.

4. ReadAir

“ReadAir is an OSX Themed Desktop Client for Mac or Windows. Built with Adobe Air” and available for download from Google Code. I wasn’t actually aware of this one till today due to it not being listed in the AIR application directory. DailyApps discovered it and ran an article about it yesterday.

5. Twhirl

Twhirl is another Twitter and FriendFeed client. Its main feature is the ability to be signed into multiple Twitter and FriendFeed accounts simultaneously. It has a tool for shortening URLs, you can update Pownce and Jaiku, upload pics to TweetPic and use TweetScan to search for tweets.

6. Pownce

pwnceshotI really wonder what the future of Pownce is. Successful startups all generally have one specific focus that can generally be summarized in one word or phrase. Google is search, Twitter is micro-blogging, Flickr is photo sharing and so on. Pownce seems to have a little of everything and as such is making little headway in any.

However If you are a Pownce user however then this application is a must; you’ll find it a great deal easier staying up to date on your contact’s latest notes, files and photos etc. An option I feel is lacking is the ability to minimize to the system tray.

7. Ebay Desktop

This is one of the first, and still one of the best, AIR applications. It’s impressive in that it really goes beyond replicating an online service on the desktop and instead extends and enhances the experience. Not only does it look great, but Ebay Desktop takes a far more graphical and interactive approach with the browsing, tracking and buying and selling of items.

Drag and drop functionality, instant search results and a real time clock that counts down to the end of the auction are some of the features in this app. If you are even an occasional Ebay user its worth giving Ebay Desktop a try.

8. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a favourite of many bloggers as it provides easy access to all your Analytics data and profiles from your desktop. It’s attractive and extremely useful if you use Analytics on a regular basis. (You can also get Google Trends on your desktop with XeGTrends)

iPhone to Change Mobile Gaming?

by

The iPhone for sure shook the mobile industry, but now people are claiming that it will also affect the mobile gaming one. Time just published an article on that line titled Can the iPhone Rule Gaming?.

The numbers they present are pretty interesting. Here is a quote:

The cell-phone gaming market is ripe for the picking. While millions of people play games on the portable Nintendo DS and Sony PSP every day, fewer than 10% of cell-phone users in the U.S. do the same on their phones, according to Nielsen Mobile. What’s more, the average cell-phone gamer spends just $8 a year on new games, versus an estimated $45 a year for users of the PSP and $65 yearly for DS players.

I certainly can see the average money spent by mobile gamers on the rise with the introduction of the iPhone, but I don’t see it threatening the market of Nintendo DS. Nokia has tried in the past with N-Gage, and we all know how it went…

Hardcore mobile gamers don’t buy the iPhone (they are supposedly younger and don’t go around locking themselves in a 2 year phone contract), and hardcore iPhone users only play gamers occasionally while on the run.

In the future when mobile phones converge with personal computers more heavily we might see phones becoming game platforms, but I don’t think this will happen over the next year.

A Tribute to the Box Art of Video Cards

by

It might be a geek thing, but since I was a teen and started playing with computers I have always admired the box of video cards. They always had some beautiful graphic art. Dragons, knights and other creatures that inspired my fantasies about the games I would play.

Thinking about that I decided to create a collection with pictures of video card boxes. Enjoy.


























AdAge Claims Online Advertising is Overhyped

by

And I don’t agree with it.

Their first argument is this one:

The inconvenient truth is that for all its new-media spin, display advertising is “old” media — a commercial message to be placed next to editorial or entertainment content. And we know by now that measured-media growth has pretty much ground to a halt as marketers continue to increase their dollars in unmeasured disciplines such as web development, public relations and database marketing at the expense of paid advertising.

Well, I think there is a huge different between an ad that appears on a paper newspaper and ones that appear on the online website of that same newspaper. For one thing, the results of the latter are much more measurable. You can track how many times the ad got displayed. How many people clicked on the ad. How many people ended up purchasing a product after that click. Heck, you could even know the country, browser and operating system of the people that saw the ad.

When hard economic times come, companies will want to spend their money in places where they can track the results more efficiently.

The the article questions:

Sure, dollars are shifting within those media budgets, with some moving out of traditional media into interactive. But most of the top 100 advertisers that wield the big budgets are still primarily TV and print spenders. The question is: Should the fact Procter & Gamble spends only 1.5% of its marketing budget on display ads be viewed as a warning signal by online ad sellers, or as an opportunity

The author of the article apparently thinks that this is a warning signal, he goes: “For all its glory, the internet still has not proven itself capable of being a primary branding medium.”

Well I think he is wrong, I think that the fact that the advertisers still spend 90% of their money on television is definitely an opportunity for online advertising. Why? Because eventually everything is going to migrate to the web. That is, everything is going to travel on IP. Your television, your telephone conversations, and even the bits that your fridge will send to the local supermarket when you run out of beer cans.

Sure it might still take some years for that to realize, but it is a matter of when and not a matter of if.

As a result, I think that online advertising will keep growing strong, and perhaps new forms of advertising will emerge, but they will certainly be based on web technologies.

Anyway you can read the full article here and take your own conclusions.

Best Online Flash Games: Ragdoll Cannon

by

I was browsing through my RSS feeds today and came across a cool little game called Ragdoll Cannon. The concept is pretty simple: you have a cannon that shoots dolls, and on each level you must make the dolls touch a “here” stone.

Simple but addicting, now I must finish all the levels! Check it out, it is Friday after all…