Yahoo Releases its AJAX Library into Open Source

YUI or Yahoo! User Interface Library is an open source library provided by Yahoo! that offers a rich set of code elements enabling user interface manipulation with AJAX, JavaScript, DOM, DHTML and CSS. You can download YUI from Sourceforge.

Yahoo's user interface library is an attempt to answer back to Google's GWT or Google Web Tookit. Here is where you can download GWT.

Second Life - A Real Life Game!

It took me quite some time to grasp the concept behind Second Life. Second Life is kind of a computer game. You can think of it as a multiplayer game. The main difference is that you don't just play with 8 or 10 players, but you are playing it with hundreds of thousands of players at the same time and you can interact with any of them while you are playing the game! Another crucial difference is that the game never ends. You just log in to the game at any time and you find it going on between the massive number of people playing in it. There is no win/loose situation like in regular games.

The interesting thing about Second Life, and similar 'games', is that you can build stuff inside the game. You can build a house, you can talk to other players, you can move around and you can buy things. The mind boggling feature of Second Life is that you can buy things with real money! This concept is the hardest to understand at first when you are new to Second Life. Yet there are people making a lot of money buy building houses for example in Second Life and selling such houses to other players in Second Life! You might think that this is kind of crazy, but think of it as someone painting a picture and selling it. The people who are building or making things inside Second Life and selling them with real money to other players are like those painting a picture then selling this picture or design to others. In Second Life, you buy and sell using artificial money inside the game, but you can later go ahead and exchange such artificial game money with real US dollars. That's the really amazing thing about Second Life and the most difficult concept to grasp at first. You can try Second Life for yourself to be able to better understand the whole concept behind it.

From 2D Mouse to 3D Remote

Nintendo has made the Wii Remote, a 3D remote used in playing computer games on its Nintendo's Wii game console. The Wii Remote contains sensors by which it is able to detect motion in 3D and know its position in 3D.

The typical computer mosue only moves on a 2D surface controlling a pointer on a 2D screen. Wii Remote opens the door for wireless 3D controllers that can give users a totally deeper experience. Operating systems in the future might offer a 3D interface with much richer functionality and ease of use than the 2D interfaces offered by the current popular operating systems.

Game Programming in Egypt!

A repeated dream of many Egyptian programmers, specially students, is to go into game programming. I am talking about 3D games, Doom style, that are action games or adventure games. A group of ambiguous and bright minded Egyptians are developing a 3D game engine and have started a software company in the Smart Village with the name of Khayal. In order to make a demo of their 3D game engine, which they call the physics engine, they have created a game that uses such engine. The game is called Boo7a.