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I always believed that computer game development was toughest thing to do as a programmer ever. As it appears — it is, and not only for programmers but for a whole team. If you plan to make a computer game, be ready to solve one of the most complex project you’ll ever face.

In this series of posts I’ll tell about my path of game engineer and designer, along with a hugely talented team made form people at 63BITS and SAKIDEAMSHENI. Every single part story will be written after few days or weeks after actual facts happened, so technically you will be victims of a successful or failed project born. This will be some soft of “Reality Show” of the blog.

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I’ve added some social button at the end of each post. Currently there are “Share on Facebook”, “Twitter” and last one for brand new Google service — Buzz, even tho I don’t like it at all. If you have recommendations for other services please write a comment below.

I will really appreciate every single click on those buttons.
Thanks in advance.

Nobody ever cared about hyphenated text since information moved from printed media like newspapers and books to screen which is now in front of you. Typography is same everywhere, at least it has to be same, but some of the typographic elements do not work on screen, like hyphenation. In this article I’ll try to cover importance of hyphenation and some of the methods to cure this problem on the web.

Two columns of justified printed text with hyphenation

If you look close to old printed books and newspapers you’ll notice that columns are perfectly justified to a page margins while remaining even spacing between words. Now look at any website with newspaper style columns — New Your Times would be a perfect example — you’ll see that lines are aligned to left margin, right side tho is left “as is”. It is perfectly readable, but image how much “analog” and neat would it be with hyphenated and justified text, just as you see in your favorite newspaper.

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Just for one day, until snow melts. Our office balcony.

You guessed, it will be iPhone and iPad compatible too, but that’s not everything new in Blogium. Last month I’ve spent working on pretty boring projects in SAKIDEAMSHENI (next SIM) and 63BITS, so I need to take a break in boring projects and work on something interesting — Blogium and an iPhone game we are working on in SIM, but that’s another story. In this article I’ll focus on Blogium 2.

First things first, Blogium 2 will be an free update for current Blogium users as I promised it year ago, when first version was introduced. It will replace previous all-togather. Even tho it’s free update, I’m rewriting it from scratch to make some new features possible, like syncing and rich text format editor, which in my opinion will look absolutely amazing on iPad. So let’s have a look on main features I’m planing to implement in Blogium 2.

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Introducing new category on my blog — Mind-Trash. A collection of random ideas and thoughts which pop-up in my brain. I’ll also use it as an archive for personal use.

Long time ago I’ve transferred my blog’s RSS feed to Google Feedburner and completely had forgotten about it. As a result some of my subscribers are using standard RSS feed generated by Wordpress and other are using proper, correct RSS feed.

Here is the correct RSS feed address. If you are using different adress please re-subscribe using this one. If somehow, you prefer to get updates by email you can follow this link.

Thank You.
Sorry for inconvenience.

And the answer is — “of course!”, everyone will buy it because it’s an Apple made tablet/slate device everyone was waiting for. But what about other questions like “do I need one?”, “is it practical?”, “what I’m going to do on it?”. Few years ago I abandoned PC/Windows world all-togather because I found Apple devices and software much more productive and comfortable for my lifestyle and job, so after every single keynote I ask myself — “do I need this?”. After iPhone 3G announcement answer was “Naah! I’ll wait for next one”, then there were new iMac and MacBooks, same here “No, mine’s are still fine”, after 27 iMac — “Yes! I need one!” and now, iPad — “Well… I still have my classic iPhone which is fine and fits my pocket and I also have my aluminum MacBook in my back-bag which can do anything except for really heavy calculations, what I’m going to do with iPad?”.

iPad in the wild, 9.7″ screen with 1024×768 pixels. What about glare?

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I have a desease — maniacal demand for simple and beautiful things. Few month ago I started to get rid of everything I do not need. My dock has now only 5 icons in it, every single interface I design is very clean and I’ve become complete minimal-design junkie. As a result you can see that I’ve totally abandoned my own custom designed theme fot this blog and replaced it with this one. It’s called Manifest and it’s free one, but thing is that it completely does what it has to do brilliantly — gives you very clear and nice page with brilliant typography and readability. That’s what I was aiming even with my first blog layout — “Nothing but content”.

I’m huge fan of very simple, yet usefull tool on the web — Readability bookmarklet.

Readability is a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you’re reading. Follow the steps below to install Readability in your Web browser.

That’s all, simple as that.

My very dear friend has just bought Nikon D40 and I couldn’t resist to ask her for a little exchange for just few weeks — I gave her my D80 instead. I’m a Ken Rockwell reader and I really do share concept of photography process with him, simple, fast and joyful, however I really enjoy absolutely another kind of image capturing. I always wondered why Ken adores D40 so much and prefers it over twice expensive D60s, D80s and D90s. So it was my chance to play with “almighty” D40.

Nikon D40 with Kit AF-S 18-55mm ƒ/3.5-5.6 Lens

First of all, Nikon D40 is half price of old D80 and current D90 so lack of some functionality is obvious. D40 features has no bracketing options at all, no autofocus with AF-D lens (they work but behave like manual ones) and… actually, in general that’s all. If you really need some kind of functionality in camera which D40 doesn’t have, go for one that has. And I do not care that it has only 3 autofocus areas because I mainly use manual focus lens and any Leica cameras has only one focus assist areas, and even so they are very best human had made by hand for non-studio use. In general photography I really do think that Nikon D40 is a brilliant, little, nimble, light-weight, unbelievably comfortable and very high-quality camera for it’s price, and if you realize that it costs half price of D80 and third of D90 it’s is even more astonishing than it appears to be.

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