My brother and I developed a first person minesweeper game in 3D, using the UNITY game development platform. Give it a shot (click to play):
We’ve also built a Facebook application version of this game, available to play at:
http://apps.facebook.com/minesweeper-game/
I finished working on this project today, it took me about a day and a half to complete it. It looks super easy but as always there are issues that you encounter only during the development phase.
The service/application offers you six boxes in which you may type whatever you want. e.g. memos, notes, temporary data or tasks.
The data is saved within each keystroke one makes. It’s stored using the browser’s cookies.
Adding extra features always costs some of the simplicity of the application. And many people try to find the “right” balance. In this project, I decided to go to an extreme – super easy & no features. Some people may like it and some may not.
Here is my new personal homepage:
http://www.sixpacknotes.com/
Your feedback is welcomed.
First, thank you for the bug reports. Without them, new & enhanced versions simply won’t come out.
The plugin now has better video detection capabilities, and a serious bug regarding the auto thumbnailing feature is fixed.
You can download the new version at:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/youtube-thumbnailer/
Any bug reports, feature requests or comments are welcomed in the comments section below.
I’ve received many emails complaining that the plugin does not recognize YouTube videos. Because of lack of time, I delayed the update until now.
I just released an update to the plugin which should solve most of the issues that I was contacted about.
Go ahead and download the new version:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/youtube-thumbnailer/
Last month I participated in two amazing events. The first one is The Big Geek and is considerably similar to the second event called Startup Weekend. They both took place in Israel.
The Big Geek II
Startupseeds
This event was organized by StartupSeeds, a non-profit organisation encouraging teen Israeli entrepreneurs to make their first steps in the entrepreneurship world. Whether it’s by giving them a place to talk about technology, or by conducting monthly meetings with the most interesting lectures (for free!). StartupSeeds even assists young innovative kids with starting their own startups by providing them financial help and the best mentors available. The online forum and meetings created a large and friendly community for the Israeli teenager who breaths technology and internet.
What’s the event about?
Sixteen kids (Ages 14-18), divided into four “teams”, worked 24 hours non-stop on their unique idea for a startup. Each team raised a fully working service within those 24 hours (!). While the projects are not breath-taking nor unbelievable, they are still awesome considering the time spent working on them. Actually, they’re awesome not matter what.
The project that my team and I developed is FixedInch. It’s a free online service for displaying objects in their real size over any screen in the world. We have discussed the possibility to continue working on it, and we most likely will, in the near future.
What else can I say? It was an awesome experience that I will never forget. It was 24 hours of fun and jokes, some of could not be told anywhere else like (via @TalDromi):
“Let’s use JSON for this”
“Who’s this Jason you are talking about?”
“XML’s brother!”
Startup Weekend Israel 2009
This is a world-wide known event, which started in 2007. Since then it took place in over 50 cities and growing (!). This is kind of a grown-up version of the Big Geek.
During the first day, 140 Israeli entrepreneurs pitched 50 unique ideas which turned into thirteen motivated teams. Each team consisted of about 4-8 people who designed and developed their idea for three days. The second day was all about work and food (lots of it!). On the third day of the event, the teams finished their work and presented their project.
My team and I worked on Frayer Meter – an online free service that suggests the most economical cellular plan according to one’s needs. While it’s not fully functional, we plan to continue working on it as we believe in it’s potential.
NOTE: If you don’t know Hebrew, feel free to use Google Translate when visiting links from this post.
I have received a request from someone that wants even more from my WordPress Custom Fields Plugin. He has a category called “videos” which has posts with YouTube videos embedded with some plugin. He wants to put the videos thumbnail as the post’s thumbnail.
First, how is the video embedded in the post? It uses the following syntax:
[youtube $video_key]
Now you can embed it like you would normally do.
Second, how do we get the thumbnail itself after we extracted the video key? We build the image’s URL with the following syntax:
http://i2.ytimg.com/vi/$video_key/default.jpg
Now, how do we put all of this together into a plugin that inserts the thumbnails?
You don’t have to because I have already done it for you.
- Visit the plugin page of YouTube Thumbnailer
- Download the plugin here
- Unzip it’s contents
- Upload the folder you unzipped to
/wp-content/plugins/using your favorite FTP client. - Go to your admin panel and activate the plugin called “Youtube Thumbnailer”
This plugin runs through the posts in your blog and if it finds a YouTube video embedded in a post it sets the thumbnail to be the video’s thumbnail.
That’s it, have fun playing with the configuration.
If you encounter any issues please comment/contact me.
As you can see in the plugin‘s stats page, It currently has 1050 downloads!
Although the number may be not as big as other plugins (All in On SEO got over 2.5 million downloads), it means a lot to me. Every time you see numbers on the internet you don’t really think about them as you would outside the monitor. When viewing YouTube videos, if I see a video that has less then 5k views most of the times I won’t enter it and try to find another one with millions of views.
But when you think about the actual numbers it’s a huge amount of people sitting on their chair at home or at work, entering YouTube and watching the video. The same goes to plugin downloads, It’s really cool to know that my plugin helped over 300 (?) other people around the world that have their own website.
Update: It how has over 3000 downloads!
I want to thank everyone who sent feedback and feature requests for the post editor buttons plugin.
Because of you I have released 3 more version of mainly bug fixes to the plugin.
The feedback was send through comments on the blog and email messages to me, if you have something on your mind, do not hesitate.
Now you can download and use version 1.3 that works perfect.
By the way if you have an idea for a brand new plugin – contact me :)
Post Editor Buttons?
This plugins allows you to add your own buttons to the post edtor’s toolbar.
I’m talking about the buttons that you see above your content text area when editing posts (b,i,link,img,ul,li).
For example you can add a “h3″ button to make subheaders in your post.
There are virtually endless buttons you can add.
Screenshots
Here is the plugins interface:
This is the output of the above settings:
Download
You can visit the plugin’s WordPress.org page, download the plugin right away and upload it into your plugins directory.
Feedback
Comment whatever is on your mind.
The new version of Mass Custom Fields Manager is out!
Why do you need it? For example if you have custom fields that old plugins left of your posts and you want to get rid of them you can now do it with a click of a mouse. There are virtually endless occasions where this plugin can save you valuable time and effort.
I added new features that you asked for, fixed some minor bugs and did some code optimization.
If you encounter any bugs or have an idea on how to improve the plugin then I would love to hear it from you.
