The 3rd annual Toronto Game Jam has just been announced for May 9 - 11, 2008. If you’re not familiar with TOJam, it’s a weekend-long event where game developers and artists gather to tackle the challenge of creating a complete game in just 3 days. It’s a friendly, collaborative environment where burgeoning game creators can exchange ideas and get some recognition. You can participate as a single, in a team or as a floater, helping others out. The end result is always a slew of games that shows off Toronto’s wealth of untapped game development talent.
Things I would love to work on and/or see at the jam this year:
non-musical re-interpretation of guitar hero/rock band controllers
iPhone games using the new SDK (might be hard with few iPhones in Canada)
games driven by web content sources (think Wikipedia: The FPS)
I got a sneak peak at the new version of Propeller yesterday. Sadly, I can’t reveal anything about it other than to say it looks absolutely amazing. It is sure to make big waves in the social news arena. I’ll post more as soon as I can. Valleywag has an equally ambiguous post on this subject.
We just launched a new version of Touchpoint Gallery with a very important new Picture Source built in: Facebook. Now you can tap into the billions of photos on Facebook and use them as your screen saver and as your wallpaper.
Using the Python client library to work with the Facebook API made it easy to offer a slew of different options in this Picture Source. It’s our most robust Picture Source yet. With it, you can retrieve any of the following types of pictures from Facebook for use in Touchpoint Gallery:
all of the pictures that you have been tagged in
one of your albums
all of your pictures
all of one of your friends’ pictures
one of your friends’ albums
all pictures that one of your friends is tagged in
all of your friends’ pictures
Lots more new Templates and Picture Sources coming soon!
We put out a new version of Touchpoint Gallery today. It features support for add-ons by way of a new file format, Gallery files. This means we’ll be able to release updates a lot more frequently. In particular, we’ll be pumping out Templates and Picture Sources on a regular basis. I’m pretty excited about the prospect of distributing an application as if it were a continuous stream of content.
Kicking off that stream of app-content is a new Template. We’ve received a lot of suggestions for Template ideas from users and one of the most popular suggestions is a scrapbook. Today we released the first in a line of scrapbook-themed Templates: the Floral Scrapbook.
And the cherry on the cake: Windows Vista is now fully supported.
Netscape has launched a new beta version of its browser, Navigator. If you had not heard about it already, its a browser with features of their social news site built in, such as voting, submitting, tracking your friends etc. It’s a must-have for any hardcore Netscape user.
This is just a quick follow up on my previous aside. As Michael Arrington reported, Pliggintends to sell it’s SourceForge account. However, the SourceForge terms of use very clearly state that you can not sell or transfer your profile under section 4-h and also section 9. Someone should probably alert the owners of Pligg to this in the interest of keeping the project on the up and up.
