Gaming Market Trends

As most people know and do these days when u find something good on the market you go ahead and flog it for all its worth

In the gaming market the latest trend to be flogged or rather the latest trend that is in the process of being flogged is strategy games genre. In the past strategy games were reserved solely for the PC market and rightly so as well.

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Contact Synchronization Progress

So a small update with regards to the progress of the contacts sync framework I have been working on.

Background

Couple of weeks back I decided that I wanted to write a smallish frame work that will allow people to synchronize their outlook contacts with their Google contacts. I did this knowing full well that there are many such applications that do this already. I just wanted to see how hard is it and what would it entail.

Current Status

I have built most of the frame work that will allow users to sync contacts between outlook and Gmail as well as a few other add-ons. First I have added an export to vCard l, so that the user can export all current contacts from Google/outlook or both to a single vCard file. This file may also be generated remotely so that it may be accessed by means of a cell phone or other remote device. During this time I have acquired the help of my good friend Ewoudt who helped write the Event Management part of the framework. The event management basically allows a user/programmer to listen to different changes in the state of the application. This is the same as every other event system and I have to say works well.

What to do now

After having a chat with Matt Benic, he recommended that I take a look at SyncML when trying to do syncing with a phone. After look at SyncML a whole new world open up to me and I came across the awesome Funambol application/Server. This server basically does everything what I wanted in terms of syncing data. I have experimented with it a bit on Linux and windows and have to say that it works very nicely. Even though I feel that I should stop the development on my current sync frame work since Funambol does it extremely well, I have decided to continue and work on it anyway as it has been a great learning experience.

Updated : The project is hosted at http://code.google.com/p/gcontactssync/ , have a look and let me know what you think

As always if there are any changes I will keep you informed.

~stalkerh

Been a while

So its been a while since my last post and getting down to write a decent post is just becoming a lot harder these days. A quick recap of what i have been up 2 and what’s been keeping me from blogging.

So the first biggest change is that i got a new person reporting to me at work , while this might sound like a good thing , it the complete opposite . I have to ensure the sufficient work has been assigned to him , continuously check completed work and other management stuff. So i guess there is something good to come from this i.e. i should be gaining some much needed managerial skills.

Secondly i have been working on multiple projects which has really absorbed be. Firstly the NWMS project has now gone into a partial live state aka its on the web for people to look at (www.nurulislam.org.za) , so i am getting a lot more change requests now that more people are viewing it and requesting changes.

The other project that got me quite interested was a wordpress plugin/widget that i am working on , if you have a look at the widget bar on the right you will see a the bottom a tag saying my songza play list. What this widget does is to pull your current play list from songza and format it using xsl and display it to the page. While this seems very basic to most for me it was a awesome learning experience .In the near future as soon as i get the formatting right i will drop a article explaining the complete process that i took and the reasons why i took them.

The last and final project that i am working on is some that has been kind of born out of a need that i saw and could not fill. The need , having the ability to synchronise Gmail and outlook contacts with a simple and easy process.

While many people are going to jump on me in and say that there are a ton of applications that already do that , all i can say is that non of them are free. I did see something that was remotely free that was recommended by FlintZA , unfortunately i cant remember the name now but it did not seem to have working functionality so that idea was scrapped. But i am happy to say that the project is about 60% done with contacts being synced up and down , now for the final checks and some beta testing then i can give to all that wish to use.

The last item on my list that is going to halt my posts that we are now in the fasting month of Ramadan , due to this fact i want to keep all non-essential activities down to a minimal so that i can concentrate on my prayers.

Last but not least i have been keeping myself really busy in my little spare time gaming on my 360 like never before. Of recent times i have been enjoying Castle Crashers as well as Bionic Commando Rearmed.

Till next time

~Stalkerh