Halo 3’s been out for some time now and one of the more interesting new additions is the ability to take screenshots from match replays. The new game engine really does look spectacular, from the ‘bloom’ generated by explosions and weapons fire to the reflections on the player models, it all lends itself perfectly to some really nice action shots which you can download via your account with bungie.net.
But how do you make the most of the screenshot feature to get that perfect picture? read on!
There’s no excuse - I have neglected my blog for far too long and with no good reason, so today I’ve given it a little gift. Over on the right you should be able to see my xbox live ‘gamertag’ which shows exactly how rubbish I am at games.
I picked up an xbox 360 premium for much cheapness by trading in the LG Shine mobile phone I got as an upgrade on my vodafone contract, it looked nice but was actually utterly rubbish to use. No signal in my house AT ALL, you can’t see the screen in daylight and the battery was weird. All in all I was glad to see the back of it and return to my sony ericsson.
Anyway, enough waffle - if anyone cares to add me to their friends list on Live I’ll have a few rounds of the only game I currently own - gears of war 
More Geeky stuff, sorry folks! I’ll do some Kai related stuff soon
After getting stuck in to AJAX, I summised (as others probably have done) that using it to submit a form and give feedback would make the whole process of completing forms online alot more ‘friendly’. Its actually not hard to do, although the example I’m going to show you is no where near polished since its really just a proof of concept.
I know some people reading will be aware of ‘AJAX’ and ‘web 2.0′ while others will be utterly disinterested - If you’re not a nerdy geek type like me I’d stop reading now since what follows will probably send you to sleep
I won’t enter into discussions about the use of the terms AJAX and web 2.0, personally I don’t like them but they’re recognisable terms so for the sake of easy reference I’m using them. AJAX is something I’ve wanted to learn for a while but I’ve never really had need to, not having had any projects which might make proper use of it, until last week.
I needed to make a event calendar for the front page of the site I look after at work. It needed to fit in a small space but offer as much information about up coming events as possible. My solution involved a mini calendar with event dates highlighted and clickable to display the relevant event information. Without using AJAX methods getting it working would have been a lot harder and much less user friendly. Its not live yet, once it is I’ll post a link and show off.
During my ‘learning’ phase I found a fair few useful sites/posts/code snippets which I thought I’d share for those who know what I’m on about.
Activity Indicator : At times you’ll need to let the user know that ’something’ is happening in the background, like when there’s a delay in fetching the data. Ian Selby came up with this superb use of ‘Ajax.responders’ to do just that.
gen-x-design.com
Activity Indicator Animated .gif Generator : To go with the above, loads of options and massive time saving! (nice looking site too)
ajaxload.info
script.aculo.us : The AJAX toolkit of choice. I spent a good day coding my own HTTPrequest functions only to find that script.aculo.us includes exaclty what I’d done and then some… and its easier to use.
script.aculo.us
Ajaxian : Great source of news and tips about AJAX methods and projects
Ajaxian.com
Photoshop Lab : Some great Photoshop tutorials demonstrating how to recreate some of the effects that are currently en vogue with a lot of sites (’How to do web 2.0 design’ for want of a better way of putting it)
Photoshoplab.com
