Newsletter for June 15, 2006 - Codename 'Banners and Betas'

[mouser]

Newsletter for June 15, 2006

Codename 'Banners and Betas'

"If you read nothing else on our site, read the newsletter!"

1. New Coding Snacks From the DonationCoder Forum
Lots of new coding snacks for download from our forum, including GridMove, CloseAndEject,WinCovers,FadingTaskbar,ToolTipPrompt, and a script for putting together multiple pages of a multipage article.

• Drag window to edge automatically resizes it 
• Terminate processes and remove USB
• Disable all taskbar button flashing
• Create your own Tool Tips
• Copy text of web page while following links

2. 3d Party Beta Programs Announced at DonationCoder
Authors have been making programs available to DC readers for beta testing. Read more about SmartWheel, ChameleonNavigator, and TrID.

• SmartWheel, scroll text in inactive windows with the mouse wheel
• ChameleonNavigator - test webpage with various settings
• Beta new version of TrID file identifier - now with batch scanning & renaming

3. June's Podcast is online - have you listened to it yet?
If you haven't heard June's podcast, you don't know what you're missing. 40 minutes of fun software talk from forum regulars.

• June 4 Podcast
• June 4 Podcast Discussion

4. World Cup 2006 Mania
Have you caught World Cup Fever?  The world cup has evenly split the forum, with some people loving it and others who couldn't care less.  Check out the new online World Cup Predictor Tool, which will teach you about statistical estimation, and learn about other World Cup software.

• DonationCoder.com's WCP'06 FIFA World Cup 2006 Markov Chain Monte Carlo Tournament Predictor
• WCP'06 Discussion
• Other World Cup Related Software

5. Website Banner Contest Winner Chosen
After months of entries, we've finally chosen a winner in our contest to design a new banner for our website.  Come see the new banner and tell us what you think.  What do you think the new design means? We also gave away some Cody mugs for the best Haiku poems, and we'll be giving away more in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

• Banner Winner
• Haiku Winners

6. Developer's Corner
Read about testing MS Office 2007 and Microsoft VISTA beta 2.  Learn how to get a free copy of Visual Studio 2005.  Learn where to get custom logos made. Learn why Firefox should be your choice for web scripting. And the new programming school section is really heating up, with lots of people having fun rediscovering the joy of coding.  Come see the medal badges we've awarded to people who have finished a series of assignments.

• Firefox for Web Developers
• Free Visual Studio 2005 Standard
• Windows vista beta preview program begins
• Programming School Medals
• Web-based logo design companies
• Angry Fruit Salad (Confusion of colours)
• Photoshop Tutorials
• Why software sucks (and what to do about it)
• Creating Passionate Users: Don't give in to feature demands!

7. Call for Coders
We've finally settled on the details of the new mini Content Management System we are going to add to the website.  If you're a PHP coder, we want your help implementing it.  There's also only 30 days left in our Borland C++ Builder programming contest, with over $20,000 in prizes.

• DonationCoder Mini CMS
• BCB Programming Contest

8. Fun and Games
We take software pretty serious, but that doesn't mean we don't like to have fun.  Read about some of the latest discoveries this month, including a few amazing flash animations (NameVoyager, World Stats, Animator vs. Animation).  Teach your kids Rock, Paper, Scissors 25.  And of course we've got a great round up of the latest best click adventures, including Mr.Tupkins and Pricilla Gone Missing.  And don't miss the Mentos fountain video, UV Art interactive display, and the Game Innovation site.

• Rock Paper Scissors 25 - an old game, a very cool twist
• Mr. Tumpkins - cool flash adventure
• Animator vs Animation - one of the best flash animations i've seen in years.
• Cool myst style flash click game
• Making the Bellagio fountain with soda and Mentos
• Is Your Son a Computer Hacker?
• UV Art - really cool!
• Transparent wallpaper concept
• Extremely cool visualization of global statistics over time.
• Baby Name Wizard - see how choices of names change in time
• What's your significant other's favorite key on the keyboard?

9. Security and Technology News and Views
This month brought some new security patches for Windows and Firefox.  Read about avoiding spam, and new troubles with Adobe and Microsoft.

• Vulnerabilities reported: Firefox, Mozilla, and Thunderbird
• A Warning about Thinkall.com
• SPAM reaching epidemic proportions
• MS Windows Genuine Advantage Phones Home Every day
• June Microsoft Security Updates
• Troubling article: Adobe restricting pdf creation
• Is firewire better than USB?
• Recommendations for good external hard drive solutions?
• Browser racism?

10. Web Discoveries
Lots of new discoveries on the web as usual, including nice software for sharing files with others, saving file/icon associations, accessing your bookmarks from any computer, and serving your mp3 files remotely.  Learn about Structured Procrastination, Swaptree, and the cool Jack PC.

• Serve your mp3 files remotely
• Tools to save file/program/icon associations
• Swaptree ... a new concept in trading?
• Website for people to arrange (legal) trading of stuff
• Jack PC
• VisualComplexity gallery collection - very cool
• Microsoft Office 2007 public Beta out now!
• Nice review of Windows Vista and more

11. Website of the Month
Each month we honor a website we love.

• June's Site of the Month, Jayisgames.com

12. Site Annoncements and Specials
We're not giving away any software this month (we're saving up for July), but we still have tons of discounts available in our members only section, and we've rearranged the Specials page to help you see the other special offers on our site.

• Specials Page
• Member Discounts Section
• Welcome two new official volunteers to the site, Josh and Ampa
• Congratulations to fSekrit, which got mentioned all over the web this month

Special thanks to jgpaiva for preparing this month's newsletter!

Support DonationCoder.com:
[url=https://www.donationcoder.com/Donate/index.html?ref=nl]

[mouser]

too much for one newsletter.. we may have to start going weekly..

[jgpaiva]

too much for one newsletter.. we may have to start going weekly..

-mouser (June 15, 2006, 06:30 AM)

... or respect the two weekl rule 

Some great threads there. Unfortunatelly some had to be left out. If someone feels something is missing, please post here and it'll be in the next one! 

Ok, great work, it's fantastic to see so much great stuff going on in the forum!

[Rover]

Cool!  Lots of stuff going on @ DC.

Two weeks would be ok.  Weekly would get too routine for me...

[jdd]

Great job as usual!  I even found a very nice DC "Links" page. 

11. Website of the Month
Each month we honor a website we love.

    * June's Site of the Month, Jayisgames.com

Mouser, May I suggest that you add a link to the links page?  I didn't know it existed, and I could not find any other link on the website to take me there.  (there probably is one but I couldn't find it.)

[mouser]

May I suggest that you add a link to the links page?

yeah it's a good point for sure.

there used to be one on the top nav bar but we ran out of space..
now the only place you'll find it linked is from help page (https://www.donation...com/About/start.html) or bottom left "website of the month" link on home page.

[jdd]

Ah ha.  I see now.  There is a lot of great stuff to be found.....if you know where to find it.  Might want to add a Site Map to the to-do list.

[mouser]

site map - YES exactly, this is what we need - and to have it in the top nav bar.  yes, i will put that at the top of the todo list.

[Redhat]

Nice newsletter mouser 

[Zero3K]

I agree. Its nice having a summary of things that went on in the message board the past month.

[skywalka]

I'd prefer a smaller weekly newsletter.  It takes me a whole day to go through the newsletter.  Also, readers would be more likely to participate in the forums because discussions won't be over by the time they find out about them.

[nudone]

I'd prefer a smaller weekly newsletter.  It takes me a whole day to go through the newsletter.  Also, readers would be more likely to participate in the forums because discussions won't be over by the time they find out about them.

-skywalka (June 17, 2006, 02:26 AM)

sounds like a good point.

[jgpaiva]

That's a good point, skywalka, but there are a few problems about it, i think.

Although it's true that this newsletter came out extremelly huge, notice that it only happened because it's about one week late. So, the regular newsletter isn't as enormous.

The thing with having one newsletter per week, is that it might be too constant. As rover mentioned, "Weekly would get too routine for me". For example, for those who read it in the mail, although it would have the advantage you mentioned, it might become too similar to the rss feeds, because a weekly newsletter would have almost all the week's posts.

Still, i understand your point about being too late to enter the talk, possibly it might be good idea to try out 

[final_poseidon]

......