CodeIgniter

CodeIgniter is a PHP framework, which is pretty fast and easy to learn.
Not many years ago I didnt really care much about frameworks, i had my little nice set of functions I collected during the years, and I didn't have much problems editting and creating new sites, but for some reason I decided to try frameworks.
I have always liked open source, so I really liked the idea of people sharing their awesome functionality, and if you dont have much experience with MVC starting with CodeIgniter is a great option! It takes like 30 minutes to read the begginer documentation, and then you have awesome reference, you may develop a bit slower first, but later you will do it faster! And in a very scalable way!
What is nice about using frameworks is that if it's a project where more than one person works (Including MVC advantages already) you know what to edit, you know what to do already, no need to lose time reading what other programmer structure is!
It has many many advantages, I will just say, i recommend it!
I have used for my last projects and it works flawlessly! I also like sharing my own libraries :) I made an excel plugin, to export an xls file.
Anyways! If you develop on PHP, i would say this is a very nice tool!

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Color Getter

About
This is a little program I made for my girlfriend (Alba ♥!) and i really liked helping her, also the program ended up very nicely, she had a very good idea!
The program is in spanish but you can make an idea easily :)

What is it about?
Well my girlfriend had a problem, she sometimes wanted to get the color of something on her screen, but it takes way too long to take a screenshot, open photoshop, zoom and then extract the color, so this program makes it easy! It's simplistic as i like my programs to be!

Here you can see the main window, you just click there to take a screenshot, a new window will open with the screenshot and more options!

That is a screenshot of my desktop (Yes, i use Windows XP) just click anywhere to get the color, your cursor will change to a crossair, you have three buttons there also, you can zoom with those if its hard to get the color you want!
You can get my program clicking the following links:

• Download .exe format for Window
• Downlad .jar for any OS (deletted by mediafire, will re-upload soon)

Hope you find it useful! Special thanks to my girlfriend, Alba, for her great idea! ♥

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GoFTP

GoFTP is my new favourite FTP client, for one main reason, its fast, and i mean FAST, you can see a chart at GoFTP website but for me that i have to work with a lot of joomla sites, download and upload them, it's very nice, i definitely reccommend it.
Quoting GoFTP website here are a list of nice features

• "Instant Connect" Technology
• "Instant Directory" Technology
• Multi-connection transfers for maximum bandwidth utilization !!
• On the fly file compression for amazing transfer speeds !!
• You simply have to try this FTP program to believe it.

Just try it, you wont regret ;)

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More advances with Java and BIP

So right now i'm working on the Sprite class, which will handle basic sprites and spritesheets.
To use it basically you will have to make a new class and extend the Sprite class, and just define the update method. Later on the main loop just do mySprite.update(); and mySprite.draw(); and it will do :)
You will be able to add animations if it's a spritesheet, just like by doing something like addAnimation("walking", arrayOfIntsRepresentingFramesSecuence); so later you will be able to just switch animations. Also there will be an option to set a default animation, which could be the character just standing there, which will be set each time the user input is null.
Another thing the class will have is collision detection, rectangle and pixel-perfect.
The input class is pretty simple but I really like how i turned out, it's very easy to use.
Once i finish the Sprite class i think i will continue with sound, and then with tiled maps.
As i don't have much experience with network programming i dont think i add this feature for a while, at least untill i tried some games and play with networking for a while.
Also it's possible but i dont think i do, it's add 3D support, i dont have much experience in this issue and i'm not sure of Java capabilities with this, if i have to add OpenGL for this to work good i dont think i add it, mostly because i dont know much OpenGL, and also i want this to be pure java for certain reasons, so, maybe just for fun i could add it with normal Java but, we'll see, i dont really think so, plus the priority is 2D, BIP will be a 2D library so probably 3D wont be there.

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Advances with Java and BIP

My little BIP library seems to become reality in a not very distant future, of course it still needs a lot of work but as i read my books, i add and develop that part of the framework, for example i finished graphics and input chapters and i implemented them on my framework, while testing a little game :)
The final touches will be useful functions, such as a nice Sprite class, Mappy loader, etc.
Right now, i made it possible to make windowed and fullscreen games, and if windowed, the window size fixes itself so the drawing area is actually what you request.
The architecture so far is simple and similar to all libraries out there, extend the Game class, implement the abstact methods and just start making your game without worrying about low level stuff and using what you know of Java Graphics2D object.
It uses Page Flipping / Double Buffering automatically depending on the situation (Fullscreen capabilities, windowed mode, etc) and it uses "the delta method" of managing updates, this means it doesnt try to keep always the same rate of UPS' but instead it gives you the time it has passed since the last frame update so you can calculate how much to move stuff, this is also known as a way to set speed to "pixels per millisecond" which is my favourite way because its simpler.
The method i use to check for input is similar to Flixel's i think, just a static Input class with a lot of nice methods to check for keyboard and mouse events (KeyDown, KeyHit, MouseX, etc).
I will post here the progresses of my little library and i hope i can finish it and it gets to be a nice and simple library, mostly for me, and my university projects which doesn't allow me to use third party libs, but also to share with the programmers community which has helped me so much during the few years i have been around.

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