Technowaves

Statistics Packages and Metrics Tools

• Sitemeter

• Google Analytics

• My Blog Log

• WebAnalyse

• Performancing Metrics

• AWStats

• Mint

• Extreme

• Webalizer

• Stat Counter

• Measure Map

• Slim Stat

Blog Editor Tools

• Ecto for Mac and Windows

• Qumana

• BlogJet

• Zoundry

• w.bloggar

• Blog Desk

• Post2Blog

• Performancing for Firefox

• Mars Edit

News Aggregators and News Sourcing Tools

• Bloglines

• FeedDemon

• Technorati

• Google Reader

• Website Watcher

• BlogPulse

• Blogarithm

• Topix

• Blog Bridge

• Grazr

• Rojo

• Memeorandum

• NewsGator Online

• Net News Wire

Email Subscription Tools and Newsletter Services

• FeedBlitz

• Zookoda

• Aweber

• Yutter

• RssFwd

• Feedburner’s Email Subscription Service

Blog Poll Tools

• Blog Polls.com

• Vizu

• Free Blog Poll

• Blog Poll

• Blog Flux Polls

• WP Polls

Other Blog Tools

• Pingoat – pinging service

• Pingomatic – another pinging service

• AudioBlogger – audio post to your blog via phone

• BlogRolling – a service to manage your blog roll

• Creative Commons – copyright protections service

• Feedburner – RSS tool that adds a variety of features to your blog’s RSS feed

• Picasa – find, edit and share all the pictures on your PC

• Flickr – Store and share your images - good way of hosting images if you don’t have a stand alone blog on your own domain.

• Flock – A browser that enables sharing and blogging from within it

• Copyscape – allows you to track down other sites that are stealing your content

• TalkDigger – ‘find, follow and join conversations evolving on the Internet.’

• Blog Flux – Stats, Pinging and Directory

• Backpack It – A place to organise your to do lists, notes, files, reminders and more - all online

• Basecamp – Like Backpack it (same people behind it) but great for collaboration on projects.

• Ice Rocket – Blog Search

• coComment – Keep track of the comments you leave on different blogs in a central place

• co.mments – Similar name to coComment but not to be confused with it - a way of bookmarking and following comment threads via RSS

• Gabbly – Add live chat to our blog posts (like real time comments combined with IRC)

• Del.icio.us – Social Bookmarking site - good for sourcing stories but also great if you get linked to on it to get traffic

• Digg – Another major Social Bookmarking site

• Only Wire – a bookmarklet that submits posts to multiple social bookmarking sites at once

• Odeo – a tool for recording and sharing audio/podcasting

• TagCloud – produces Tag Clouds for your blog from RSS feeds

• Indie Karma – a micropayment system for bloggers

• Tiny URL – Turns long URLs into tiny manageable ones

• Swicki – a new type of search engine that harnesses the power of a web community - sort of like a search engine and wiki combined

Filmloop – photo sharing

• Stock.xchng – Free Stock Photos

• Favicon Maker – allows you to make a favicon from a photo

• YouTube – a tool for putting video on your blog

• blip.tv – another video uploading tool

Do you know of other great blog tools? Feel free to share them in comments below.

Technorati Tags: blogs, blog tools

This plug-in allows designers to create compelling 3D user interfaces in Maya and export to XAML, the next generation application GUI markup language for windows and the web. Objects created in Maya can be used as hit targets, windows forms controls, and more. Because the objects are kept as vector data in the interface, the user can scale the entire application and keep the same look and feel. Look for future export features like animation, mesh optimization, xml formatting, and the ability to specify the WPF target type template for Maya objects.

Download here(FILE SIZE: 1087 KB)...

New Features in this Release

• Designer support in VS.NET
• Performance optimization

Existing Features

• Polygon reduction and optimization specific to XAML.
• Export support for lights, cameras, materials, instanced meshes, textures
• Transparency maps (must use PNG with alpha)
• Animation export. Basic animation is supported, see details below.
• Fixed error loading XAMLExport.mel (Export options dialog now opens)
• Memory leaks fixed
• Major performance fix in very large mesh exports
• Fixed memory consumption on large mesh exports

System Requirements
.NET Framework 3.0
Maya 6x, 7, or 8x

Download the latest .NET Framework 3.0 CTP

Future Features

• Exact animation curve export.
• XAML Formatting.
• Baked Textures (export procedural textures as file textures).
• Add animations, materials, and other resources as resources, instead of directly adding into the "visual tree".
• Be able to specify if you want to copy files, for textures, to the output directory of the xaml file. This will also modify the path automatically and make the path relative.
• The information specified in the Place2DTexture Nodes should be exported too. At least some of the settings of the Place2DTexture Node have a representation in xaml for example Tile, Viewport attributes.
• Specify output template file for output formatted export
• Export video textures as video on mesh
• Export pattern brushes, for textures with fractals, gradients, etc.
• Instance object materials
• Mac OS X version

Known Issues

• Texture files will throw a System.Security.SecurityException if the xaml file and texture files are run from the browser. Try running from a vs.net project instead.
• Skinned meshes and nurbs are not supported.
• Rotation animation only works when Maya is in Quaternion animation mode. This is a limitation of the .NET Framework 3.0.

Installing Maya To XAML

• Extract the contents of the compressed file.
• Copy the correct version of the [MayaVersion]/MayaToXAML.mll file to your bin/plug-ins directory.
• Copy the scripts/ExportXAML.mel to your ( My Documents/maya//scripts ) directory.
• Launch Maya > and go to the Window Menu > Settings/Preferences > Plug-in Manager...
• In the Plug-in Manager > Click loaded next to MayaToXAML.mll

Using Maya To XAML

• Open or create a new mesh file: File > New Scene or Open Scene...

Note: If your mesh is NURBS, you will need to convert it to polygons. To convert to polygons, go to the Modeling view and select the mesh. In the Edit NURBS menu, click the Rebuild Surface Options button icon. Choose the Polygons option, in the Output Geometry section and click Rebuild.

To export the mesh data, go to the File menu and click the Export All Options icon. Choose the XAML file type. Click the Export All button and enter the file name. Select xaml from the file type. The following export options are functional: Filter Export Polygon meshes Cameras Animations Lights Normals Texture Coordinates Other options will be available in a future release

Animation
The newly added support for animation export is not feature complete. There are some fundamental differences in how Maya and WPF handle animation and how Maya allows the user to customize the rotation technique. A future release will provide full support for spline based animation curves. A couple key differences and constraints in WPF prevent a clean conversion of Maya keyframe animation to WPF. Both WPF and Maya use cubic bezier curves for animation.

Difference #1:

Maya has the ability to use different rotation spaces based on the user's selection. Maya's default rotation space is Euler rotation, which can be changed to Synchronized Quaternion via a simple user preference setting. All though WPF provides basic abstraction of its core Quaternion rotations via Euler rotations, it always uses Quaternion rotations at the core of the framework. If you're not using animation, this is a non-issue, but if you plan on animating rotation, you must change the setting in Maya to use Quaternion rotations. Otherwise, the Euler rotations in Maya will allow you to rotate your objects more than 180 degrees, and WPF will only understand the first part of the rotation and SLERP the rest.

Difference #2:

Maya's keyframes have the same concept of the KeySpline property, found in WPF DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames, known as animation curve tangent controls in Maya. However, Maya does not place an upper or lower bounds constraint on the p1 and p2 control points (KeySpline X1,Y1 and X2,Y2).

WPF constrains the KeySpline values by placing an upper bounds of 1 and a lower bounds of 0 on the KeySpline property. The constraint means that animated values can not be interoplated to a value less than the start keyframe or greater than the end keyframe value. The developer's rationale behind this was purely ease-of-use. Users understand the values as ease-in and ease-out, which is easier understood as values between 0 and 1. I tend to side more on enabling the user.

Maya assumes the user has a better grasp on animation curves, and it allows you to modify the tangents so that values are affected outside the values of the specified key segment. Unfortunetaley, the only viable solution to converting the Maya animation curves to XAML animation curves, is to subdivide the Maya animation splines when a curve affected value is less than 0 or greater than 1, using a technique called de Casteljau's algorithm. For now, when you encounter this issue, you can split your curves in Maya's Graph Editor.

I hope to have more time to detail these issues and provide some special attention in future releases.

A test scene in Maya..




Exported into WPF..




Click here for more details...




Technorati Tags: xaml, maya

Download Links:

http://rapidshare.com/files/31451850/0321374479.zip

http://w13.easy-share.com/1092191.html

Editorial Reviews





Book Description

“Chris
Anderson was one of the chief architects of the next-generation GUI
stack, the Windows Presentation Framework (WPF), which is the subject
of this book. Chris’s insights shine a light from the internals of WPF
to those standing at the entrance, guiding you through the concepts
that form the foundation of his creation.”
–From the foreword by Chris Sells

“As
one of the architects behind WPF, Chris Anderson skillfully explains
not only the ‘how,’ but also the ‘why.’ This book is an excellent
resource for anyone wanting to understand the design principles and
best practices of WPF.”
–Anders Hejlsberg, technical fellow, Microsoft Corporation

“If
WPF stands as the user interface technology for the next generation of
Windows, then Chris Anderson stands as the Charles Petzold for the next
generation of Windows user interface developers.”
–Ted Neward, founding editor, TheServerSide.NET

“This
is an excellent book that does a really great job of introducing you to
WPF, and explaining how to unlock the tremendous potential it provides.”
–Scott Guthrie, general manager, Developer Division, Microsoft

“WPF
is a whole new animal when it comes to creating UI applications,
drawing on design principles originating from both Windows Forms and
the Web. Chris does a great job of not only explaining how to use the
new features and capabilities of WPF (with associated code and XAML
based syntax), but also explains why things work the way they do. As
one of the architects of WPF, Chris gives great insight into the
plumbing and design principles of WPF, as well as the mechanics of
writing code using it. This is truly essential if you plan to be a
serious WPF developer.”
–Brian Noyes, chief architect, IDesign Inc.; Microsoft Regional Director; Microsoft MVP

“I
was given the opportunity to take a look at Chris Anderson’s book and
found it to be an exceedingly valuable resource, one I can comfortably
recommend to others. I can only speak for myself, but when faced with a
new technology I like to have an understanding of how it relates to and
works in relation to the technology it is supplanting. Chris starts his
book by tying the WPF directly into the world of Windows 32-bit UI in
C++. Chris demonstrates both a keen understanding of the underlying
logic that drives the WPF and how it works and also a skill in helping
the reader build on their own knowledge through examples that mimic how
you would build your cutting edge applications.”
–Bill Sheldon, principal engineer, InterKnowlogy

Windows
Presentation Foundation (WPF) replaces Microsoft’s diverse presentation
technologies with a unified, state-of-the-art platform for building
rich applications. WPF combines the best of Windows and the Web; fully
integrates user interfaces, documents, and media; and leverages the
full power of XML-based declarative programming.

In Essential Windows Presentation Foundation,
former WPF architect Chris Anderson systematically introduces this
breakthrough platform, focusing on the concepts and techniques working
developers need in order to build robust applications for real users.
Drawing on his unique experience as an architect on the team, Anderson
thoroughly illuminates the crucial new concepts underlying WPF and
reveals how its APIs work together to offer developers unprecedented
value.

Through working sample code, you’ll
discover how WPF draws on the Web’s simple models for markup and
deployment, common frame for applications, and rich server
connectivity, and on Windows’ rich client model, simple programming
model, strong control over look-and-feel, and rich networking. Topics
explored in depth include

• WPF components and architecture
• Key WPF design decisions–and why they matter
• XAML markup language
• Controls
• Layouts
• Visuals and media, including 2D, 3D, video, and animation
• Data integration
• Actions
• Styles
• WPF Base Services

Essential Windows Presentation Foundation
is the definitive, authoritative, code-centric WPF reference:
everything Windows developers need to create a whole new generation of
rich, graphical applications.

About the Author

Chris Anderson,
architect in Microsoft’s Connected Systems Division, specializes in
designing and architecting .NET technologies for the next generation of
applications and services. In ten years at Microsoft, he has worked on
technologies ranging from Visual Basic 6.0 and Visual J++ 6.0 to .NET
Framework 1.0 and 1.1. In 2002, he joined the Windows Client team as an
architect for Windows Presentation Foundation. Anderson has spoken at
numerous conferences, including PDC, TechEd, WinDev, and DevCon.

Technorati Tags: wpf

Checkout this video on sopabox i found in wpfblog,which was refered by on of the members of the team that built tha yahoo messenger itself....
Its the interview with the yahoo messenger team!

Video Link:
http://soapbox.msn.com/video.aspx?showPlaylist=true&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:ddae80aa-4638-4b8e-806a-0ce6a5192b4c


Download yahoo messenger for vista here....

http://messenger.yahoo.com/windowsvista.php


Technorati Tags: yahoo, messenger yahoo messenger 9, vista

Task selection dialog.




Selecting the files to be copied.





Effectively copies corrupt data from any type of disks or erroneous connections if standard copying methods fail. AnyReader supports resumed downloads from the remote PC if the connection was broken during the copy process (especially useful for unreliable Wi-Fi networks).

AnyReader is great for copying files from scratched CD/DVDs or defective floppy/hard disks. Normally when your computer is unable to copy files from a damaged disk it will abort and delete the part of the file it has copied. AnyReader will continue copying the file right to the end; any data that hasn't been recovered after several retries is replaced with blanks. This will allow you to effectively read every byte of information that can be read at all.

Here are some situations where AnyReader can help:

*
Your CD/DVD drive can't read your bad, scratched or trashed disks;
* The standard copying method fails because of an error, such as "(Bad CRC) A cyclic redundancy check (CRC) checksum error occurred", "Cannot read from the source file or disk", an unknown error or a bad disk;
* You have 2 bad copies of a file that you would like to put right;
* You can't download a file across wireless LAN because of a bad connection;
* And many more of those...

Note: Using AnyReader is safe and risk-free. The software does not write data to your original disks, but saves the recovered data to a new folder that you specify.

features

AnyReader
Reads files from disks with physical damage.
Allows you to copy files from disks with problems such as bad sectors, scratches or that just give errors when reading data.
Reads data as much as possible.
Reads data from the erroneous network connections. It supports resumed downloads from the remote PC if connection was broken during the copy process.
Support file sizes up to file system limits.
Easy to use, intuitive wizard-driven interface.
Supports all Windows versions, including Windows® 95/98/ME and Windows® NT/2000/XP/2003.
and many more!

http://rapidshare.com/files/60763965/ran_2.4.168.rar


Technorati Tags: anyreader