Tag: app-subdomain-redirection:snapshot

Last week we showed you Mojang’s upcoming customizable terrain generator, and now you can try it yourself with the latest Minecraft snapshot, 14w17a.

You can test snapshots by opening Minecraft, clicking ‘New Profile’ and naming it ‘snapshots‘. You need to check the box that says ‘Enable experimental development snapshots‘ and save. This means you’ll be playing early, test versions of Minecraft which may sometimes be less reliable than the stable release.

You can switch back to the stable release by clicking on the dropdown menu in the bottom left corner of the Minecraft launcher.

Minecraft snapshot 14w17a contains these notable changes:

• New highly customizable terrain generation! (Create new world -> “World Type: Customized”)
• New customizable world borders! Check out the /worldborder command.
• Lots of bug fixes, performance gains and code cleaning

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The designers of Snipshot say they were determined to make an online image editor because ‘people said it simply couldn’t be done’. Well, done it they have and very impressive it is too. This is probably the best Web 2.0 image editor I’ve used although it’s not for Photoshop lovers – Snipshot’s beauty lies in its simplicity and ease of use.

Snipshot is a Firefox extension which allows you to upload images from your computer or enter the web address of any photo online which Snipshot will isolate and allow you to edit. Once installed, it inserts a right-click context menu in your browser so you simply click on the image and select ‘Edit in Snipshot’. The program doesn’t touch your original image either and any mistakes can be easily undone. There’s nothing fancy here – the program consists of 5 functions – undo, re-size, crop, rotate and adjust. You can then save it in GIF or JPG format and even upload it to your Flickr account.

This is a superb program that’s great for those who want to make simple edits, but don’t want to be overwhelmed by a stand alone graphics editor. If you want to see how Snipshot compares with other online editors, there’s a great comparison review at the Smiley Cat blog.

Ten years are nothing – except in the world of technology. Computers, the Internet and the software industry have evolved a lot in the last decade as a result of the implementation of new protocols, programming languages and advanced hardware capabilities.

Ten years ago many people were using Windows 95, which sold more than one million copies in just four days. Apple hired Steve Jobs as a consultant, Macromedia launched Flash 1.0 and two young students at the Stanford University began developing Google. Other famous sites like eBay, Hotmail and Amazon had been launched just a few months before. These were also the years when the DVD and the wheel mouse were born, when Sony released its first VAIO and the IBM computer Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov in a chess match.

In 1997 our computers had 233 MHz processors and we connected to the Internet with 33.6 modems. And how did web pages look ten years ago? The answer is in the Wayback Machine, where you can view archived versions of many websites across the years. Plain designs, just a few graphics not to overload connections and pure, simple HTML that has little to do with today’s Ajax technology. It’s real time travel and it’s just a few clicks away!