App Inventor for Android

Wonderful Tool available here which allows people to develop applications for the Android platform.

Instructions on set-up & installation can be found here.

Kodu

Kodu is a Game Creation Tool made by Microsoft which will be released pretty soon, You can find more at the following link or you can watch the video below.

Video Game - E3 2009 - Videos

Online Sound Synthesizer

Nice online tool for making music can be found here. Just click the squares on the screen to make your music.

StripReloc

Wonderful little tool which can be downloaded here, made by Jordan Russell (Inno Setup), which removes unnecessary data from an EXE & reduces it's size.

Usage is pretty simple too, when I wanted to reduce one of the demos that came with Basic4GL, I just typed the following...

StripReloc /B asteroiddemo2.exe

Image Resizing Update

Online tools for resizing images can be found at the following links...

• Online tool written in Java here.
• Another Online tool written in Flash here.

A good description of the image resizing algorithm can be found here.

Tomb Raider Level Designer

A lot of free tools which you can use for designing your own Tomb raider levels can be downloaded from this site.

CharacterFX is now Freeware

CharacterFX is a character animation tool, created for gamers, artists, modellers & hobbyists. It allows you to breathe life into your meshes using skeletal animation and advanced tools like Inverse Kinematics or Weighted Vertices but still it is easy enough to use for all levels of computer graphic artists.

• imports WaveFront OBJ, MilkShape3D ASCII, Autodesk 3DS
• skeletal animation with key frames
• easy to use forward and inverse kinematics system

Download from here.

Media Conversion

Nice site here which can convert different types of media.

AWK Windows Examples

Okay, here's the first; a simple Hello world example.

awk "BEGIN { print \"Hello world!\" }"

The above program will print Hello world! on the screen.

Linux users should notice the use of double quotation marks at the beginning & end of the script. Also notice how the quotations in the braces have had to be 'cancelled-out' with backslashes.

If anyone wants to know why I've become interested in Awk, it was based on me reading this thread on the Ubuntu Forum.

AWK, GAWK, MAWK etc...

I'd been hearing about 'awk' for a longtime on the Ubuntu forum. It's a simple command-line tool that you can use for searching through text files. I've just downloaded the Windows version which can be found here.

The biggest difference between the Linux version & the Windows version so far has been in how you enter quotation marks for the tasks.

Single for Linux '
Double for Windows "

I'll try & post some usage examples later on.

Process Tree in Ubuntu

Want to know what processes are running in Ubuntu? Just open a terminal & type the following.

pstree

If you want the output from the command to be written to a text file on your desktop just do the following.

cd ~/Desktop
pstree > output.txt

Online Text Editor

Useful free online tool, available here.

Remove text with uniq

Uniq is a great little command-line tool which when combined with grep; makes text operations really simple.

Sharebee File Upload

Sharebee is a wonderful file upload site. It takes the file that you upload & copies it to several different upload sites.

RGB 2 Hex Converter

Very useful online RGB to Hex converter available here.

Online Image Editor

Another useful online tool can be found here. It's an image editor which can be used for resizing images.

TrID

TrID is a useful command-line tool that can analyze files & tell you about their format.

You can get it from here.

GNUWin32 Tools

Have you ever wanted to use Linux Command-Line tools like wget, gzip, grep & cat in Windows?

Check out this site. Just take the .dlls & .exes, place them in your System32 folder & you'll be able to use them from the Command-Prompt.

A package listing can be found here.