Seems the Giana’s Return team are in trouble again, but read on:

Quote:

[tHug] our current graphic arist seems to be extra busy or has disappeared, at least he does not appear online nor does he reply on emails… as we want to get things done, we are looking for someone to help out again.

Please don’t offer your help unless you know what it means to work on a large project. You need to be a skilled 2D pixel graphic artist, dealing with limitations suchs as colors and tile sizes.

Giana’s Return is freeware, so there is no money involved, therefor we can also not pay you anything.

Who wants to help out?

http://www.gianas-return.de/?p=197

jChat4Android is a chat application for the Android platform based on Jade agent framework. It shows how Jade can effectively be used in a peer-to-peer context on mobile devices.

Features:

* Contacts management (contacts are read from the phone contacts database)
* Persistence (you can see the status of all contacts connected to your own JADE platform)
* Real time localization (you can see the position of the contacts on the map and the distance from your current position. Localization uses the Android mocked GPS provider for tracking contacts position. You are able to import new custom tracks if you wish.)
* Multiple chat sessions handling ( you can open multiple chat sessions with different contacts and switch between them)
* Support for chat with many contacts in a single session
* Mocked SMS sending and phone call to contacts

Discussion: http://www.anddev.org/jchat4android_10_released-t2643.html

http://code.google.com/p/jchat4android/

MID4th is a Forth System for Java MIDP-2.0 phones.

Release notes:

An ANS Forth System written in Java2ME. It is adapted for Mobile devices from WebForth, available at the FIG archive. The Forth is reasonably standard with referance to the Dpans94 standard document, with a few changes to facilitae use on a mobile device. The main features are as follows.

The Forth suports persistant blocks of size 256 UTF-16 characters. There are 256 blocks in a block set. The current block set can be edited through the Java interface, or saved, or loaded. A Java based block set manager can be used to load or delete block sets.

The use of general URL files is supported. Any URL may be supplid as a filename, and opening the file is done read only. Writes to files are sandboxed, and so no changes are ever made to files.

There are PlatformSpecificWords to control many features of MID4th.

The display supports a background bitmap with 16 bit colour depth (ARGB each 4 bits), and an overlayed full colour font capacity. Alignment is to an 8*8 pixel grid monospacing of TheFont.

The playing of MIDI notes is supported, with note 69 being 440Hz. The notes play asynchronously, so as not to interfere with execution. There are facilities to synchronize code with the device master clock, and multimedia abilities depending on the phone model. Note that some phones suspend or end MIDlets when a media stream is opened, and this may be anoying.

http://code.google.com/p/mid4th/

PocketCM ImageViewer is currently a test version, the purpose is to experiment what’s possible with image on our Windows Mobile device using the PocketCM framework.

Changes:

– Rotation support (scroll from top to bottom on the rightmost part on the screen when in slide or zoom mode).
– Variable zoom support (slide on the bottom on the screen to change zoom)
– Header button now disappear after a few seconds of inactivity, allowing you to see the picture fullscreen.
– Rewritten image loading engine, should be faster but mostly support bigger image. The good news is that those improvment will be in the next PocketCM Contact build.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=333559

Here comes a driver and SDK for the Neoflash Motion Kit by Raphael.

Release notes:

After a long time, here’s an update for the motionkit driver too. It finally brings the driver and SDK out of beta status and merely contains a new motionUnload function that allows to unload the currently running motion driver so you can load a different version as well as addresses a problem when trying to load the driver in a 3.xx+ kernel application.

So what does it do?
If you are a dev: You get easy acces to the neoflash motion kit input data without any SIO coding on your side, provided as raw gravital acceleration vector as well as a rotation vector that represents the tilting of the PSP. Those values are also filtered and smoothed over time in a configurable way to enhance signal quality without any coding on your side. You also don’t have to care whether the user has the motion kit plugged in or not, you just poll the motion data as an additional input method – as long as no motion kit is plugged in, the driver will just return zero values for all vectors. If your application requires a motion kit to be plugged in, you can easily check for that too (the SDK sample application shows a method to do so). Apart from that the driver bypasses the nosound problem that the motionkit suffers from because it’s being connected to the headphone port. It’s even possible to switch the motion kit and headphones at any time without a problem.

If you are a user: You get a custom firmware plugin for adding a simple support for the motion kit to any UMD game or homebrew by enabling the button forwarding mechanism, which interprets motion gestures as configurable button presses. Ever wanted to navigate through XMB by tilting your PSP? Do it!

Discussion: http://forums.qj.net/showthread.php?t=143051

http://www.fx-world.org/wordpress/?p=51

JoySens is a custom firmware plugin for Sony PSP that allows you to control the sensitivity of the analog stick in a very efficient way as well as “repair” faulty analog sticks. In very bad cases where the analog stick is not repairable, you can also just disable it so it doesn’t interfere with your games anymore. Apart from that it includes functionality to swap and remap DPad input to analog stick and vice versa, hence allows you to control the XMB with the analog stick for example.

Changes:

– fixed compatibility issues with Sony UMD driver (and possibly some other applications that require more kernel memory)
The config file system now uses a mere 1Kb of RAM where it used 24+Kb in 1.4/1.41
– Reduced module size a bit (to further help memory problems)
– added a workaround info output for POPS (flickers a lot, but at least you see something)
– fixed the adjust calculation to avoid crashes for high values (shouldn’t happen anymore even with adjust 32.0)
– fixed a little Button remapping bug

http://forums.qj.net/showthread.php?t=143050

MyBookWorm is a remake of an existing Java game named “Bookworm”.

The goal is to carry out words with the letters available on the plate. With each word carried out the score increases and the difficulty too.

http://www.playeradvance.org/forum/showthread.php?t=26656

Wii Solitaire is a very simple solitaire game which makes use of the Wiimote. This game is still a work in progress.

http://wiibrew.org/wiki/User:Wil/Wii_Solitaire

Wii Region Changer let you change your Wii’s region code freely. Custom IOS v37 rev 03 or newer is required.

Thanks to http://www.tehskeen.com for the news.

Update 13.07.2008 – 19:00
It seems the Wii Region Changer is not a “complete” product and therefor might harm or brick you Wii. PLEASE DO NOT USE IT!

The link in the original posting has been removed!

Inferno is an operating system for creating and supporting distributed services.

Inferno was first made in 1995 by members of Bell Labs’ Computer Science Research division to bring some principles of Plan 9 from Bell Labs over to other systems. Inferno is a distributed operating system based on three basic principles borrowed from Plan 9:

* Resources as files: all resources are represented as files within a hierarchical file system
* Namespaces: the application view of the network is a single, coherent namespace that appears as a hierarchical file system but may represent physically separated (locally or remotely) resources
* Standard communication protocol: a standard protocol, called Styx, is used to access all resources, both local and remote

[Text taken from Wikipedia]

Thanks to brakken / http://www.tehskeen.com and Nintendo-Scene ( http://nintendo-scene.com/1116 ) for the news.

http://code.google.com/p/inferno-ds/