Camera Phones Plaza

It remained very little time until EA Games will launch the new part of Need for Speed.
Need for Speed ProStreet has been developed by EA Black Box in Vancouver, B.C. and brings new head to head competitions against the best street racers in a multitude of racing showdowns.

Larry LaPierre, the Executive Producer declared that "Need for Speed ProStreet accelerates street racing culture by providing the ultimate stage for the pursuit of street racing supremacy," and that "This is a game about building the ultimate performance-tuned battle machine, taking it to multi-disciplinary showdowns all over the world and pitting your skills and reputation against the very best street racers."

The exceptional graphics with perfect detailed images manages to transport the gamer directly in the center of a real racing experience, while the Autosculpt technology allows directly impact the performance of the cars and personalize its appearance.

Need for Speed ProStreet presents the Nissan GT-R PROTO for the first time in a video game, after being unveiled at the 2005 Tokyo Motor Show.
Besides the Nissan GT-R PROTO, other unique, very desirable cars that will appear in the game are 1970 Plymouth Hemi Cuda, 1995 Mazda RX-7, 1999 Mitsubishi Eclipse, 2006 Audi S4, 1986 Toyota Corolla GTS AE86, 2006 Mitsubishi Lancer EVOLUTION IX MR-edition, 2006 Volkswagen Golf GTI and 2008 BMW M3.

ProStreet will start to be available in stores on November 1 this year in Europe and on October 31 in America, for Xbox 360, PlayStation2, PLAYSTATION3, Wii, Nintendo DS, PlayStation Portable, PC and mobile.

Flash is one of the greatest technologies on the Web, in my opinion, and I am sure that a lot of people agree with this. The bad part of the story is that you need a lot of study and good programming knowledge to fully unleash its power. Of course that sometimes you can solve things easier, using animated GIF files, for example. Today, I have here a very simple program that can assemble animations for your sites from still images, other animations or text, called Animation Workshop.





Setup



The last version of this program is 2.0, released on the 3rd of February. The shareware version has a really nasty nag, so it doesn't matter for how long you can use it, legally speaking. I am sure you won't stand it for more than a few days, anyway...

As you can see in the screenshots above, the installation is not really different from most Windows programs...or so it seems! The 15MB setup package should be easy for most of us to download and install, but what I didn't like is the length of the installation process. Enough to say that I had to click too many Next buttons, and nothing else.





Interface


Animation Workshop looks clean and very easy to use, as you can see in the screenshot to the left. In fact, it's too clean... just think about this - the menus from the main menu have only a few options each, and the toolbar isn't that rich in tools either. After seeing the main window of the program for the first time, only a question remains: "how powerful can be this program, if its interface is so basic?". Well, this is exactly the question I'll try to answer in the next chapter.





Features



The features of this program orbit around creating animations, but I wasn't expecting for this to be the only thing you can do. I thought it is normal to have an animation workshop that also allows you to edit images and objects, create new ones, import graphics... wait! That's it!



Importing graphics and setting options for each frame of the movie you are creating is the only thing you can do with this program. In fact, the idea is as it follows: you use another program for creating the content you'll merge into a movie, then import the files into Animation Workshop, then export your work. The good part is that you can import enough file formats, at least for beginners (I am sure that advanced web designers are not going to use this!), and one of the formats available for export is SWF (Flash file, if you didn't knew it by now).


At last, a warning! Don't press the About item from the Help menu if your speakers are on and somebody around is sleeping, or if you want to have a peaceful day... you're going to face the audio-nag when closing the program, anyway!





The Good



Animation Workshop is pretty easy to use and you don't need to spend much time learning it. It can export animations to Flash files.



The Bad



The price is huge, considering the features that this program (doesn't) have. There isn't much you can do with it, and you need additional software for creating the contents to import in Animation Workshop. At last, I'll say it again: the audio-nag is really annoying!


Conclusion


Animation Workshop is a really nice name, and I was expecting more from this program. Unfortunately, the only thing I like is the splash screen, but that doesn't make the program useful. Well, I don't want to bury it, so if you have the time and think this may help you, give it a try. Just hit the download link below... you know the rest!



Developer: Alchemy Mindworks Inc.

Price: 29.99$

Trial Link: Download

LiquiBase is an open source, DBMS-independent library for manage database changes and refactorings.
Structure and data changes are stored XML files located in version control with other source code.

Its features include the support for merging of changes from multiple developers, a Database Refactoring IDE-Plugin, support for rolling back changes, and the ability to create DIFFs from which it can generate logs.

LiquiBase supports the following databases: MySQL, Postgre SQL, MS-SQL, Sybase, DB2, Apache Serby, HSQL, H2 and InterSystems Cache.
In case of using LiquiBase with an unsupported database, the problem that could interfere if it won’t succeed running is that it could not determine the correct date/time function.
If this happens it can be passed to the currentDateTimeFunction argument that will override the function used in SQL.

What the new version LiquiBase 2.1 brings new are the support for H2 database, InterSystems Cache database and change, improved error messages, < comment > tag, absolute change log file references, ";" or "go" delimitations in tag, and clearCheckSums in the command line migrator.

LiquiBase can be downloaded or upgraded by simply replacing the liquibase.jar file.
XSD declaration has to be changed with the following code:

xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance";
schemalocation="http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.2
http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/dbchangelog-1.2.xsd";>

EseT, the global provider of security software for enterprises and consumers created a new version of its award-winning NOD32 antivirus software system, 3.0.290.0 Beta 2, with an improved system of cleaning and deleting infiltrations, that doesn’t need user interaction.

The scanning can be run in background using less system resources.
The update package is smaller than in version 2.7 while the management and protection against damaging of updated files is more effective.
It also offers Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express email protection.

NOD32 Antivirus System has won many international important awards being one of the antivirus systems that have the best detection efficiency and extremely fast hard disk scanning rate.

Versions available are for all major operating systems including Windows XP 32/ XP 64, Novell and Linux.

BC Soft games offers a new puzzle game titled The Magician's Handbook: Cursed Valley, with the story about a handbook of a magician, whose pages are revealed after travelling to the dark and mysterious Cursed Valley and removing the curse that has haunted the valley for many years.

During the exploration of the 13 levels, the enchanted objects hidden throughout the valley are helping in breaking the evil spell while the incantations learned along the way are used to avoid the shadow and other distracters of light.

The Magician's Handbook is the only seek and find game with hand-painted backgrounds that make the story more attractive.

BC Soft is a small company located in Salt Lake City which started to be known in 2001 with the launching of the game Break Ball, and was awarded for Dark Archon in 2004.

The Magician's Handbook: Cursed Valley is available for download as demo or as full version for 19.95 US dollars.