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I put bbPress on my site a while back. It doesn't have all of the features of some other boards, but it is free and pretty easy to customize. I was able to integrate the logins of my site, my blog, and my boards without too much hassle.

I second this, especially the integrated login which is quite nice. Additionally, bbPress is very easy to customize the appearance, if you're willing to get your hands a little dirty in the process. As an example: Asylum Walls, a forum I rebuilt for a friend, just to illustrate that you can change every tiny graphical detail. That forum was previously a plain, ugly black-on-white "theme" (to use the term loosely). The limits, as with anything that is heavily customizable, are your imagination and time.

Yeah, that forum could've been made even better, but the "time" constraint caught up to me. It's just one example.

...assuming that there is even such a thing as fairness in the context of copyright law, which there is not.

Other than an online cartoon, what do you have to do in Flash that can't be done in html?

But you're probably right, to a novice, it might look bad.

there's no good way to make a low-budget video game

Beg to differ. Sure, it's very incomplete -- there's only a few levels -- and gameplay isn't the most original, and it's sure not gonna put the screws to any big-league dev/pub houses, but considering that this was made by one guy*, I find your statement entirely wrong.

(*Disclaimer: Yeah, I'm that guy. Shameless plug, but I think I've made my point pretty clear.)

That approach is already broken; when the user overrides font and font si[z]e with their own (a perfectly legitimate thing to do) this easily ends up looking like garbage.

I would argue that you're wrong, or that at the very least this reasoning does not apply universally. This site (shameless plug) looks just fine regardless of the font size, or whether you use a serif or sans-serif font. The whole thing scales quite well, and does use transparent GIF spacers for "ultimate control". So where's the problem?

In fact, quite a lot of sites (nytimes.com, for example) look distincty better once you overrride their font choices.

If a site requires the user to manually set their browser's font in order for the page to look good and be legible, then the designer of the page did not do their job properly.

what are the differences between png and jpg?

JPEG images are "lossy" meaning that some data (image quality) is sacrificed for the sake of higher compression (smaller file size and thus higher download speeds). PNG's are "lossless", so while the integrity of the image is preserved perfectly, this results in a larger file size. It's a trade-off. For the sake of not alienating dial-up users, I personally prefer JPEG for displaying my artwork online, even though image quality takes a (moderate) hit in the end result compared to the original image.

One other advantage of JPEG over PNG is the near-uniform rendering of JPEG files across all known graphics-capable browsers, unlike the PNG format which renders quite differently from one browser to another, especially with regards to transparency alpha channels. For ex., Firefox renders transparency (alpha) data in a PNG correctly, while Internet Explorer completely ignores the alpha channel, and thus erroneously renders the image with no transparency at all. While the 8-bit (256-grayscale) transparency and transluscency of PNG files are far superior to the all-or-nothing per-pixel transparency of GIF images, the latter has far less universal support than the former, which unfortunately negates many of the PNG format's inherant advantages.

A good example is "Alt" tags. These are crucial for displaying your page in a text only browser such as links, e-links, lynx, etc...

Unless, of course, someone is an artist who just wants his work to be seen and enjoyed by others (or a photographer, or a fledgling game designer, etc.). Suddenly, text-only browsers don't seem so relevent -- a flowery description inside an Alt tag just ain't the same.

Mind you, I'm not saying text-only browsers have no use (of course they do!), just that they have very limited use, and I certainly wouldn't recommend them as the only browser a person ever uses (ie. great for mobile devices, lousy for regular use). Without a decent graphics-capable browser, there's really a lot to miss on the Internet, unless you're only doing research.

Having said that, I really can't see how it's all that critical to get noticed for browsers that have only the tiniest portion of the market.

Note: Not looking for a flame war, just my two cents, YMMV, rebuttals welcome. Thanks.

A good example is "Alt" tags. These are crucial for displaying your page in a text only browser such as links, e-links, lynx, etc...

Unless, of course, someone is an artist who just wants his work to be seen and enjoyed by others (or a photographer, or a fledgling game designer, etc.). Suddenly, text-only browsers don't seem so relevent -- a flowery description inside an Alt tag just ain't the same.

Mind you, I'm not saying text-only browsers have no use (of course they do!), just that they have very limited use, and I certainly wouldn't recommend them as the only browser a person ever uses (ie. great for mobile devices, lousy for regular use). Without a decent graphics-capable browser, there's really a lot to miss on the Internet, unless you're only doing research.

Having said that, I really can't see how it's all that critical to get noticed for browsers that have only the tiniest portion of the market.

Note: Not looking for a flame war, just my two cents, YMMV, rebuttals welcome. Thanks.

Windows users want little risk, and find little reward in knowing how their tools work.

Thank you for that oh-so-blatent generalization. Where to begin...

First, I'd like to preface this reply with two statements:
1.) Yes, I'm a long-time Windows user.
2.) No, I'm not a Microsoft apologist.
3.) Yes, I've dabbled with other operating systems (esp. Linux).
Having said that...

From my vantage point as an lifelong artist and as a fledgling game programmer, MS has been both a blessing and a curse, for me personally anyway. Here's the thing: At this point in time, all the most powerful apps that are available to me, which are needed in both my fields, are Windows applications (eg. 3D rendering, 2D painting, Visual Studio for my programming, etc.).
(Note: Not looking for a flamewar on which apps are best, 'cause really that's a matter of personal preference and I say 'to each his own' in that respect.)

Here's another thing: The reason I'm a long-time Windows user is, quite simply, I'm accustomed to Windows. Yes, it has many flaws -- believe me, I'm painfully familiar with those (occasional BSOD, etc.). BUT it also has many advantages: A great many applications are available for Windows, far more so than for any other OS in the world. Sad, but true. Also, over the years I've become quite comfortable "hacking" Windows' various subsystems to suit my needs (registry, 3rd-party DLL replacements, etc.). I'd argue that such hacks are very much on the same level as the various Linux customizations, the only difference being a question of legality (a debate for another thread).

Yes, I'm aware that there are many FOSS alternatives out there, but so far none have met my own specific demands. Your mileage may, of course, vary. That's the great thing about our current age, everyone has a huge variety of choices available and they should be able to find a suite of OS+software to meet their specific demands. I certainly won't put someone down for using Linux, I think it's a wonderful idea, as long as you can find OSS apps that meet your particular demands. In that case, I say to each his own.

All I ask is the same non-judgmental courtesy in return. Just because someone uses Windows or Mac OS on a routine basis instead of Linux or any other F/OSS alternative, doesn't mean they can't comprehend the inherance advantages of an open-source OS, it simply means they have different priorities in what they need from the apps available to them. Not better, not worse, just different. Again, 'to each his own'.

Regards,
WeREwOLf

ultranova, any more info available on your turn-based fantasy game? I'm always curious about what other indy game devs are coming up with, these tend to be much more free-form than any of the bland Generic First-Person Shooter 6: Extreme Bumpmap Edition we seem to see everywhere.

I too and developing a game in my spare time, a classic-style arcade shooter, leveraging my personal experience as an artist helps with the graphics though. Nothing revolutionary, just a fun, simple kill-everything-and-try-not-to-die game like the type I enjoyed in the arcades 20 years ago. It is also designed from the outset to be very mod-friendly -- all data for levels, terrain, weapons, etc. is stored in plain text files, textures are simple bitmaps, sounds are easily-edited/replaced wave files, and so on.

Sure, the industry may die and be reborn every now and then, but there will always be gamers/game makers like us to carry on the tradition. At its heart, video gaming is and always will be a hobby, something to be built and enjoyed by those who love the passtime, like those who spend years rebuilding classic cars in their garages and take 'em for a spin when they're done just for the sheer joy of it. The fact that a bunch of business-types have managed to turn it into a "grey corporate parking lot" so they can make a buck doesn't diminish the hobby as a whole, it just means you gotta search harder to find good games.

And as for people like you and I and other indy game devs out there who create games for the sheer enjoyment of it, to paraphrase the Firefly theme, they can't take the sky from us.

The last thing we need is the government telling Apple to waste time and money making their product do things that their target market doesn't care about.

The last thing we need is the government telling Microsoft to waste time and money making their product do things that their target market doesn't care about.

while the Windows-only games are certainly dominant, they are just as certainly growing fewer.

Unfortunately, the majority of PC games still require Windows, and most likely will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

The single biggest hurdle to games running on Windows and Linux is the entrenchment of DirectX as the foundation for PC-based gaming code (ie. video, sound, input, networking). Love it or hate it, DirectX is getting better with each generation. This is great for developers who want a unified platform upon which to quickly and effectively write code that will run on 90+% of PCs. However, it's bad for any other operating system, or for smaller devs who would really like to code for multiple OS's but simply don't have the resources to retool their game engines to do so. If they go exclusively for Linux, they leave out a huge potential market. Anyone who's ever coded for both OpenGL and Direct3D is well aware that porting a game from one platform to another is no small undertaking; many subroutines need to be entirely rewritten. This lock-in will ensure that, unfortunately, Windows is the default OS of choice for anyone who wants access to the widest selection of PC games for the indefinite future, and probably well into Vista's lifecycle as well.

I'm currently writing a 3D action game myself -- screenshots here http://www.darkicon.com/werewolf/projectx/screenca ps (and yeah, shameless plug) -- which I would love to be playable on Linux, but since this is a spare-time project it's just not feasable for me to write two engines. Companies like id and Blizzard can do it because of their huge resources, but the rest of us small-time devs are basically S.O.L. in any cross-platform venture.

Obviously, the Gimp aspires -- rightly so -- to be far more than a photo-tweaking tool.

I have only moderate experience with Photoshop, but for an example of what Paint Shop Pro (various previous versions) is really capable of, check out my gallery of original artwork here:
http://www.darkicon.com/werewolf/mygallery/

With the exception of werewolf.jpg, all of these were originally drawn/painted by hand in PSP v4 and higher over the past several years.

Of special importance is sentinal.jpg and temp02.jpg, which fully show off what the program is capable of doing in the right hands.

They were wrong. Shame on them... and shame on everyone who actually BELIEVED their ridiculous con-job. They're SUPPOSED to be harder on the eyes... they're on a COMPUTER SCREEN for God's sake! Who in their right mind would expect them to be better than print!? People who don't think and who swallow everything the media feeds them, that's who. This marketing hype has people expecting things that just won't happen. People are disappointed, and thus articles like this one get written.

The technology simply doesn't exist for ebooks to replace print, but that doesn't mean that ebooks are a dud. Ebooks are just another format for data with benefits and drawbacks vs. other formats for the same data. It's like computer images... comparing ebooks to print is like comparing a mid-quality JPEG with a high-quality Bitmap. With JPEG you accept lesser quality in exchange for smaller file size. With an ebook, you accept inconvenience and lesser quality in exchange for... what? What do you get in return? You are SUPPOSED to get a lower price, but that isn't happening because the media kept pushing the "CD vs. cassette" analogy that just doesn't apply. Retailers priced and marketed their ebooks according to the wrong set of assumptions, and thus those products don't move. Then they came out with special over-priced ebook readers that were a good 10 years ahead of the screen technology needed to make them viable... or even tolerable!

Ebooks should have been marketed as an ultra-low cost format so folks could get CHEAP books that they can either read on a screen or print out on their own paper. Instead, they were marketed and priced as being equivalent or even superior to print books. That's a ludicrous lie, and THAT'S why the market is tanking.

A better way to look at it is with Hardback vs. Paperback books. With paperbacks, you pay a lower price for the same words... but in a different package. You get a package that is smaller and more portable... but with smaller print and less sturdy construction. Now add ANOTHER format: Ebooks. You get those SAME words in a less-portable, less readable, (depending on your hardware) format... a format that you would expect to pay a whole lot less for. For this reason, ebooks should be priced MUCH less than hardbacks and considerably less than paperbacks. How much less? You tell me... ? Really... I'm a writer and I want to know how much the market will tolerate. How much would YOU pay for your favorite writer's new work in ebook form, if the hardback was around $20.00? How much for that computer manual that you want/need if it was in ebook vs. a $60.00 softcover?

Just my two cents.

DARK ICON
http://www.darkicon.com
http://www.infinitemultimedia.com