Web Design Rebel Hammerkit Launches Closed Beta
Finnish web design solution provider Hammerkit has launched a closed beta of the new version of its cloud-based web design tool with revamped UI and features. The company's tool allows web designers to implement even complex websites on their own, without the need for help from programmers. Traditionally web designers have built mock-ups and wireframes, and then transferred these over to programmers to implement and weave in database connections etc. dynamic functionality. Hammerkit aims to revolutionize this old school fashion, allowing creativity without learning complex programming techniques - thus the company's tagline "a tool for the web punk generation."
Geek Girl Meetup Gathers 100 Women To Talk About Tech
ArcticStartup is joining Geek Girl Meetup as a media partner. Geek Girl Meetup is a Swedish unconference for women, by women, who are interested in technology, web, social media and entrepreneurship. The event takes place October 24-25 in Stockholm and is being organized for the second time despite its short existence. What started as a one day event for 50 participants in March has now turned into two day event with 100 women attending. And there're still ladies on the waiting list!
Unity Technologies Eases 3D Game Development for iPhone and Wii
Unity Technologies is a Danish gaming technology startup. They provide tools for creating visually-rich 3D downloadable, online, iPhone and Wii games, or other interactive content like as architectural visualizations or real-time 3D animations. The company is based in Copenhagen, but has an international team and a sales office in San Francisco.
The company's main product is Unity multi-platform game development tool, including a 3D game engine, which enables developers to create cutting-edge 3D content supposedly faster and more efficiently than with other tool sets. The Unity editor only runs on Mac OS X, but it can be used to produce games for Mac, Windows 2000/XP/Vista, Nintendo Wii, and iPhone. In addition, it's possible to publish a web game played inside a normal web browser from the same project, the visual fidelity being identical to the standalone version. This is achieved by the company's own Unity Web Player Plug-in for the most common web browsers. The plug-in is said to be already distributed in "6-digit" numbers.
Over the past couple of years, the company has gotten lots of new clients from indie and small shop developers, and a few high-profile customers including Disney, Sony Motion Pictures, and Cartoon Networks. Unity has been used in games, advergaming and edutainment projects, and technology demos. There is quite impressive a variety of games (latest best).
The company promises to combine usability, power, and platform reach in their tools, and seems there is user support for the claim as well. The framework is said to have built-in fallbacks and workarounds to provide solid support for almost all hardware and software combinations. It also presents features like Live Preview for playing the game exactly as it is and do real-time modification, Click to Publish to build the game with one click and running it with another, even directly on an iPhone. Unity also claims that with their tools the developers get the best out of iPhone, "consistently beating GL ES benchmarks by 30-40%." However, while Unity has features supporting ease of use, like drag-and-drop, it's still script-based programming tool, so not perfectly suitable for purely visual designers alone.
Unity Technologies is a technology company by heart, they state they're "all about building technology, driving it forwards, and supporting it." The company offers the tool with a standard licensing model, differentiating between small developers and companies with turnover in above USD 100,000.
Unity probably finds the biggest market within smaller indie developers and in different special projects (like WolfQuest and Axe Billions), while the big companies most likely will keep using and developing their own tools. Considering the real mass-market, online web gaming, the web plug-in works neatly, but the biggest drawback is exactly the need for it. It's not possible to install new plugins in many of the public or workplace computers, even though the installation of the Unity plug-in is quick in itself. Gaming sites offering Flash-based games have become hugely popular due to the fact the Flash plug-in is available in pretty much all main browsers. Breaking into the mass-market will thus be difficult. Also, the market for in-browser 3D gaming is still relatively small compared to casual 2D games. There's also competition, like Adobe ShockWave and services like InstantAction competing for the hardcore gamers. In iPhone game development, on the other hand, it will be interesting to see what kind of customer base Unity is able to get.
If you want to check out a demo, see Unity's Tropical Paradise browser demo.
ZeroTurnaround JavaRebel to Improve Development Productivity
ZeroTurnaround JavaRebel is a product by Webmedia Ltd, an Estonian firm, which has been the fastest growing software development company in the Baltics.
ZeroTurnaround JavaRebel improves developer productivity by reducing the "turnaround" time it takes for the programmers to see the changes made to the code in action. Turnaround time refers to the time it takes to build, deploy, and initialize changes in web development to see the actual result in running application. With web development it might take several minutes, or more, for the programmers to see the changes made to the service. Big software development teams having many deployments per hour are wasting a lot of time and money with developers waiting for the deployment process to finish. The people may have hard time concentrating, and the overall productivity may be low. 
With JavaRebel the deployment process is claimed to take maximum 1-2 seconds. The company also offers JSP Weaver product, which interprets the JSP files used in web site development on-the-fly and thus reduces the time taken to reload a JSP up to 50 times down to milliseconds.
Webmedia recently announced that LinkedIn Corp. has licensed JavaRebel for all its Java engineers. According to Ivo Mägi, Chief Development Officer of Webmedia, JavaRebel has currently more than 10 000 users worldwide, and it is the first step in conquering enterprise Java development market.
The company offers JavaRebel as open source for "qualified Open Source projects" and with commercial licenses.
[Via Toivo Tänavsuu's TigerPrises.com]
