Found this and thought it was interesting. Claiming to be almost every file format in existence in one list. Including now unused formats and current. I would have no idea if the list is complete but I reckon that it might go close.
So if you have ever wondered if a file format exists or ever has; this is a great place to start. Alphabetical order for easy searching.
Almost Every file format in the world!
I am not big on fancy fonts and such but I came across a website this week that had a great top 10 list of what they considered the best fonts of 2006.
It is not that I am against fonts or anything like that, I like a nice font. But fancy unique ones have their limitations. For instance if you have a font installed on your machine you can use it all you like, print a letter with it without any problems. But send a document to someone and they don’t have it on theirs and it will bork. They won’t see it. Same goes for a web page. It has to be resident on the machine for the user to see it.
One way around this is to create an image that uses the font. But that changes it as well, it is now an image and is treated as such. Creating a header or logo using a fancy font is not so bad because within the html you can edit the text to reflect the content on the page. This raw html of the page is what the web spiders crawl for indexing.
I heard a podcast this week where there were open questions and one podcaster was wondering why her content was not being indexed. It turned out that the whole page of text that she referred to was an image. She wanted the page to look nice and so that the visitors could see it she made the whole block of text an image. Google does not index the content of an image as far as content is concerned. In all honesty I am after content crap can still look good and some of the ugliest web sites have the best content.
I should also mention as a side point that having a massive number of fonts installed is notorious for slowing down your machine. So be picky with what you install and maybe review them once in a while and cull out the ones you don’t use any more. Saving them to disk is a great idea as you can always install them again if you ever have the need.
So now that I have trashed fonts… I found this nice collection of fonts this week. The Best Fonts of 2006. While I am not sure what the best is based on they are a nice collection. They are from a site called MyFonts and I would suggest that these are what they consider to be the best fonts as opposed to being judged or voted on. You can see the whole collection as an alphabet and you can purchase them if you wish. Must be hard to develop fonts because the ones I looked at range in price from $19.00 to $40.00. But they have some great specials as low as 10 bucks! Cool. What is the going rate for a font anyway? Still worth it if you are after something unique in my opinion.
Looks like a great site by the way lots of fonts and styles to suit anything that you would want to do, 52,454 at last count. I really liked the “more like this” feature that selects fonts based on the one you are looking at. These fonts definitely have a place for the designer and artist. But remember that they have a place and more importantly when and where you shouldn’t be using them.
Open source stuff is tops. I would argue that there is not an application out there in open source that won’t fill the gap for something that you pay for. I have a link to a whole list of applications that fit this criteria in the Web Links. Note that this list is Windows specific but covers everything that you could think of and then some. But I have found the mother load!
Games are great, especially ones that you do not have to pay for. Just skimming through this list again I would argue that there would not be a game type or genre that is not represented. One my personal favourites and that of my mates is BZFlag. A first person tank game… the tanks can jump too! Great game and great fun.
While these games might not win up against the likes of commercially produced games (yeah the ones that you pay $100 bucks a pop for) but they are pretty good considering that most developers do it for the love of it. In addition they contain the elements that are necessary to make a game great: fun, playability, functional, multiplayer, free! In some cases they are excellent, not because they are “pretty” to look at but because of their excellent non tangible elements, like being fun. They often do it better as well. Just don’t write open source software off because it is free, the days of free being crap are long gone.
Open source games are often really customisable. If you are into setting a server up, then this is even more so. James set up an excellent BZ server, alas now dead because he became a Mac convert. But it was total fun and exciting to play in and tweaked for the handful of us that used it. One final aspect that I would point out is that the community is very active, always developing and assisting each other. So the help is there if you need it as well. To them a bug is just another challenge!
So if you are interested head on over to the Wiki for the A-Z of Open Source Games!
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