The "http://Rollercoaster Tycoon" series of games for the PC is an amazing achievement in programming.  A perfect game for parents to play with their kids.

If you don't quite have the patience for that, here's a very cute, very cool, well done little puzzler that uses line drawing and physics as you attempt to create coasters that take your people from point A to point B, collecting coins along the way.

Very nicely done and fun to experiment with.

http://www.fatratgam...llercoaster-Creator/

The indie game coding website tigsource.com is holding a short programming competition focusing on games that use procedurally generated content.

The competition runs from May 5 to June 2.

Procedural Content Generation is just a fancy name for an old technology that was popularized by Will Wright's Sport media blitzkrieg (which seemed like they were trying to pretend they invented the concept) -- it refers to any scenario where rather than fixed human crafted content, a game employs some algorithms to dynamically create some content (environment, mazes, etc.) during gameplay.

http://forums.tigsou...dex.php?topic=1646.0

This looks very promising -- we might even consider using it for the Self-teaching Programming School here at DonationCoder.com

From the very nice review on makeuseof.com:

Studeous allows you to communicate, download, upload, discuss, and pretty much keep up with your coursework. As a teacher, you’ll be able to register, set up a class page, and get an “enroll” link that your students can use to sign up and register for the class. You then have a multitude of features at your disposal. You’ll be able keep track of all your students in a roster and easily update grades online. You can also update information regarding homework, events, tests, etc. and even create a drop box, which provides a place for students to upload assignments.

...

As students you can check all the information provided by your instructor. A great implementation on this site is a discussion board, allowing you to talk about assignments, homework, etc, with fellow classmates and teachers. There’s even a live chat option, letting you communicate with users outside of class, and an effective messaging system that works much like email. You can also look up your grades online, create study groups and events, and access course listings.

...

Academic institutions spend tens of thousands of dollars each year on services that Studeous does better, and for free. This means that schools with a limited budget can have access to this excellent and versatile service. Both teachers and students will enjoy Studeous to enrich their academic experience in an easy-to-use and integrated place.

http://www.studeous.com/

If money was no object, I would use oXygen as my XML editor. But at $300 I cannot justify purchasing it. I am curious what XML editors you folks use on the Windows platform?

This game is getting mentioned all over the place in the last few days.  I finally gave in and tried it, despite what sounded like a boring concept to me.

Truth is, it's done very well and is a fun way to practice your typing.

The concept is very simple, you and other people online type the same block of text to advance your cars along a line.  The fastest typer wins.  Very low tech visuals but it's a very clean interface and the multiplayer part just works well and helps motivate you.

The best part of it is probably that the text you type is selected from books and movies, and after you complete a "race" the page tells you about the text you just typed.  It's a great way to make it more entertaining.

http://play.typeracer.com/

Well.. This free utility is almost exactly what was planned for the program ContextMenu Commander, which I actually anticipated working on this summer.

The idea is to provide a generic customizable shell extension utility where users can create their own shell context menu items.

Looks extremely promising and they even have a 64bit version and a dll that developers can use.  And the license allows free commercial use.

Very impressive.

This handy utility allows you to manage context menus items of file objects displayed in a file manager like Windows Explorer or any other application that deals with shell's application programming interface. It's a very simple way to make your often used file actions quickly accessible.

With Fast Explorer you can create new context menu items, submenus (cascaded menus), dividers, and optionally specify menu bitmaps and hint text.

For an ultimate control over dynamic context menu items added from within Fast Explorer you can define your own look & feel using the custom-drawing feature.

http://thesoftpro.tr...wnloads/fe/index.htm