After a few months of hard work (mostly by Isaiah, as of lately), Caffeine for Linux has now reached adulthood with its 1.0 release! With this release, we finally feel like Caffeine is stable enough to be used on a day to day basis, and should fix most situations where the screensaver is being mischievous. It is our hope that this release will somehow make it into the official Ubuntu repositories, but of course maintainers of other distributions are more than welcome to include Caffeine in their repositories as well.

In case you have no idea what I’m talking about, Caffeine is a tiny little applet that sits in your system tray and uses magical caffeine to keep your computer from going asleep or activating the screensaver. This could be helpful when you’re giving presentations, playing full-screen games or when you’re watching flash videos.

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As an amateur programmer and web developer (I did say amateur) I’m always looking to find a good IDE that matches my workflow and that allows me to do what I want as quickly and with the least effort possible. Out of all the free IDEs I have tried in both Windows and Linux, none of them even come close to matching Geany’s pure awesomeness!

While it undoubtably has the worst looking icon ever, you can clearly see that the IDE is not overly complex or messy.

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World of Goo is a physics based puzzle game from game developers 2D Boy. The game revolves around a large number of slimes and their journey up-up-up! Throughout dozens of levels you have to help the slimes overcome all their obstacles by building towers, bridges and swings - out of goo.

The game is available for Windows, Linux and Mac, and currently there is a birthday super sale over at 2D Boy, where you get to set your own price. While you can most certainly buy the game for $0.01, do keep in mind that the developers are not including any kind of DRM, and have gone through the effort of creating a Linux version of their game. So do pick a price that you think is fair.

The sale will end on October 19th, so hurry up and get one of the best games available for Linux!

Click on the image below to go to the World of Goo homepage.

If you’re no stranger to Löve, then you already know that Löve is a battlefield. But that’s not all it is! It’s also perhaps the most awesome free (as in beer and freedom) 2D game engine for rapid game development on and for Windows, Linux and Mac OS - in Lua!

If you don’t yet know what Lua is, let me try to explain it to you. Imagine a programming language where the syntax is more of a gentle breeze guiding your way, rather than a restrictive metal harness shielding you from the wrath of GCC. Its tongue is much like that of Chewbacca, in that it doesn’t really make sense, but it works, everybody understands it, and speaking it seems as simple as leaning your head back and growl. It’s much like Python in that sense.

Regardless, this post is about Löve, not Lua! Keep reading to find out what makes Löve special, see examples of games created, and if you want, you can even download my own game - Söccer!

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This is old news! Caffeine 1.0 has been released. Go check it out!

I know you have all been waiting impatiently for this ever since we released Caffeine 0.2, but now it is finally here - Caffeine 0.3!

For those of you with short memory, Caffeine is a coffee cup that sits in your system tray, waiting for you to click it. Once you do, it fills up with coffee and keeps your computer from going to sleep or activating the screensaver. This could be really useful for when you’re playing fullscreen games that don’t inhibit the screensaver, or when you’re watching a long flash video.

This has been in the making ever since we released 0.2. The biggest change for me is that we now have another - extremely productive and skilled - developer working with us. His name is Isaiah Heyer, and he has really been the driving force behind this release. Many, if not most, of the new features are written by him.

What’s new in Caffeine 0.3?

Our main goal with this release was to completely rewrite the code in a neater fashion - to make future development easier. Because of Isaiah’s work, this was completed rather quickly, and thus we decided to include some more features that we were originally planning to release in version 0.4.

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