Getting Started with Marmalade

Marmalade is a cross-platform solution that allows us to write the source code for a video game once in C++ (a language that most video game developers will already be familiar with) and then deploy it to a number of different platforms, including iOS, Android, and BlackBerry PlayBook.

In this article by Sean Scaplehorn, author of Marmalade SDK Mobile Game Development Essentials, we will be learning how to get the Marmalade SDK set up for development. While Marmalade is available in both Windows and Mac versions, the Windows version is the most developed of the two.

Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)

Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is a programming language built into Microsoft Office applications. As you improve your skills in any application from the Office System, you will eventually realize that although Microsoft Office applications offer a large number of tools, they do not offer everything you need to perform your daily chores. Such chores may include creating a corporate custom-format, a custom function that calculates commission payments, and so on.

Thus, VBA works as a gap-filler; in other words, its main purpose is to ensure that you can do whatever you need to do in your job.

In this article by Robert Martin, author of Excel Programming with VBA Starter,you will get to know a bit about VBA, its basic features, what you can do with it, and how you can put it to work with a view to facilitating your daily work, by automating common tasks.

augmentedTi: The application architecture

Augmented Reality application is clean, efficient and usable. It shows how to hide the processing from the user and build a display which updates and rotates smoothly.

This article by Trevor Ward, author of Augmented Reality using Appcelerator Titanium Starter, dives into the open source code base of the augmentedTi example application, explaining how it has been implemented.

Advanced Indexing and Array Concepts

In this article by Ivan Idris, the author of NumPy Cookbook, we will learn some of NumPy's more advanced and tricky indexing techniques. NumPy has very efficient arrays that are easy to use due to their powerful indexing mechanism. NumPy is famous for its efficient arrays. This fame is partly due to the ease of indexing. We will demonstrate advanced indexing tricks using images.

In this article, we will cover:

• Installing SciPy

• Installing PIL

• Resizing images

• Comparing views and copies

• Flipping Lena

• Fancy indexing

• Indexing with a list of locations

• Indexing with booleans

• Stride tricks for Sudoku

• Broadcasting arrays

Before diving into indexing, we will install the necessary software — SciPy and PIL. Some of the examples in this article will involve manipulating images. In order to do that, we will require the Python Image Library (PIL); but don't worry, instructions and pointers to help you install PIL and other necessary Python software are given throughout the article, when necessary.

MoGraph

MoGraph animations are created by creating basic objects and combining them together in unique and interesting ways.

This article by Jen Rizzo, author of Cinema 4D Beginner's Guide, provides a brief overview of many common MoGraph objects such as cloner and tracer, as well as how to work with Cinema 4D's built-in Dynamics system. In this article we will learn about:

• Cloner objects

• Effectors

• Dynamics

• Tracer objects

• Text objects

Adding Bodies to the World

Bodies are what make Box2D games possible. Anything you can move or interact with, is a body . Birds, pigs, and crates in Angry Birds are bodies, as well as the idol and the totem bricks in Totem Destroyer.

In this article by Emanuele Feronato, author of Box2D for Flash Games, we will cover:

• Creating a fixture
• Creating a box shape
• Different body types — static, dynamic, and kinematic

Meet Yii

The name Yii is an acronym for Yes, it is, and is pronounced as Yee or (ji:). Yii is a high-performance, component-based, web application framework written in PHP5.

This article by Jeffrey Winesett, author of Web Application Development with Yii and PHP, provides you with a brief history of Yii, an introduction to the Model View Controller (MVC) application architecture, and you are introduced to the typical request life cycle as it makes its way from the end user through the application, and finally as a response back to the end user.