In the past I'd linked to the Facebook Developer Toolkit, but I noticed recently that this has been discontinued and Facebook SDK replaces it. This helps developers create Facebook iframe and web apps using the most current and fully supported Facebook APIs, or integrate their website with Facebook. Facebook keep amending their APIs so maybe in a year or two there may be another one!

This SDK uses the Facebook Graph API and Javascript SDK, and also has compatibility with the old Rest SDK. The SDK is open source though curiously enough you need to install Ruby, Albacore Dependencies and Microsoft Code Contracts to build it. Can someone tell me why?

Anyway I've replaced the old toolkit with the SDK in the C# Code library. There's further reading on the Microsoft website.

• Link to C# Code Library

Unless you've lived away from civilization for any length of time, you'll probably know that a Kinect is a peripheral for an Xbox 360 that features an "RGB camera, depth sensor and multi-array microphone running proprietary software", which provide full-body 3D motion capture, facial recognition and voice recognition capabilities.

It's already been used in such diverse non computing environments as a Quadricopter to map indoor spaces in 3D and keep the quadricopter stable.

Microsoft recently announced that an SDK for Windows will be launched some time in Spring 2011 so you will be able to develop software that can recognize faces, voices and movement for up to two people!".

Some devices are meant to be tinkered with and some devices aren't though that doesn't stop it happening. Game consoles or portable game devices are definitely in the latter category. The business model usually involves building the device at a loss then making money by selling software. To this end the manufacturer actively discourage mods or people running their own software on the device.

My own opinion is that I've bought it, so I should be able to do what I want but some countries have made that illegal. If you do mod it there's a chance (if you mess up) that you'll brick it, i.e turn it into a non functioning paper weight.

But that said, if you have a Nintendo DS and want to read books in ePub or XHTML format, you can install dslibris. Written in C++ it uses an anti-aliased proportional font to display UTF-8 text; i.e. it handles Eastern and Western text. This involves installing a patch and I haven't tried it so be careful!

• Link to C++ Code Library

I read a lot of stuff on the web, and anyone with an eye for the future can see that HTML5/JavaScript is slowly starting to gain traction and impact; there's Chrome Experiments, Mozilla's Web O'Wonder etc. The missing link is Internet Explorer's support for Canvas which is due to ship later this month in IE 9. Next year we should start seeing hardware backed games running WebGL, a browser based version of OpenGL.

The day of the general purpose PC is far from over, but we will see a fair bit more stuff running in the browser, especially games. There is though a massive amount of Flash Apps and games out there and the SWF format is documented. (PDF Link)

There's even an open source flash player Gnash written in C++, so it's a good place to start from. Not an easy task though. However what there isn't currently is an open source or commercial Flash-> HTML5/JavaScript converter. Adobe have an experimental application called Wallaby. So is someone going to write one?

• Link to Linux C++ Code Library