Rumour has been flying around that Microsoft will add support for Divx and Xvid video playback on the Xbox 360.

Right now, if you want to play any videos in divx you either convert them to wmv format (yuck) or use another tool like Transode360 or vlc360 to convert on the fly and stream the videos to your xbox, of course you’ll need to have another computer online and using Windows Media Center. There’s also a commercial alternative for Apple computers but I don’t recall the name.

The rumour states the update will come in the form of a patch in 2 months time. Let’s hope this is true, I always thought it was stupid having a Xbox that works as a “media center” without support for common video formats like divx.

You can find the rumor at Xlife.nl.

4ColorRebellion as posted a review of Comic Book Ds, a homebrew application for the Nintendo DS that enables you to view digital comic books in a neat way.

I haven’t tried CBds yet but I’m willing to get some legal comics from Homebrew Cast and give it a go since I take my DS everywhere (yeah, it’s part of my lifestyle now) and I spend nearly 2 hours of daily commuting between my home and work.

Yeah, portuguese public transportation are clearly not the fastest of the world.
The application seems to have a dynamic menu system that permits the user to jump from page to page with ease, you can also zoom in a particular panel. There’s some limitations derived to the size of the images but those will be fixed later.

Anyway, you can catch the whole review of Comic Book DS (including screens) at 4ColorRebellion.

Since I’ve started working on weSpendMoney I’ve been fiddling more and more with Ajax. It’s no suprise because since Google started using it in Gmail and Google Maps, the popularity among developers and companies skirocketed and besides, it gives me with the means to build a gui which provides a more user friendly experience and eliminate waiting times (or at least hide them).

The RubyOnRails framework already comes with the prototype library and several ajax helpers so it’s more easy for the developer to work it them and there’s also rjs templates which generates javascript using ruby code.

There’s a nice tutorial for beginners on this subject at RubyNoob!

But I’ve also gave Rico a try, it’s another open-source JavaScript library (there’s so many of them now) that provides full Ajax support, drag ‘n drop management, rounded corners (yay!) and some essential cinematic effects. I think it’s worth trying out and the examples are simple to understand, many books also have examples in Rico.

Of course with all these Ajax effects I needed some activity indicators, It’s a good thing I found out this page which has a nice gallery of them. Someone actually made a generator for this, very neat.

Finally, there’s a great site which has many tutorials, links, discussions and resources on the subject, go on hover to Ajax Lessons for some learning.