I’m sure most everyone has already seen (and played) the new Pacman game that adorns the Google home page. This game is their first interactive doodle, which celebrates the 30th anniversary of Pacman. As usual, it’s a tightly coded, perfect little gem of an implementation. I can’t imagine the amount of testing and code review that went into this in order to get it to pass muster.
The game itself is coded in good old-fashioned Javascript and HTML4, also known as DHTML. The Javascript runs the game loop, and takes keyboard input to control the game. It moves GIF images around a playfield which is a simple HTML DIV containing the background playfield image and a bunch of GIFs for the ghosts and pellets.
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With the alleged imminent release of the theorized Apple Tablet, there’s been a lot of discussion about whether or not it will run Flash. As you already know, the iPhone does not have a Flash plugin, nor standalone Flash player. The Apple Tablet, which may or may not exist, will most likely run on a derivative of the iPhone OS. Nothing has changed in the performance of the Flash Player nor on Apple’s stance with regards to it. So, it’s reasonable to assume that it will probably not run Flash. Read more...
Over the past few weeks, I’ve had the privilege of working with Daniel Jacobson of NPR.org in developing a Flash widget that utilizes their newly-released API. The result of these efforts is the Reverbiage World Widget that plots stories on a 3d globe. The widget is written in ActionScript 3.0 using my own 3d engine currently in development. Read more...
Steve Jobs recently announced at the WWDC that the iPhone will be able to allow developers to develop iPhone apps using the Safari browser as a platform (video). “We have been trying to come up with a solution to expand the capabilities of iPhone by letting developers write great apps for it and yet keep the iPhone reliable and secure, and we’ve come up with a very sweet solution.” There’s no SDK, you use web technologies and deliver your apps via the web. Read more...
I’m pleased to announce the latest update to Picklish is now completely cross-platform. Now you can create slick Flash photo and video galleries on your PC and your Mac! There’s no easier way to publish your photos and video to the net.
It was a big challenge making my first cross-platform application. Using MDM Zinc made it possible. Zinc is a great development system, however their OS X version doesn’t have nearly the number of features that the PC version does.
I use ffmpeg to encode video in FLV format. And, since Picklish is free, I can’t afford to include MP3 encoding functionality in the app itself—due to the fact I would need to pay royalties to the creators of the MP3 codec. I use Windows Media Player to encode the audio into MP3 format on the PC. For OS X, I use iTunes to encode the audio stream to MP3. Since Zinc supports AppleScript, I was able to tell iTunes to encode the audio stream.
So, please give it a try and let me know what you think!
