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Mindless retro action :)

About a week ago a friend of mine released his very first indie game – for the iPhone of all platforms. Sounds like a bit of a pain and probably it actually was. The game is basically a bigger and better version of one of his old games. The old one was written in C++ for Win32 (the source is also available over there). Later on he also ported it over to the GBA.

The new version looks and sounds pretty cool. If you're interested check out the video over at the official site. By the way, all models were done with everyone's favorite box modeler Wings3D. And the final audio cutting was done in Audacity. Both tools are mind-boggling awesome for these tasks. Check them out if you haven't yet.

Well, about a week has passed and he only sold a dozen copies so far. In the meantime it was pirated a few thousand times. Ouch. So, if you got $2.99 to burn (and an iPhone to boot) you can make one poor student very happy.

Zing!

This topic has bothered me for quite a while. There are really some people out there who believe that validators are something for standard lunatics; that passing the validation with flying colors is just another pointless bullet on someones nerdy checklist. That the sole reason for valid markup and styling are some kind of bragging rights.

That's not the big idea. It really isn't.

When you write other kinds of code, there usually is a compilation step involved. If something goes wrong, the compiler will tell you where it couldn't figure out what you meant. With that information at hand you can quickly take care of the issue.

Now, with CSS and (X)HTML things look differently. There won't be any kind of direct upfront feedback (unless you serve your documents as application/xhtml+xml). Things will either look as intended or they won't. If they look right is also a completely different story.

Be sure to watch the video in HD

Oh boy... I totally forgot to post this. A year ago Farbrausch and Neuro (their site has been down for a while) made a nice real time invitation demo for Nvision 08 featuring gorgeous vector graphics, which were done with Inkscape.

Check the demo if you got a decent Windows machine. Otherwise (or if you're just a bit lazy) take a look at the video over at YouTube.

By the way if you'd like to save the video you can do that easily with the Video DownloadHelper extension for Firefox.

That's some shiny logo

CSS grid frameworks in a nutshell

There are various CSS grid frameworks, which try to make the life of front-end designers easier. There's YUI Grids, Blueprint, a bunch of other frameworks, and well, the 960 Grid System.

All those frameworks do their magic through non-semantic classes, which are added to your containers. While this sounds pretty bad, it actually isn't much of an issue in reality. Well, that is if you don't use those classes in your content. Fortunately there is very little reason to do so if you're using some kind of CMS – and if you aren't, you probably should.

Personally I happen to like the 960 one most. It's pretty minimalistic while offering enough flexibility. It's also shipped with a bunch of templates for Fireworks, Illustrator, Omni Giraffe, Photoshop, and Visio. Inkscape, however, was missing. It's time to fill that gap! :)

pew pew

Know your :target

:target is one of those sparkling new CSS3 pseudo-classes. Unlike the other (pseudo-)classes it got some semi-dynamic properties without any kind of client-side scripting. Well, :hover and :active are also somewhat dynamic, but we're used to that stuff by now.

The :target pseudo-class is supported by all modern browsers. IE6 and IE7 are of course way too old. Unfortunately IE8 still doesn't support this. Pretty disappointing, isn't it?

However, this shouldn't stop you from using :target. If it's used as intended it only adds small visual cues which improve usability a bit. Dropping them won't break the site, but they are surely nice to have. Wikipedia for example uses :target to highlight the footnote you jumped to and anyone with a decent browser benefits from this small tweak.

I'll show you how :target is used on Wikipedia – or more precisely: in general, and I'll also show you some rather experimental things you haven't seen before.

More accurate now

This is the updated extension for Inkscape which simulates 9 different types of vision. It's a color effect and therefore it can be found over at Effects->Color->Color Blindness after installation.

It still supports the same set of modes:

• normal trichromatic color vision
• protanopia red-green blindness (no red cones)
• deutanopia red-green blindness (no green cones)
• tritanopia blue-yellow blindness (no blue cones)
• typical achromatopsia (no cones; rod monochromat)
• protanomaly (anomalous red cones)
• deutanomaly (anomalous green cones)
• tritanomaly (anomalous blue cones)
• atypical achromatopsia (low cones; cone monochromat)

The hashes match

I just finished a tiny web application. And by tiny I do indeed mean tiny. It's a single file and less than 8kb in size (thanks to GZRepack). You can check it over at riddler.kaioa.com.

It allows you to store the hashes of answers to some question in an URL. If someone clicks on that URL he/she is then asked for the solution. If it matches any of the up to 5 hashes the icon and the border turn green and he/she can then start the next round.

The art of shuffling

What it says on the tin, really

Here you'll get Flash (AS3), haXe, JavaScript, PHP, Perl, and Python ports of my continuous shuffled sequence algorithm. As usual the code is available under a Zero-clause BSD-style license, which means you can use it in any way you like.

All implementations utilize an un-seeded default source of randomness. If determinism is required, you'll only need to hand over a PRNG and use that one instead. Or hand the seed over and initialize the PRNG with that one as the original Java version did it.

*squish*

SWF gaiden (side story)

This is some kind of spin-off from my previous mini project. As I said back then Deflate is everywhere. SVGZ files are just gzipped SVGs for example. I thought it would be nice to have some specific tool for SVGZs, but since it's just GZip I decided to generalize it a little bit.

It's basically a logical sub step on the way to the next SWF re-compression utility. It spawns several worker threads which invoke different ZIP utilities with different switches. E.g. with 2 cores there are 2 worker threads by default, which means it can keep up to 12 cores busy with the current default configuration (it contains 12 tasks). At the end the smallest Deflate stream is extracted and put into a GZip file.

The tool is similar to PNGOUT, OptiPNG, or PNGCrush insofar as it clearly puts the priority on size over time — except that it's for GZ/TGZ/SVGZ/etc. files instead of PNG.

Hrrrrrngh!

Intro

With web games you want hits — lot's of hits. A million per month or more if possible. Of course this means lots of traffic. While broadband became faster and cheaper during the last couple of years, traffic is still somewhat expensive. In order to get a nicer cost/income ratio there are apparently two options: reduce the costs and/or increase the income.

As you might have guessed I'm about to tackle the former with brute processing power. If you reduce the file size by 1% every 100th served file is free. With 5% it's every 20th file and with 10% every 10th file. If the price for that are only a few minutes of processing power it looks like a really good deal, doesn't it?