I've uploaded Hoverbattles to its own server on EC2, and it has been running fine with an uptime of over 96 hours so far, and this is great!

http://hoverbattles.com

I've wanted to share a few of the mistakes/lessons learned writing and deploying a multiplayer game built entirely with JavaScript on top of NodeJS and WebGL for a while and this represents an opportune moment to do so.

I've gone with a brain-dump of various related learnings, as well as a couple of periphery items - first off, we'll go with the reason I couldn't keep Hoverbattles up on the old server.

Kicksend uses the tried and tested pattern of sending our new users confirmation emails to verify their identity. With that, there will always be emails that aren’t delivered successfully, which we care about a lot.
A bounced confirmation email means that our new user wouldn’t have been able to activate their account. So they’ll either have to either sign up for a new account, or contact us to change their email address. These are steps we don’t want to put any user through.

I’ll preface this by saying that yes, I’m running Google Chrome Beta as my main browser, and yes, some bugs are to be expected from running a beta browser. That’s besides the point. So what am I complaining about?

Any small bug on any browser can instantly kill a product you’ve worked months or years on.

Though it's not widely known, you can write native-feeling iOS apps for the iPhone and iPad in JavaScript (+ HTML and CSS).

In this article, I'll explain how to:

strip away the browser chrome (the url bar and button bar);
prevent viewport scrolling and scaling;
respond to multi-touch and gesture events;
use webkit CSS to get the iPhone OS look and feel;
cache the app so it runs without internet access;
get a custom icon on the home screen; and
have a splash screen load at the start.

The sarcasm in this talk does not represent anyone's actual opinion. For a more serious take on software, try Destroy All Software Screencasts: 10 to 15 minutes weekly, dense with information on advanced topics like Unix, TDD, OO Design, Vim, Ruby, and Git.

Cut the Rope is an immediate favorite for anyone who plays it. It’s as fun as it is adorable. So we had an idea: let’s make this great game available to an even bigger audience by offering it on the web using the power of HTML5.

To do this, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team partnered with ZeptoLab (the creators of the game) and the specialists at Pixel Lab to bring Cut the Rope to life in a browser. The end result is an authentic translation of the game for the web, showcasing some of the best that HTML5 has to offer: canvas-rendered graphics, browser-based audio and video, CSS3 styling and the personality of WOFF fonts.

You can play the HTML5 version of Cut the Rope at: www.cuttherope.ie.

All of these sliding box animations work on the same basic idea. There is a div tag (.boxgrid in my css) that essentially acts as a window where two other items of your choosing “peek” through.

For years, one of the telltale signs of not getting it has been using Flash as a substitute for the Web. By delivering Flash over HTTP and extending browsers to run it, it's easy to overlook the fact that Flash is a competitor to the Web, not a proprietary part of it. (Being a competitor isn't a bad thing, but it is what it is.) Flash sites are dying, partly thanks to Apple, but a new bad practice is emerging.

Except it's not new. It's as if a bunch of people got together and decided that the problem with Flash sites is the technology, not the use of it. Everything I used to hate about Flash is back, this time in the form of JavaScript. Like Flash sites, there is a new breed of web apps that don't feel quite right. Maybe it's because they scroll like a supertanker. Maybe it's because the back button doesn't work right. Maybe it's because the browser tells you it's done, but you don't see any content. (I'm looking at you, Twitter.)

Bruce Rogers and I graduated from Facebook’s Engineering Bootcamp in January and began researching how HTML5 could apply to games across the Web. We found HTML5 poised to become a potent platform for game development but still hampered by significant performance variance among browsers and drawing techniques. We're hosting a tech talk this evening on what's becoming possible with HTML5 this evening along with speakers from Zynga and SproutCore which will be streamed live.

Swarmation ist ein genial simples, aber absolut episches Pixel-Multiplayerspiel in JavaScript: Jeder steuert einen Pixel. Auf Kommando sollen Formationen gebildet werden. Und das funktioniert sogar. Unglaublich faszinierend, wie sich mit steigender Spielerzahl kleine Gruppen bilden und mit der Zeit besser darin werden, zusammenzuarbeiten. Wer hier nicht grinst, ist tot. Zeigt das euren Psychologiefreunden.

If you haven't seen it yet, check out the JS1K demo contest. The goal is to do something neat in 1 kilobyte of JavaScript code.

I couldn't resist making one myself, so I pulled out my bag of tricks from my Winamp music visualization days and started coding. I'm really happy with how it turned out

Creating mobile Web applications with HTML 5, Part 3: Make mobile Web applications work offline with HTML 5
Creating mobile Web applications with HTML 5, Part 2: Unlock local storage for mobile Web applications with HTML 5
Creating mobile Web applications with HTML 5, Part 5: Develop new visual UI features in HTML 5
Creating mobile Web applications with HTML 5, Part 4: Using Web Workers to speed up your mobile Web applications
Creating mobile Web applications with HTML 5, Part 1: Combine HTML 5, geolocation APIs, and Web services to create mobile mashups

Best HTML5 and CSS3 tutorials - June 2010

Einführung in Canvas

About a month ago or so, Amy and I release a little (literally, it’s about 5k) HTML5 iPad App for looking up time zones. I don’t mean select-box wasteland like all other time zone sites (who likes select boxes anyway?!), I mean a nicely polished, touch-enabled UI that works offline, too.

Official Spry Blog

The Spry framework for Ajax is a JavaScript library that provides easy-to-use yet powerful Ajax functionality that allows designers to build pages that provide a richer experience for their users. It is designed to take the complexity out of Ajax and allow designers to easily create Web 2.0 pages.

Hi, my name is Andy Powell. I'm a RIA developer located in the metro Atlanta, GA area. I am currently employed by Universal Mind. I get to build really cool applications with tools like Adobe Flex, Adobe ColdFusion, Adobe Spry, Hibernate, Spring, & other cool technologies.