I have always said that Apple doesn’t want to risk buggy system and battery life (valid reasons. and I think Apple has a right to refuse Flash until Adobe fixes problems and proves Flash Lite can work on mobile phones). But to call themselves “open” because of support for HTML5 is silly.

His last “sixth” reason is where I really disagree. Not allowing third party applications (like Adobe CS 5) to make IPhone applications because of fear of the quality is bullshit.

I ONLY use third party apps to make Flash content. Many people ONLY use third party apps to develop windows/java/android apps.

If I want to make a Flash app I can use Mac OR Windows and a bunch of programs. If I want to make an IPhone app Apple now requires me to buy a Mac and develop with their own Mac software.

Nice job encouraging competition Steve.

Here’s the code:
SELECT *
FROM ptg_users
JOIN (

SELECT ROUND( (
MAX( ptg_users.id ) – MIN( ptg_users.id ) ) * RAND( )
) + MIN( ptg_users.id ) AS rid
FROM ptg_users
) AS x ON ptg_users.id >= x.rid
LIMIT 1

Replace ptg_users with the name of your table.

You can make your own here. I think it’s a great way to teach someone the basics of computer programming and logic.

Initial Tape: PIG

1,_,1,_,>

1,P,2,_,>

2,I,3,P,>

3,G,4,I,>

4,_,5,G,<

5,I,6,I,<

6,P,2,_,>

6,_,1,_,>

Here’s the description of the game written by Tim Halbert (who wrote the music to the game):

From the creators of the Flash sensation Boomshine comes a devious new game where hand/eye co-ordination and a lightning-quick reaction time spell the difference between success and failure. Hundreds of colorful particles floating in the ether – and it’s your job to put them all together. Click and hold down the mouse button to make a ring around the dots, and watch them all gather in the center. With every ring you create you’ll get closer and closer to your target… but miss the target, even by one, and the nucleus is ruined. How quickly can you complete all fifteen levels without making a single mistake? The challenge is on…

Special thanks: Tim Halbert, Tim van de Vall, Aneece K, Ajani T, Anna M, MochiMedia, and Kongregate.

The new variance (built in) will not ALWAYS select the closest average color picture match of the sliced region. This way the picture won’t have so many repeated pictures on solid color sections.

The variance is 1% multiplied by the number of pictures in the pool. This means that if you select 500 Flickr results that means the program determines the 5 closest pictures to a color slice and chooses a random one. It’s hard to explain, but basically it means that more pictures from the pool of pictures found will be used (at the expense though of possibly losing recognition of the original picture).

Here is a smiley face built with the result for the search “smiley” on Flickr. Even though the middle is solid white, it selects a random choice from the closest 5 white pictures (instead of the whitemost picture) in order to add some variance. You can also see I added a watermark (as I thought it’d be a good idea to get people spreading the application).

Click here to Picterize your own photo.

Remember, you can click “Save” on the bottom right to save it to your hard drive.

Pass it around and send me the photos you guys make with it! And let me know if you find any bugs (I’m sure it isn’t bug free) or have any suggestions.

//adding multiple events at once.
EventManager.addEventListeners( loader.contentLoaderInfo, [
ProgressEvent.PROGRESS,    onSiteLoad_Progress,
Event.OPEN,                onSiteLoad_Open,
Event.COMPLETE,            onSiteLoad_Complete,
IOErrorEvent.IO_ERROR,    onSiteLoad_IOError
] );

It’s a great method to save retyping so many lines.

Get the updated class here. Also, if you have, are, or planning to use the class I would love to know how!

Brain Reaction

Lovers of Internet recreation have played all types of games, including first-person shooters, role-playing, pure action, gambling games via online casinos, mysteries, trivia, typing, and the list goes on and on. The gamers of the world are always looking for something a bit different. Enter Boomshine, a browser-based flash game that cleverly blends common sense with a little bit of luck, and the end result is summed up in one word: Entertaining.

Boomshine is a seemingly simplistic game controlled via your browser’s flash player. The object of the game is to click on any one of a number of randomly floating circles. Doing this will cause the clicked circle to expand (boom, in a sense), and the circumference will then envelop surrounding circles close enough to the action. What you’re left with – if done correctly – is a massive chain reaction of circles. Think about the way the Big Bang is taught, and how the universe began with a boom and then a chain reaction.

The game was created by Danny Miller, with the music supplied by Tim Halbert. The mouse-controlled Boomshine is addictive, mostly because it is challenging to complete each new level. Boomshine starts out simple, with users only having to envelop one other circle in the vicinity. But as the game progresses, you’re given tougher tasks – such as setting off a chain reaction of 27 spheres out of 45 floating within the perimeter. And though it may sound easy, a player’s timing and sense of direction must blend perfectly to advance through the more difficult levels.

Since the spheres carom off of the edges, billiards players might have a slight advantage. Anticipating which direction the circles are going is paramount; also knowing one click in the corner can prompt a chain reaction across the entire screen is a useful tidbit of knowledge. Players may spend their time chasing the direction of the circles, when they actually need to be focusing on how to reach all four corner of the square by way of chain reaction.

The game consists of 12 fun levels, with new high scores posted regularly. Once players get a feel for the task, the game moves pretty swiftly. But with the scoring system, barely squeaking by will not suffice; set off the ultimate chain reaction in each level to hold the high score. It’s definitely a challenge.

My most popular game, Boomshine, was recently duplicated by some author and posted onto Facebook where over 20,000 users have now added it. The game is called Chain Rxn.

My inbox has seen multiple emails from a variety of people who noticed the rip-off. I requested (and I request the same for my visitors of this site) to report the application to Facebook as it violates intellectual property. I’ve reported and requested the removal of Chain Rxn to Facebook multiple times but it doesn’t look like any action has been taken.

I normally would not be this upset; there are simply unoriginal poeple out there who feel that it’s easier to copy a game 100% then to even change it a little bit. However, out of all the clones of Boomshine that I’ve seen (even large companies such as T-Mobile have duplicated Boomshine without my permission), this one in particular just sets off my nerves. The worst feeling comes from reading a comment from a player asking if Boomshine ripped off Chain Rxn instead of the other way around!

If the author simply put credits, I probably wouldn’t be making such a fuss. But this guy is making money off advertisements off my game.

Other bloggers have already noticed.

So please, next time you’re on Facebok, please report the application to Facebook. Maybe if enough users complain Facebook will remove the application.

Google mentions on their in one of their Chrome FAQs that it’s up to the web developer to decide if a new link opens as a seperate process or not.

I found this out first hand by going to W3 School’s html samples page and clicking on one of the links. Instead of opening on the same tab, the link opens on a new tab. So now I had http://www.w3schools.com/HTML/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml_basic open in a tab. I edited the html source code on the left frame and put in a simple infinite loop with Javascript then hit run. As expected, the tab, instead of the entire browser, hung.

However, when I clicked on the W3 School’s html sample tab (which launched the now frozen tab), I noticed it was also frozen. My other tabs, such as Gmail, Google Calendar, etc were fine.

Google answered why: 

New tabs spawned from a web page, however, are usually opened in the same process, so that the original page can access the new tab using JavaScript.

Makes sense. In fact, that is one of the reasons why current web browsers run in a single thread. No big deal. Most of the time I have multiple “sessions” of browsing and I don’t mind if a few tabs share the same process thread.

Anyway, if you don’t have Google Chrome, get it. Finally multi-core machines will see benefits in browsing the web. I can have 10 tabs open without seeing a slowdown.

Nevertheless, the decision has raised significant issues around the web regarding web standards, and whether or not they have worked in the past or not.

Take for example IE and Firefox. Every web developer has experienced the browser compatibility problem. 90% of forum posts start with “Strange CSS bug, works in IE but not in FF” or “Script works in FF but not in IE” etc. Ironically, Adobe Flash’s success has largely come from this problem as Flash runs ubiquitously on every browser. While the W3C has made progress on creating web standards, in general it’s been a failure. Even newer browsers, aware of the recommended standards while in development still don’t pass Acid2. But why has this failed?

I think it’s by choice. Microsoft, Firefox, Safari, and Opera fight for the larger share in browser usage. If coders create a site that fits their browser, the idea is that more users will download that browser. For a long time, IE was the standard. Whenever a site didn’t work in IE, as a developer, you MADE it work on there knowing that 90% of the visitors to your site would have IE.

But a phenomenon happened: the open source movement. Firefox arrived as an open source competitor. It’s not that Firefox was better than competitors (it wasn’t). But because of the nature of Firefox just being open source, the browser had more power than other competitors to browser dominating Internet Explorer. Firefox complies with the web rather than the web complies with Firefox. This development strategy could have only existed on an open source project, as the developers of the project did not have the authority or mindset to take over the web.

But as mentioned earlier, Firefox has led to major problems to web designers and coders. It’s a pain to create stuff! Everyone wants a page to look the same on every browser and on every computer. Only a dream… and will stay a dream.

Having standards would fix this problem; however, how would the actual products react? How will innovation be affected? There are many parallels to government oversight in the economy and web standards… but we don’t have to go into that.

A fleet only goes as fast as its slowest ship. When Mozilla, Firefox, and Apple vote on a particular feature to be a standard, some will have to pick up the pace while others will have to slow down. And that is what has been happening at the W3C and ECMA. Adobe has included a bunch of features that it would have probably had to remove in order to comply with ECMA 4. Now that ECMA 4 is dead, Adobe can keep those features… and even develop new ones without having to wait for ECMA to accept or reject revisions.

Of course, the downside is that we developers will have to work extra hard to make our products work on multiple software. Meaning more browser specific pages and more time researching what works on a particular browser and what doesn’t.

But here is where I disagree. At this level, the benefit isn’t that someone with IE may see an awesome Javascript menu while someone on FF may see a image mapped navigation. The biggest misconception I have found is that coding standards are susceptible to the same criticism as software standards (Browsers, GUIs, colors). But it ain’t.

Here’s why: the standards proposed in ECMA 4 were in coding syntax rather than in any product output. At today’s high level coding languages, we can basically do anything we want with Javascript, Flex, and Actionscript; however, the syntax is different. And THIS is something that NEEDS standardization. Just because the experience of writing the literature of source code may be better and more intuitive on one platform than another doesn’t change the actual output of the product. This is why I think the dump of the ECMA standard is a BAD thing. The ECMA was a scripting standard. So Actionscript may get private constructors now, whooped-dee-do.

What would have happened if RSS standards weren’t introduced? Sure, maybe one RSS format would have “extra features”, but we wouldn’t have the RSS readers that we do today. The Google Reader team can focus on making their product better and not on how to read hundreds of different XML formats.

I’m not saying that ECMAScript is comparable to XML; however, I am trying to address the criticsm I have been reading trying to say that web standards hinder innovation and are always a bad thing.

The reason ECMA failed was because companies want to control the market. The excuse Microsoft and others use is that, in practical terms, the web doesn’t need certain coding features. But that’s just an excuse. Web applications are getting more and more advanced. A standard like ECMA 4, which would last for many years, needs to support the most advanced coding syntax as possible. Sure maybe most products are not big enough to really benefit from abstract classes, but in 2 or 3 years, when ECMA 4 was scheduled to be adopted and shipped with products, who knows? And what about in 5-6 years?

In other words, in the short term and for companies that have the capacity to advance their languages more than others (like Adobe) , and since AS4 may come out sooner, this decision is ultimately good in the short term and bad in the long term.