The day begins at 10 pm

I wonder how many other folks out there "start" their day at 10 pm. I dont mean the "official" day - that's the one you do when you wake up in the morning, go to work, spend time with children or other family and friends. I mean that special part of a day when everyone else is asleep, and it's just you and the glowing monitor...

For me this is the time when I keep my sanity. I can catch up on blogs, dream up ideas, or just follow web threads across the net. Do you know what I mean? Going to a site - moving to another, following that idea further, that idea leads you to another, then you hop over to google, then to some obscure site, etc. etc.

It's a great part of the day - but frustrating. I want to record some sounds and things, and instead I have to muffle my typing as to not wake up the wife and kids :).

I have a goofy idea which I really hope to make progress on this weekend. Here's to time...

BTW does anyone have a name for a good host for podcast mp3's? I want to create a podcast, but I'd max out my isp's disk space really quickly...

Indie Game: Glace

Here I sit, early in the morning, tons of things to do today, plus I'm on the clogged straw that is dialup access while my cable is being worked on. However, even being on pokey slow dialup access, I still downloaded and tried out Glace, and so should you. It's a fun platformer that has a cute storyline and stylistic graphics. The interesting thing about the character is that you have all the "powers" you need at the beginning. The development of the character is actually you learning how to control the little guy. Very interesting, and fun. So, I'm off to call my cable company and beg for access back - you go download this game and try it out. It's perfect for your 7-10 yr old who's looking for a new game to play as well.

i-piphany...

Gosh, I just had a major brainstorm on the way in to work today... thoughts of podcasting, the new wired cd, adventure games, choose-your-own adventures, Jack Flanders, and I stumbled across this great CD from Dieslboy called "The Dungeonmaster". It all coelesced into something amazingly awesome. Now I just gotta DO IT. More soon.

Infoblox demo

From Dr Dreff comes a link to a way cool new laszlo widget from Antisleep. Pull together your bloglines, del.icio.us, technorati, flickr, and wikipedia information together in one view. Killer!

Researchers detect Methane on mars

This is very good news! It can only be 1 of two things. Boring geothermal stuff or life! My bets are on the second option...

On the train

Once again I sit on the train, typing away in WikiDPad whilst listening
to podcasts. It's funny, since I've been listening to podcasts like Adam Curry's
Dail Sourcecode, the train ride has gone from insufferably long, to not nearly
long enough. Dont worry, I'm not going to wax philosphical like yesterday.
Today after getting work done, I spent some time thinking about my nascent
online game, poking around the net, learning some new things, and
getting upset that del.icio.us kept going down whilst I was trying to add some new links.

Here's some random ideas I'm kicking around:

1) laszlo-based Mud/MMORPG (duh)
2) PodQuest - a which-way book style series of sound clips which go together to
make an adventure.
3) Add - on adventure - imagine an old fashioned serial where each episode
is created by a different group of people. Or people vote on what
happens next. Then each week you get a new podcast with the next episode.

Do it yourself ticketing

Scott Andrew talks about a nifty service that allows you to create tickets for your own event - even with refunds, etc. And a few weeks after the event they mail you a check. Cool.

My Enemy, Time

Here I sit on the train listening to a podcast by Adam Curry.
I have so many ideas, things to do, things I want to do, and it's just
incredibly frustrating. I've been here in the Bay Area long enough to know that
you can realize your dreams - if you just stay up till 3am , coding, composing, writing,
or whatever. If you are a dad like me who walks home from the train, hugs the kids
and wife, then putters around on the computer for a few hours before
getting guilty and sloughing off to sleep - only to do the same thing the next day - things are much more difficult.

My challenge is not coming up with great ideas, or being smart enough to bring them
into reality, its just having the stinking time to do ... anything.

With that in mind, I'm sitting here on the train thinking about what to focus on.
I have an idea for a great game - and for helping create a community for Laszlo, and
for a plethora of other interesting things. And it's great to see a meme
evolving. I came up with an idea to bring together podcasting and geocaching - and Adam Curry mentioned it on his podcast a while back (coool!) and now other people are
taking the idea and evolving it further with concept of having hotels or
travel agencies offer a podcast of all the places you might visit on some planned journey.

Gosh - time time time! Where to get time. Time to play video games, time to spend with kids, time to think about great big ideas, time to meet with cool people, time to think, pray, sleep, eat, love. Time is my enemy, friend, partner and adversary.

What to do? My only choice is to focus. Get the scattered sunbeams focused into a tight point of light, and burn your initials on that dead leaf like you did as a kid with a magnifying glass. Eliminate everything thats a distraction or sucks away valuable time.
Find something to go deep with - to take to completion.

Okayyy, you're saying. He's finally lost it. Posting this long rambling blog post about what? Time, ideas, focusing. Well, go ahead and skip on to the next newsfeed or link, for me this is helping me figure out where to take my life, career, whatever.

Back to reality. This week I'm kicking off planning of my 2d
laszlo-based zelda-style mmorpg/chat app. Look for a prototype in the next few weeks.

Chat with other Laszlo Developers on IRC

If you are poking around with the sourcecode for Laszlo, or are interested in finding out more about it from "real" people, you might fire up your favorite IRC client (perhaps "dust off" might be a better phrase?) and head over to #laszlo on freenode.net.

Game Neverending --- ending

From the site:

Game Neverending is being put up on blocks indefinitely. Flickr, Ludicorp's online community and photo sharing site, is on fire, and as a small company we don't have the resources to build both simultaneously. And so, we have to shut Game Neverending down. We love Game Neverending and wish we could do both, but it has been a struggle.

It makes me very sad, since that site's been the impetus for many things for me, including some cool ideas like Playful Applications.

However, it's given me a new thought - which involves creating a new game world of my own. Can I do it? Will it be another endlessly put-off project that goes nowhere? Or can it become something cool? Stay tuned and see for yourself.

SlayerOffice - bookmarklets and insanely cool js

I've probably blogged about SlayerOffice before, but it's simply too cool to miss. If you've not already clicked the link above, then do so. Stop reading now. No. Go on. Well, shoot. You're still here. Slayer Office has some really insanely great bookmarklets and other nifty examples of using the DOM, js, gaming, and other things. But if all you do is go to the site and grab the [favelet suite] you'll be doing well - especially if you are a web developer and have needed these tools for a while and just didnt know it :)

Back from vacation...

Gosh, it doesnt seem like vacation. I took two days off last week to let my wife go to a conference while I watched the kiddos. Instead of a relaxing time, it was non-stop work. I hardly even logged on to check out the state of the world. Gad. Funny that I'm now thinking that coming in to work today is my real vacation...

Shmup Experiments

Whilst riding the train to and from work I'm working on a fantasy rpg meets shootemup game. Basically it'll be about the princess who goes on a quest to rescue the prince.

Here's a couple of test demos that I'm working on - each one shows off some effect I want to achieve in the game:

Shmup Circles

Many shooters have "curtains" of bullets. I finally figured out how to do that..


Lots O Dots

Trippy - will be part of a dream sequence...



I'm including the Gamemaker 6 source files if you want to try them out yourself using GameMaker 6 which I highly recommend getting if you like the idea of creating your own game.
Here's a screenshot if you want to take a look.

Me on Oreillynet

The Wayback Machine is an amazing thing - like looking through an old school yearbook. Anyway I happened to run across one of my articles I wrote for Oreilly a while back concerning Mozilla. The specifics may be off now due to changes in specs, but the ideas are still sound and have totally not been utilized...

Jay Is - web games

Oh I'm just a link hound. It's sad. I should stay with just a few sites and keep to my own little interests.... Nah.

You probably know by now I dig web games. Here's a great site which also seems to dig webgames and reviews them. Found several I'd never heard of before. Cooolio!

Yes, I'm just a link hound.

Checking out Rojo

Somehow, I managed to get an invite to Rojo, which looks to be a cross between del.icio.us, bloglines, and google search results, with a little orkut/tribe.net thrown in. It's kinda cool! I find myself fighting the interface somewhat though - I keep looking for the kind of things you get in del.icio.us for free ... the ubiquitous copying and stuff. Overall it's pretty darn cool though.

BTW I have 4 Rojo invites left -- if you want to try it out drop me a message

Wet Miserable Day

Yoh Ho Ho it's a wet and miserable day.
Yoh Ho Ho it sucks in every way.

Gotta a ton a work to do and not much else to say.

Yo Ho Ho it's a wet and miserable day.

Repost: Socially Constructed Interfaces

Here's another idea reposted:


Imagine if you were able to construct new interface widgets from within your application, and send them in realtime to folks you were connected to which they in turn could use right away in their own version of the app. What I mean is this: for a long time I have been trying to find a way to tie "gaming" principles of competition and "construction" into more traditional apps like say a browser or an email app. I was playing a game called the "game neverending" (link) which has built into it the ability for you to construct - "things" such as boxes or apple pies, and such things like that - which you can then give to other people in the games as gifts. They are more than trinkets, though, because the "thing" you create can have useful properties like improving your mood. This seems to be a similar concept to something you might see in a MUD or a MUSH. I also noticed that there were things you could construct like "radio button" and "scrollbar". In the context of this game this is used for some other purpose, but it hit me that this would be an excellent way for someone to combine a game with a "real world" application.

Imagine (if you would) starting off with some kind of application which did one thing - send email perhaps or have instant messaging. The ui would be extremely plain - but you would have the intrinsic ability to


1) connect to friends somehow


2) be able to construct your own "widgets" which could range from simple tree menus, to throbbers, or even useless animated icons


3) have the ability to send these "widgets" to others - which in turn gives you the increased capacity to make more widgets or accept more complicated widgets of your own.


In this way, UI elements and features "evolve" from social interactions. Really cool widgets get shared widely and advance the tool as a whole. Other features which are useless never get shared, or rarely do and would fall by the wayside. The user is constantly incentivised to continue to revise and create new features and GUI's because they gain what I can only describe as whuffie or egoboo - but there would also be some real world benefit.

I dont know if this idea would fly, but that's why I'm posting it here as well as LazyWeb.

In a way it would be sorta like a kazaa for ui elements and features instead of images and music, except that you are rewarded for sharing - and you are actually "pushing" widgets to your friends instead of them just "pulling" them from you.

The incoming widgets would reside in some kind of "in box" but would be "live" even while they are there and could be dragged and dropped into the main app.

There might be an issue of viruses or denial of service widgets, but this is offset by the fact that you are proactively sending the widget to someone else, and they know who you are (otherwise you couldnt send it) and if you mess up their machine they will spread the word quickly to others to keep you from doing it again.

Repost: Playful Applications

Here's a reposting of something I did on a blog a while back, but I want to revive the MEME :)

I've been kicking this idea around in my head for a long time, and I hope that I can begin to describe it here in a way that I can convey what I mean.

What is a "playful" application? It is an application which takes the concepts of play and discovery and merges them with a traditionally mundane task - like email or web browsing. It's probably better to explain this with a series of examples - both imaginary and real.

Example 1) MoodStats From the site it says:

Moodstats is an application that allows you to quickly record & rate how your day has been in six different categories. You can also attach comments to these values to further illustrate why your moods are the way they are.

MoodStats is an excellent example of what I'm trying to get at. It is an application which does something practical (if you expand your definition of practical to sharing info about your mood to others) and does so in a way thats fun and encourages you to "play" with the app, as well as actually do something besides get a "score" which usually means nothing to folks who play games.

Example 2) n_Gen N_gen is a tongue in cheek application which allows you to enter some basic information and it generates a host of "designed" treatments for you. I'm including this as an example mostly because it's not "really" intended for you to try to do some serious work with the tool, but rather to explore the kinds of things it can do. This exploration aspect is something I think is a key feature of games, but is so very much lacking in standard applications.

Example 3) (fictional) Imagine if you were to fire up your email application - and instead of seeing an endless litany of email subject lines - that you see say a simcity style isometric view of a town, where each house is an email thread, and individual cars are incoming email messages. Spam messages show up as say fast food restaurants. You still see the same "information" which is the contents of your email inbox, but now it has visual aspects of a game, and you have that "discovery" factor.

Example 4) JuniorNet Juniornet is primarily a "kids desktop" which consists of a rotating and constantly updating desktop of games and other visually interesting applications. The most intriguing of these, at least to me, is something called "SteamMail". Instead of getting a beep when you get new mail, you see a little steam whistle like character who pops in and says you have new steam mail. Launching steammail takes you to a large room that looks like some kind of machine that accepts mail as those old fashioned "tubes" like you used to see at old drive through bank tellers. Whenever my kids would get a mail message, it was a very exciting thing to watch the mail come into the machine and cause all kinds of interesting things to happen.

Example 5) The Game Neverending When I first started playing this game, I briefly thought that in addition to creating in-game "toys" that you could create user interface widgets that could enhance your game UI. I learned that this was not actually the case, but the idea intrigued me so much that I wrote an article called Socially Constructed Interfaces... This is one kind of task that a "Playful Application" would be great at doing.


Example 6) <fictional> Imagine that you have purchased a new computer with a brand new operating system. You start off with a very basic interface, and you can only to very simple things like open files and view text. As you gain experience using the computer, it gradually "unlocks" new features for you such as a browser, an mp3 player, or a new way of navigating your files like say via a timeline or an icon based view. This would be akin to playing say an RPG where you start off with 'nothing' and you gradually learn about your world, and you gain new tools to interact in your world. Gosh, why isnt anyone doing this?

mini example 7 - Look at this site, and click on the "toy box" link. All these adoptable "toys" that folks are passing around on the web are evidence of a desire for folks to engage in "play" at the same time doing practial activities (hrmm is web browsing practical?). What if we could combine these "toys" with say blogging.


*sigh* I'm finding this concept difficult to explain, but perhaps if I keep at it I can convey what I mean.

I am puzzled by the fact that there is this huge invisible wall between so called "practical" apps and "games". Practical apps have dry, plain text based interfaces where everything simply sits there and waits for you do pull down menus or scroll down scrollbars. Whereas games can have wildly different interfaces, yet somehow there is an underlying order that gamers pick up on almost immediately and can usually make sense of right away. Why is this? Perhaps it is that "practical" apps have always been for "serious" or "mature" audiences, while games have been the province of children.

I can see some exceptions to this trend. For instance when you look at "skinnable" apps like many MP3 players - you see a pent up desire to break away from traditional look and feel.

Here's another way of describing this... imagine if you took the folks who designed Sim City, or Half-Life, and tasked them to create a personal organizer app, or a web browser. What kind of application would they come up with? You could bet that it'd be fun to use.

It's these aspects of play, discovery, progressing through "levels", gaining skills that I think make some of the more popular traditional applications so appealing. What do I mean? Well I'm still trying to figure that out, but ever notice when you use a tool alot, like say Photoshop, that it seems to have almost a personality, or "flavor" to it? Some apps have virtually none of this "personality" but the ones that do, I'm wagering have a greater popular base of users.

So far I have yet to find an application which really employs these ideas. So this is partially why I've written this article. Do you know of any "Playful Applications"? If so please email me! I want to create a collection of these rare apps. I also intend to try to write something like this myself - with my meager skills - perhaps with RealBasic.

---

Some interesting out-links:

my list of playful applications


social software

presence based multiplayer gaming


Faciliplay : play as an online facilitation technique

Naima - social architecture for networked communities

Found a comment host: Comment This!

Amazing - I stumbled across this site completely by accident - and I realized it was exactly what I was looking for. Now you can comment your hearts out. :)

Blog Comments hosting?

Hello blogosphere, websphere, geosphere, insert-your-name-here-sphere. I am in need of some assistance. Is there a service somewhere out there (beneath the pale moon light) that can host free blog comments? Meaning I host my blog on my plain vanilla FTP site through blogger.com - and I dont have the dynamic cgi access to allow comments, but I've been getting feedback that comments might be useful -- I'd certainly dig them. So does anyone know of a site that offers an add-on blog commenting system? Does even such a beast exist?

I can feel it - "convergence"

I am getting that feeling again. The one I had a long time ago when the web hit. It's that "convergence" feeling. I'm sitting here at my pc, jumping from kinja, to bloglines, to del.icio.us, to magnatune, to yahoo groups, and I realize that someone's going to pull all these services together and create something really powerful. I've been subscribing to great RSS feeds, and I'm finally starting to see the "rewards" of that. News that I care about, and stuff that's interesting to me is getting to me very quickly and efficiently. Oh, and by the way - I havent read my spam-filled inbox in days - instead I'm using Gmail. Can you smell it? CONVERGENCE is coming.

Idea: PodQuests

The other day I had an idea about PodCaching - where podcasts could be linked to a certain location - so you could go to some scenic spot and listen to all the comments by other people about that location. This was even mentioned by Adam Curry on yesterday's podcast! Anyway here's today's idea:

Do you remember those "which way books" of olden times? You could choose your own path in the story and decide how the adventure progressed. Imagine taking that idea and applying it to podcast playlists! A person (or team) records a series of events - like entering a castle, picking doors, dying horribly, etc. Then at the end of each clip, there would be directions as to which playlist item to switch to to hear the next part of the story - only, you'd have choices. You might even imagine having a "live" component of this where you have the person with the iPod start in a given location in the city, and move about the city in sync with the adventure.

Great news! Laszlo w/o having to have the server software on your website

The repercussions and benefits of having Laszlo free and Open Source are starting to happen. One of the biggest things holding back widespread adoption of Laszlo is that you have to have the presentation server running on your own server - you cannot just create some application and upload the swf+resources to say some freewebs server space. It looks like in the coming months that is going to change. This is amazingly cool news! What that means is that not only will you be able to just create the application on your own system and just ftp the resulting app up to your website, you'll be able to do things like mail it around to friends, embed it in web pages, truely collaborate with other developers, since you could create a sourceforge project with the lzx files and let anyone download and help create it! There'll still be the need for the presentation server, but it becomes more of an application building tool on your local desktop. There will still be the need for the server if you want to do some special things like persistent chat I think, or calling java on the server, but this opens the door to hundreds of new apps.

For me this also seems like a step in the direction of the holy grail for Laszlo (ok, perhaps the holy Dixie Cup) runnable applications (.exe) on your desktop w/o the browser at all ...

Idea: PodCaching

Time for some serious thinkage. I've been listening to many Podcasts the past few days and it's amazing how this idea of taping an amateur - style radio show and making it available via mp3 using RSS to syndicate it is catching on. While riding home on the train last night a thought occurred to me - what if you could combine Podcasting with Geocaching. Meaning instead of subscribing to a "show" you subscribe to a "location" - a GPS location. These locations could coincide with Geocaches so you could do things like listen for hints as to where to find the cache, list to others talking about the history of that location, or some funny thing that happened there.

Imagine further with me here :) Say you were going to go to a local restaurant. You could query the location and load into your iPod all the comments or interesting things about that restaurant. Heck! You might even get to listen to the owner of the store read to you the menu! Or imagine you want to go to a local museum. The night before you go, you request the feed for that location and in the morning you can take with you a series of stories, guides, comments and other great things around the museum. You might listen to someone who knows how to find the best art pieces quickly, or where to park nearby and save some money.


If anything, it would be very cool to plan to go to some park or scenic spot, or even ask you travel across country - you could have someone who's already done it travel along with you and point out great spots to stop or eat.

How to make explosive flares in GameMaker

I spent way too much time last night trying out various effects in GameMaker 6. I did however come up with a really interesting explosion effect as you can see from the link above. If you have [GameMaker] you can try it out with [This GM6 file]

Kindred spirits

Every so often I am reminded of what really brought me to the internet, and it's true sprit. When I first starting using the net - wayyy back with wierd things like *gasp* gopher sites - I was astounded by the ability to find other folks who were "just like me". Meaning folks who liked Star Trek, or The Geek Code, or developing sites using some new language called HTML. It impressed me so much I created a little org called the HTML Writers Guild ... Of course I completely had no idea that it'd explode into a huge organization which exists even today in a modified/merged form. Anyway, getting back on topic here, every so often you run across someone online who's sorta on the same wavelength as you. I ran across this person's site a few weeks ago somehow - probably on delicious and suddenly find his blog and posts everywhere... Stuff like that happens on the 'net. It's happened waaay to often to me for it to be a mere coincidence. I think the net is a facilitator of a basic human desire to find others of like mind. I had a similar experience with finding another website of like-minded folk last month with this site: Ozone Asylum.

And so, long windedly and round-aboutly (yah I know, I know) here's a blog you should give a click to and check it out if you have found stuff on my blog of some interest.

My Game: Crystal Fantasy Shooter

I'm working on an interesting game using [GameMaker] called "Crystal Fantasy Shooter" which will be a combo of an RPG, a side scrolling shooter and a fighter like Double Dragon. It will be pretty fun I hope :)

The above is a link to a very early prototype if you want to give it a try.

Pure CSS Image Rollovers

Busy with work, but I ran across a neat way to to image rollovers without js and without having to preload images. Pretty cool. BTW the link is in the title above. And here's a big hello! out to all you RSS subscribers. If you subscribe to my blog please drop me an email sometime. [email me]

Sword of Fargoal

I stumbled across a really nice dungeon crawler game this weekend, called Sword of Fargoal. Basically it's like NetHack or Rogue, only with beefed up graphics and retro style presentation. It's a real jem! Give it a go.

Some Laszlo Comments

Looks like DrDreff has some choice comments in response to a pro-Flex post by someone else. Nice reading :)

TinyWorld - laszlo based RPG

A while back I created a simple little RPG (actually little more than a demo) and I hope to revive it now that Laszlo is gone open source. [Give it a try].

Laszlo Goes Open Source

This is great news!!!
From the site:

As of now, the entire Laszlo platform is open source software. You can download, install and deploy it for free. The source code is released under the Common Public License (CPL). You can even build proprietary, commercial solutions on top of the open source Laszlo platform. Laszlo itself has shifted its business model from platform licensing to professional services, support, and commercial application development.

Datafication

If you us a Gecko-based browser like Phoenix, Netscape, Mozilla, Chimera or something else, then you can take advantage of the fact that they support the data: URL . This application allows you to choose an image and will in turn convert it to a data url which you can then paste into your HTML page. This is handy when you want a document to carry around the images that it needs. This is also handy for bloggers who can simply paste the image into a blog posting and have it stay with the post without having to upload a separate image. Note that although you could use this for large images, it really is meant for smaller type images - since it takes some time for the browser to decode it.

Here's an example:




This is my own creation - though it uses some code from Charles Yeomans for the Base64 conversion.

I also want to thank Dr Brain for the inspiration for this app, as I've emulated his excellent datafy.rb (ruby) script. Check out his script because it's actually much more versatile than my simple app - but you need to have Ruby running somewhere on your machine.

Here's the link to the data URL spec, which has been around since 1998!

Download it here for Mac OS X and Windows:

DataFication (Mac OS X)


DataFication (Windows)

A post a day

Ok, I'm going to commit to posting 'something' every day - even if it's just some link or other coolness. Here's today's link [world cyber games] .