Gamemaker RPG: Ark 22

Gamemaker is one of thos applications most near and dear to my heart. Its a powerful tool for creating games and is accessible to even very young kids for making games. Ark 22 is a full fledge RPG created using Gamemaker that will keep you coming back to finish it. This is a great example of the kinds of awesome games you can create using this awesome tool.

Exalead web search

This is an interesting "kitchen-sink" style approach to web search. For those of you who like your information from a fire hose, you may dig this. The web page thumbnail search is nifty.

Cross-Domain Scripting with JAHAH

From ajaxian.com comes news of this great library for doing cross-domain scripting and "includes" from one site to another. Very interesting!

Text-base dPong! Pong meets Zork

Imagine blending two genre's of games that heretofore have never met. Oh, say retro arcade games like Pong and text-adventures like Zork.This is exactly what Gregory Karber did with his Pong: The Text-Based Game. What's amazing about this game is that it's not just a rote set of pages - its actually a dynamic changing game of pong, only textual. Double points for hitting on two retro genre's at once! What's next? Pac Man meets Oregon Trail?

AFLAX now has persistent storage

AFLAX is a terribly cool project to expose the guts of Flash to everyday javascripters. I envision that someday Adobe/Macr will actually wake up and fold AFLAX like capability back into the core Flash product. But for now, check out the demos and make something cool!

Visio with the canvas tag

I know canvas is going to be big. I remember when I worked at Netscape talking up the idea of getting a canvas element going in mozilla - but it was too early then. But the time has come for things like this to take off.

Soapboxing aside, here's another great canvas demo - this time emulating a subset of visio / omnigraffle features.

KToon: Open Multimedia Toolkit

After poking around on Brian's site a bit - I found this. Brian describes it as follows:

an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) to develop Multimedia projects based in open standards as SMIL, KToonScript and the persistence format KTN.

Using HTML Tables (appropriately)

Here's a good article on how to use tables for their intended purpose: presenting tabular data.

Starting the redesign - the nightmare begins

Eventually there comes a time in a web developer's life that they meet with dread, loathing, and downright horror sometimes. What could it possibly be? The website redesign. Yes, that thing that lurks in the back of your mind. You know you'll have to do it sooner or later. You know you aught to do it. But with all the real life, and real work you have to do, it's just such a hard and important thing. I mean this is your site. It has to reflect you as well as just how awesome your skills are. Folks will probably see your site for approximate 15 seconds before flitting off to some other location. That is, unless you find that special "something" that earns you either a bookmark, a del.icio.us add, or daresay even a rss subscription.

So, with all that in mind, I begin my quest for a new site design. I pray I make it out alive. :)

New Year's resolution - daily posts.

I've resolved to make this a year when I post at least something every day. Something new, something cool. Hopefully worth stopping by for.

For today we have a nifty ajax application called ajchat - a js based chat service. Give it a go and see for your self.