Rawkes Weekly: 3rd October 2011

First off I'd like to apologise for the lack of updates last week. In my defence I have had a pretty hectic couple of weeks and took an impromptu break from things for a couple days. Perhaps one day you'll forgive me.

On the 22nd and 23rd of September I flew out to Poland to attend and speak at onGameStart, the first large-scale HTML5 gaming event. It was a great success and I got to meet some crazy-intelligent people for some interesting discussion.

I've written up my general feedback about onGameStart and documented the slides and resources from my talk on Rawkets. You should also check out these round-ups of the event on the first day and the second day.

Last Monday I travelled to Birmingham to give a talk at Oxygen Accelerator. The talk was about why HTML5 & JavaScript are awesome and how they can be used in today. I had a great time there chatting to the teams about how they can use HTML5 and JavaScript in their projects.

Something that really pissed me off last week was the new that Can I Use was compromised and taken offline. Who in their right mind would attack such a useful and passive resource?

In other news I spent some time this weekend working on Rawkets and finally added really basic AI players that follow you around.

Eventually I'll update this to make the AI more intelligent so they can communicate, team up, defend, attack and do all sorts of other scary stuff.

Something else that intrigued me recently was discovering that X Factor single-handedly made everyone on Twitter unhappy yesterday evening. Disgraceful!

Links of the week

• Box2D & JavaScript tutorials by Seth Ladd
  • Here is a compilation of Box2D tutorials created by Seth Ladd from Google.
• Charles Web Debugging Proxy
  • Use Charles if you want to monitor and debug network traffic on your computer. One great use for Charles is to monitor network traffic through your browser to debug a multiplayer WebSockets game.
• SockJS
  • SockJS is a WebSockets emulation library similar in concept to Socket.IO. Once difference with SockJS is that it claims to do thing differently, and it doesn't use Flash as a fallback.
• Brendan Eich - Capitol JS
  • Brendan's annotated slides about ES6 and Dart from Capitol JS.
• HTML5 Video Face Detection with Canvas and Javascript
  • I'm a sucker for facial detection. This is a JavaScript implementation that uses HTML5 video as the input source.
• appMobi
  • appMobi claim to have created the world's first integrated HTML5 game development and deployment environment. This can only be a good thing for HTML5 as a platform, regardless of whether the claim of "world's first" is factually correct.
• Barcode Beasties
  • While I was at Oxygen Accelerator I met the developers of Barcode Beasties. It's a wicked game for Android which turns everyday barcodes into collectable monsters (think Pokemon). I love it!
• GameBoy Colour JavaScript emulator
  • Ever wanted to play your favourite GameBoy games in your browser? Well now you can with this sweet JavaScript emulator. A few games are already loaded onto the website, like Pokemon (I used to love that game).
• Zynga going open source
  • Ok, so they haven't decided to open up everything but Zynga have started releasing components from the Aves HTML5 game engine. So far it's just a couple of bits but I'm looking forward to seeing what else they release.
• Byte-saving Techniques
  • Here are a bunch of techniques to help you shave a couple bytes off your JavaScript application. Some of these techniques are generally just good programming practice.
• JSConf.EU Slides
  • Some kind soul has collated a bunch of the JSConf slides and resources from the event in Europe this past weekend. I'd take a look as a lot of these talks are amazing and informative.
• Déjàvis
  • Déjàvis is a tool for analysing and visualising data. I've not tried it out yet but it looks interesting.
• TextMate 2 is coming
  • Hands up who gave up waiting for TextMate 2? Well, according to this blog post you should have held out a little longer as the next version will come out as an Alpha before Christmas. I'll hold judgement until I see it with my own eyes.
• Introducing Amazon Silk
  • Amazon have decided to create their own browser for the Kindle Fire. I'm yet to dig into the nitty gritty but I do wonder why they couldn't have adopted one of the existing browser engines.
• SlideShare Ditches Flash for HTML5
  • I've been looking forward to this day for a very long time. I'm so glad that Slideshare have pushed forward and embraced the open Web.
• Code Improvements in Muse Beta 3
  • The Muse Engineering team outline the improvements in the latest release of Adobe's latest Web editor. I'm still not convinced about this or Edge yet but I'm interested to see how they progress in the near-future.
• Open source clone of Theme Hospital
  • CorsixTH is an open source clone of the popular Bullfrog game. Bullfrog are now known as EA UK and as far as I know Theme Hospital wasn't immensely popular (or even released?) outside of the UK. Still, I'd check it out if you want to destroy your productivity and chuckle at the timeless humour.
• Firefox 7 for developers
  • Here's an overview of the key improvements for developers in Firefox 7.

Track of the week

Civilisation by Justice. I can't wait for Justice's new album to come out, only a few weeks left to wait!