Rawkes Weekly: 5th September 2011

A lot has happened since the last update. The most sad of which is the decision by the HTML5 Grind blog to go on an indefinite hiatus. Hopefully someone will have the time to pick up the torch otherwise there's going to be a gaping hole in the HTML5 gaming scene.

At Mozilla I've been working a lot this past week on the Ask MDN dashboard; a public tool that aims to promote discussion on Twitter surrounding each Ask MDN event. The project is built with Node.js, MongoDB and WebSockets and is planned to be released for the next event this coming Friday (9th September).

A personal project that I've been working on is the real-time Twitter sentiment tool.

Over the past weekend I've been making the tool more robust so it can now recover from a crash by loading previous sentiment values from a database.

Other changes to the tool deal with situations where tweets don't get processed in the order that they were sent, which actually caused the majority of issues with the previous version.

Oh, and it's my birthday tomorrow but don't tell anyone. Ok?

Links of the week

• IsoCity demo
  • Awesome preview of a HTML5 game being released by the creator of Isogenic Engine.
• Browser-based Games IRC channel on Freenode
  • If you're interested in HTML5 and JavaScript game development then you should hang out in this IRC channel.
• Socket.IO 0.8.3 - multiple bugfixes and improvements
  • Socket.IO has been updated again to fix some issues with the original 0.8.0 release from last week.
• CodeMirror
  • JavaScript library that lets you put a code-editor in the browser. I've seen it used in talks where a speaker edited code using CodeMirror and had the output update dynamically.
• WebGL Globe
  • A 3D globe framework created by the Google Data Arts Team that anyone can use for data visualisation.
• WebGL Globe - Google Search Volume by Language
  • One of the data visualisations created using the WebGL Globe mentioned above. This one plots the search volume on Google in various languages and locations.
• MouseLock Specification Draft
  • JavaScript API specification from Vincent Scheib at Google for situations where the mouse position needs to be locked and the cursor hidden. A couple of these situations are first-person games and 3D modelling applications.
• An Arduino interface to Pusher
  • I'm desperate to try out this Arduino library for the Pusher service. Easy real-time data transmission to physical devices through the Internet? Yes please!
• Technology behind the ROME "3 Dreams of Black" project
  • A looks behind the scenes at the technology and processes used to create the ROME "3 Dreams of Black" WebGL project.
• Improving HTML5 Canvas Performance
  • Looking at techniques that can be used to increase performance of animations and games created with HTML5 canvas.

Track of the week

Promises by Nero. I'm a bit of a Nero fan in general actually, I'd check out the rest of their new album.