Rawkes Weekly: 10th October 2011

Wow, what a week it has been!

It started out amazing with finding out that I made the final 3 in the "Brilliant Newcomer" category of the .net magazine awards 2011. Absolutely chuffed about that and can't wait for the ceremony next month. Best of luck to the other guys in my category; Harry Roberts and Lea Verou.

That amazingness continued with the release of the iPhone 4S along with all the pomp and circumstance that surrounds it. Still, it's always great fun watching these Apple events and I'm just glad to finally upgrade from my ageing 3GS!

But the amazingness didn't last long. I'm sure you're all aware by now that Steve Jobs passed away mid-week. Although such news wasn't massively unexpected (he was very ill), it was such a sudden loss to the tech community. In a small way, Steve's impact on the community can be summed up by the dramatic effect he had on Twitter users when news of his death started to circulate. So sad.

In completely unrelated news I can now confirm that I'm officially addicted to Minecraft. It's such a delightfully simple game, but don't those always seem to be the ones that are the most fun to play? I also love how there is a Minecraft-esque map viewer in WebGL.

Links of the week

• Turn a github.com URL into a git.io URL
  • URL shorteners are all the rage nowadays. This Gist allows you to create git.io short urls for your Github projects.
• Stripe
  • Online payment services have been a hot topic recently. Stripe aims to be the payment service for developers (made by developers). I'm yet to use it but it certainly looks promising, and pretty.
• Source Engine Levels in WebGL
  • This is just plain awesome. I saw Brandon demo this Team Fortress 2 map in WebGL at onGameStart and couldn't wait for him to release the code for it. I'd love to see someone try and add gameplay functionality to this demo, even if it's just a simple method of running around the map. I'd also check out his technical post about the map viewer.
• Tweetures
  • I'm always a sucker for data visualisation. This little project is a fun look at popular Twitter users, each represented by a simple organism.
• Node.js Templating Options
  • Recently, I've been using Node more and more for serving public website files. Here is a list of some of the most popular templating options that exist for Node. I'm a fan of Handlebars myself.
• Epic brings Unreal Engine 3 to Adobe Flash
  • I don't care what you think of Adobe and Flash, this is seriously cool! Epic has managed to get their Unreal Engine 3 to work with Flash and its funky new 3D engine.
• Substance.io
  • Substance claims to be "document authoring and publishing for the Web." I love the look it has going as well as the per-paragraph comments system, which is something I want to experiment with here on the blog.
• Building a Node.js Events App Using RabbitMQ, Websockets, and Django
  • Having recently created a Node and WebSockets events app for Ask MDN I was excited to see that others have been working on similar projects. There's no code here but the concepts involved make for an interesting read.
• J3D WebGL engine
  • J3D is a WebGL engine created by Bartek Drozdz. It looks promising and I can't wait to see how it progresses in the future.
• Unity exporter for J3D
  • Off the back off the J3D engine is a tool that allows you to create scenes in Unity and then export them into J3D (WebGL). I love tools that make it easier to develop and create awesome stuff with WebGL.
• Tizen
  • The future of mobile certainly seems to be HTML5, at least that's what Tizen believes. I just love the idea of being able to develop apps and interfaces for phones with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I'm looking forward to seeing how Mozilla's own Boot to Gecko project turns out.

Track of the week

Medley by Justice. I know I recommended Justice last week but just wait until you hear this medley of tracks from their latest album.