Rawkes Weekly: 19th December 2011

The eleventh instalment of the all-new Rawkes Weekly. In it I go over recent events and give you some of my favourite links related to Web development and general geekery.

It's been a busy time at Mozilla since the last update. The biggest news being that we launched the developer preview of the Mozilla Labs Apps project. This project is our vision of how applications should be on the Web; open and distributed. You should definitely read the announcement and the documentation, the functionality promised is mouth-watering.

Since the apps announcement I posted on the Mozilla Hacks blog about how gaming relates to our work with apps. In the post I detail all the APIs and functionality that we're working on at Mozilla that will directly benefit game developers.

I also wrote about ways that we can recognise the young and hidden talent within our community. It's an issue that I think deserves some time and effort to solve.

Links of the week

• Node.js now includes NPM
  • Node Package Manager is now included within the latest 0.6 builds of Node. This is a logical and practical step, I like it.
• The Relationship Between Firebug and Mozilla Developer Tools
  • The question about the relationship between Firebug and Mozilla's own Developer Tools comes up time and time again. Hopefully this post by the Developer Tools team will help make things clear.
• CNN Ecosphere
  • Pretty WebGL visualisation of tweets about the COP17 Conference. Just a pretty WebGL visualisation would have been enough for me!
• Blis - A blitted isometric system for AS3
  • This is a fascinating method of collision detection in games by giving every game object a different colour value. So simple, yet so clever.
• Let's have a look at some recently landed Web APIs for Firefox
  • WebAPIs are something I absolutely can't wait to see cross-browser. In the meantime, this post by John Hammink gives an overview of the WebAPIs that have already landed in Firefox.
• GLSL Sandbox Gallery
  • Anything to do with WebGL still blows my mind. This site lets you add your own GLSL code and share it with the rest of the community, all with a nice visual preview.
• DNS Service Discovery browser extension
  • This Firefox and Chrome extension is absolutely amazing. In a nutshell it allows you to access services on the local network or the Internet that have been broadcast using multicast DNS, like Apple's Bonjour technology. Imagine using this to look for local HTML5 game servers within the browser.
• node_mdsns
  • This Node.js package allows for multicast DNS/zeroconf/Bonjour service discovery and broadcast. Coupled with the browser extension above there really is nothing holding you back from creating services with Node.js that you can discover within the browser. Very cool!
• Fun with <video> and <canvas>
  • This little demo changes the colour of a page background based on what is showing in the video. I've seen something like this before, however this implementation seems neater and prettier.
• Move The Web Forward
  • Described as a "guide to getting involved with standards and browser development." Definitely worth a read.
• SublimeVideo Unleashed!
  • HTML5 video UI service SublimeVideo has unleashed its offering to everyone. It's such a well-designed experience and one that should be considered if you're hosting your own HTML5 videos.
• Spotify developer resources
  • Guidelines and documentation for the Spotify Apps JavaScript API. I'm yet to play with this yet but I'm excited to see what apps come out of it.

Track of the week

One (Logistics Remix) by Sky Ferreira. A bit poppy, but oh so awesome once you get into it.