Rawkes Weekly: 3rd January 2012
The twelth 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.
The twelth 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.
What better way to bring in the new year than with a fantastic Rawkes Weekly. It's been a pretty quiet fortnight since the last update, I certainly enjoyed the time off.
Yesterday I took the time to write about 2011 and all the crazy things that happened within it. Needless to say that 2012 is going to be mental if last year was anything to go by!
In other news, GitHub now serve .webapp manifest files with the correct content-type, meaning you can host your Mozilla Labs app or game using GitHub pages! The first game hosted using this method is MarbleSoccer.
Some great news just before the festive break was that Mozilla and Google have renewed their search deal. 2012 is going to be a great year for the Web now that this is out of the way!
And on the open Web game development scene I was interviewed for an article for .net magazine about Mozilla's position on open Web games. It's worth a read.
Links of the week
- node-compute-cluster
- This Node.js library allows you to distribute computation across multiple processes. I'm fascinated by all the multi-process stuff happening in Node right now.
- 360° MP3 player UI demo: Javascript + Canvas
- I love this radial visualisation of audio data using HTML5 canvas. It's a shame that the audio data isn't grabbed using HTML5 though, I'd love to see that put into this demo.
- Ender
- Described as the no-library library, Ender is effectively NPM for front-end JavaScript libraries like jQuery.
- About the @mention constellations
- An insight into a beautiful data visualisation of 10 minutes of conversation on Twitter. I can't believe how many tweets there are!
- Faster Canvas Pixel Manipulation with Typed Arrays
- Andrew Baker walks you through how to manipulate pixels in canvas as fast as possible using Typed Arrays.
- Service Discovery Comparison
- I didn't realise quite how many methods of service discovery were out there. I'm massively interested in mDNS/zeroconf and the possibilities that it brings for open Web games.
- Travis CI
- I've seen a lot of continuous integration services around lately but the cool kid on the block seems to be Travis CI. I'd love to try out CI myself.
- Dochub
- Ever wanted instant search on MDN? If so then look no further than Dochub. I'm intrigued to see how this little service progresses.
- Testing with Mocha
- I'm currently giving test-driven development a try on the re-write of Rawkets. So far I'm really enjoying Mocha as the platform of choice for writing my tests for Node.js and the browser.
- MotionCAPTCHA
- This is like normal CAPTCHA but instead of typing stuff you draw something. I love the concept but I worry about the accessibility of drawing specific shapes.
- Quake 3 demo with the Mouse Lock API
- Brandon Jones has updated his Quake 3 WebGL demo with support for the Mouse Lock API. No more sub-par mouse interaction disrupting the experience!
Track of the week
Let The Sunshine by Labrinth. This kind of music isn't usually my cup of tea but I've really grown to like it recently.