This is a great example of how JavaScript can be used to render graphics and games in browsers, at only 14 Kb of code (compressed). The demo is playable, using arrow keys, although it features only one (incomplete) level. No external images or files are used. Sprites are made using canvas or div-making tactics (for IE), and sound is embedded as base64 encoded data (URIs). All sprites have only 4 colors, which helps keep things small (40-60 bytes per sprite).

As the guys at Nihilogic said, this was a proof-of-concept exercise, but it’s impressive how much was achieved with a single 14 Kb javascript file.

Share This

Opera has been a good student, studied a lot lately, and passed the Acid 3 test! The Acid 3 test proved to be a mouthfull for every major browser release until now.

This is a screenshot of WinGogi (Windows version of reference builds used for the internal testing of Opera’s platform independent Core) after having successfully rendered the Acid 3 test page. According to Opera Desktop team blog, the Opera development team have reached the 100% pass grade for the first time, after having worked hard on fixing bugs. There are still some things to fix, but they will be sorted out soon. A technical preview version will be released on labs.opera.com soon.

Now, if they could only get Opera Mini on my P1i to do the same, that would be great

Share This

The new YouTube API allows even further integration of the YouTube service into all kinds of online projects. So far online applications could provide users with ways to upload and view videos, on various different devices, as well as comment and vote on video content.

The new API features include the following:

• Upload videos and video responses to YouTube
• Add/Edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc)
• Fetch localized standard feeds (most viewed, top rated, etc.) for 18 international locales
• Perform custom queries optimized for 18 international locales
• Customize player UI and control video playback (pause, play, stop, etc.) through software

YouTube now gives developers a way to produce applications that include uploading, managing, searching, and playing back video content and metadata, all available in the YouTube “cloud” (managed by YouTube). Sounds great, and having read some case studies they gave, some interesting ideas are springing into mind already…

Read in more detail on YouTube Blog.

Share This

“I became Acid 3, the destroyer of browsers.”

The Web Standards Project released the Acid 3 test, and all the browsers failed big time. DrunkenFist posted screen shots of various browsers and scores - IE 6 and 7, FF 2 and 3, Opera, Camino, Safari… This is what the properly rendered test is supposed to look like:

Damn, and it seemed like it was yesterday that IE 8 passed the Acid 2 test.

Share This

Even though Microsoft previously stated IE8 will have to be “told” to render pages in “standards” mode, they have now changed the situation. IE8 will by default render pages in the “most standards mode compliant” way.

They’ve recently published Interoperability Principles, and according to their blog post, it’s with these principles in mind that they decided to change IE8’s default rendering mode. Microsoft has been under a lot of legal pressure lately, especially in the EU, and even though they say browser render modes cannot be looked at from the legal issues perspective, their move is a preventive one against potential legal issues that may arise in the future.

Well, whatever Microsoft, just give us standards mode!

Share This

Mozilla is busy developing the new mobile version of the Firefox browser. Doug Turner, Firefox mobile product manager, has just released another idea for the user interface for the new mobile FF, on his blog. Basically, the browser would have a hidden UI layer that would come up when a user touches one of the icons that translucently sits on the bottom of the screen. The whole idea is that the user would have the whole screen available for viewing the internet page, and use the UI extension only on demand. Here are two pictures which represent what the new mobile FF UI could look like:

  

Pretty good idea, although I am hoping the mobile FF will not inherit blocking glitches of its big brothers (open a few tabs and run a couple of AJAX intensive sites, and that’s it). The Mozilla Wiki already has an entry for the new mobile touchscreen browser interface from a while ago, although quite different than the one just presented.

Share This

So, MySpace has decided to join the social network development community. While other social networks, like Facebook, have introduced their developer platforms over the past months, MySpace seems to have been sitting on the sidelines taking notes from the field. According to Mashable, they’ll be addressing some of the problems associated with social network development platforms such as privacy, monetization and data ownership. These issues have been obstacles, especially in the case of Facebook. User experience will be top priority, while developers will be probably be enabled to monetize their applications through some sort of shared revenue program.

MySpace applications should be embeddable on other sites, and will support Google Open Social from the very beginning. The official opening is on February 5, but you can pre-register now (requires MySpace login).

Share This

It’s been a while since I last posted anything about Facebook. There has been a lot going on in the news about it, mostly concerning privacy issues, rumors, and about who bought a stake in the company and for how many zillion dollars… This time the news is Facebook released a JavaScript client library to the public a couple of days ago. This in itself is interesting, although the Facebook API has already been in use for a while, allowing the same thing only through server-side programming (for example in PHP). The news appeared on numerous sites, but I came across this post on AllFacebook which spawned an interesting discussion about the new library. Basically, the client library offers nothing particularly new, other than Facebook can now be queried using client side scripting only which will make life easier for those who want to have less server side coding.

Share This

Yes, that’s the sad truth, but before all guns are pointed towards Microsoft for this, I must say there are reasons the IE development team took this road. Their blog post explains this in detail (the whole backward compatibility issue, the state of things now, and the future support for standards). Although simply putting Internet Explorer 8 into a single standards mode was expected, they chose in the end to allow web developers to opt-in to the IE8 standards mode by adding a meta tag in the source of the page, which would explicitly tell IE to render the page with the “best standards compliance possible”. The default render mode is “quirks mode” (compatible with current content) and “standard mode” (IE7 standard mode).

Compatibility seems to have been the main reason for this kind of approach in the end, as roughly half of the top 200 US web sites were in “standards mode”. A rather large discussion was spawned about this, so get ready for a few hundred comments to read. There are some really spot-on suggestions and ideas, and of course some (well deserved?) criticism. Well, at least they passed the Acid 2 Test.

Share This

Sun Microsystems bought MySQL AG for 1 billion dollars. MySQL has so far been the clear leader in open source database solutions. It’s MySQL has been the backbone of almost all websites in the past years, and puts the M in LAMP. The fact that Sun bought MySQL shouldn’t be to alarming, since Sun has openly supported open source in the past years. But, is the MySQL ownership change going to affect its further development?

MySQL has been free for years, although it made some money selling support subscriptions, but not nearly as many as there are MySQL users. The open source model is certainly a hard mouthful to swallow, especially in some cases. MySQL has a lot of users, and a community that grows on a daily basis. Now that it’s become Sun’s ownership, the company will have a great population of users to offer its other products to. Gordon Haff wrote an article on this on News.com, in which he discusses some implications of the deal.

On the one hand, MySQL will surely benefit from having a system as powerful as Sun Microsystems behind it. This should make a lot of desired development take place, and sooner too. On the other hand, there is the possibility that MySQL will simply be used as means to offer other products that require license purchase. What I’m hoping for is further development of MySQL, bringing it on level with Oracle, but still keeping it free. Sun certainly has the means to do this. Well, one can hope…

Share This