Social, Media & Games — Jaz-Lounge

Extra Credit episode about the importance of the pre-production phase of games

Although the topic are games, this also applies to other areas like web development!

Evaporating cooling effect

CSS Step-Animation as replacement for JavaScript

Read on developer.mozilla.org: Making animated Images with only CSS. 

A note to myself: Check performance vs a pure JavaScript version.

Ask MDN Follow-up: HTML5 and games

The transcription for the first Ask MDN event. (http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/08/ask-mdn-follow-up-html5-gaming-creative-javascript/)

Game mechanics can apply everywhere. Not only in games, or in childhood plays. They also provide good extra intrinsic motivations while renovating a flat. 

For example: Take you have to paint all (or some) of your rooms new. Taking game mechanics into consideration, start with the smallest room and probably the smallest wall in it. Then paint! While you paint, you can count your progress. 10% 20%… and finally 100%. Hey! You leveled up. You are now Painter (level 2). Congratulations. Now pick the next wall, and go on, level 3 is waiting. After painting 4 Levels you are level 5. Time to meet the first screenroom-filling boss, Dr. Ceiling-of-the-smalles-room! Did you defeat it? Well, you now get the Badge “Painter of the smalles room in the house”. Do you want more? Then go on, there are more rooms to paint, more levels to level up, more badges to earn.

You get the picture? Great, now go and renovate your flat.

Btw: This game mechanic does not only apply to painting, you can also use it for more of your renovation work you have to do.

Teambased Projectmanagement tool

Just found out about teambox.com. The first impression is simple, elegant and useful. It combines Taskmanagement (including assignment and priorization), some small wiki functionality (it has pages), twitter like conversations (so you can say what you are working on), file attachments and two organizational levels (projects and Tasklists).

After I tried that out a little while, I will make an update…

Yesterday morning I send around this link to some people in my office. Since then it made it’s round through the whole company. So I think it is worth to be posted here.

It’s another good short rand about what is hindering us to work in the office. I believe I posted another one some time ago.

(Source: ted.com)

The all true and really funny fronteers10 talk of Jake Archibald (former BBC employee now working in The Team). He talked about how to manage and build an Javascript API.

GameOn 2010

I just registered for the GameOn 2010 of mozilla labs. But I’m not quite sure if I will submit the awesome swordnbow to this. I just had an idea for some other cool, funny, web two nully and probably highly addicting game. If someone is interested to participate and knows JavaScript, please let me know. Maybe we can team up for this one.

If you are using new or experimental technology, you have to bring time with you. At least if you try upgrading to a newer version. That could break things and it can be hassle to find the cause of the problem.

Also, if you have problems installing or uninstalling things with npm after you installed something, try upgrading npm. Another app you installed may have changed neccessary npm files and an older version can’t handle them and will throw strange errors.