WaxJelly

Top 10 iPhone Games…

Time killers, RPG’s, First-Person Shooters… I’ve been running the gamut of possible apps / games to kill time lately (long story). And, thanks to my new 3GS (thanks Kevin), I’ve been able to actual compare / contrast some performance enhancements in the new setup. Here’s my top 10.

• I Dig It – A thorough review is deserved here, and I’m not all that inclined to replace this excellent one. Suffice it to say, their integration with Facebook is damn-near flawless, and the graphics, sounds, gameplay, and addictive quality add up to a top-notch game.
• Let’s Golf – Simple, beautiful, and awesome. (it’s more fun than Tiger Wood’s golf, ’cause it’s way simpler, and includes smarter game-play like upgrades at each level).
• Toki Tori – This is the best combination of platform and puzzle that I’ve seen in a game on any platform. It’s an impressive level of complexity, combined with uber-simple controls, and really aesthetically pleasing graphics.
• Enigmo – Apple’s “Best of 2008″ is just a logical extension of a physics engine, but it’s done well enough to keep your attention until you finish it, and make you want to start over when you’re done.
• Assassin’s Creed – The single most impressive graphics and interaction that I’ve seen in any iPhone app, period.
• Parking Lot – A super simple and somewhat obvious extension of the ‘blocked’ game that took me an entire tour last fall to finish, Parking Lot makes the list for simply having more levels, and slightly wider variety of puzzles.
• F.A.S.T – Killer graphics and all-tilt controls makes this flight simulator game the best in breed.
• Flight Control – OMFG I’ve spent way too much time on this F#%$ing game.
• Penguin Catapult – For a good time, play Penguin Catapult. Trust me.
• Mafia Wars – This game sucks the hours out of my day like no other. It’s mindless, effortless redundancy means that I have it open in 9 out of 10 meetings that I attend.

Ignite Zurich

I was recently asked to speak at Day Software’s annual Ignite Zurich conference. Zurich, Switzerland was incredibly beautiful, clean, and remarkably expensive. I mean, really, really, expensive. That said, the conference was really cool, and my presentation was a lot of fun to give. I was able to meet guys like Roy Fielding, Chief Scientist for Day Software, and reconnect with David Neuschler, Day’s CTO, and Kevin Cochrane, Day’s CMO. These are truly some of the smartest technologists that I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet, and I’m thrilled to be working with them on Newsweek’s new site.

I’m also looking forward to next year’s conference… Fiji?

And just like that, my life is complete…

iTunes introduces App Sorting

Really Forkin’ cool Data Visualizations… (you’re welcome).

http://www.flickr.com/groups/856209@N23/

http://chartporn.org/

http://www.good.is/

… and see many more with deep interesting analysis at Smashing Magazine.

Google Maps covers apple store with a UPS truck?

One of my favorite features of Google Maps is also the feature I use least. Street View allows you to zoom into a 360 degree pic of the address, and see the view from the street. Very cool.

In seemingly unrelated news, today I decided that I can no longer function without a proper iPhone charger. So I looked up the address to the Apple store, thinking I’d get a walking short-cut since I work only a few blocks from the intersection. I searched for “apple store fifth avenue” on google maps, and out of habitual curiosity, I selected “street view”. What I saw was this…

Ladies and gentlemen, the apple st… a UPS truck? WTF?

I scooted the POV cursor to the north corner of the street to see the difference.

… and the south corner?

Ah, there’s the apple store. Amazing. Dick Chaney has to make Google take his house off of the maps, but Apple can’t even get their store shown. You’d think we could just replace this image with a better one.

That’s my proposal, peeps. Someone make a Google Maps API that allows users to login and override the store front shot of businesses with better photos. Maybe even link them up with a Flickr API and allow for galleries to be shared? If this already exists, let me know. I’ll gladly review it. So long as there’s no UPS truck in front of the freakin’ flagship apple store.

If you missed it… get firefox 3.

There’s something great to be said for Tech companies that take all the right things seriously and, in the words of Tyler Derden… “Let the things that do not matter, truly slide”. Google’s Annual April Fools jokes reminds me of a crazy uncle who’s 40 and inexplicably single and rich, Apple’s blatantly taunting and arrogant ads – and then actually delivering consistently stellar products – make them the older brother that would suck if he weren’t so generous with his talents, Firefox’s “we build it, you break it, we make it better” cycle of development makes them the younger brother. The one you’re proud of, but just kinda wish he would plan better.

Don’t launch a “we’re gonna break the guinnes world record for most downloads” marketing campaign, and then fail to beef up the bandwidth, dude. Seriously!

After trying throughout the day yesterday, and even sending out the iChat blasts to friends to get them to download… I finally got Firefox at midnight last night. I was so frustrated. “Sitting here waiting up to try and get a friggin’ browser I already have…”

Nay. Not. Nill. No. I did NOT already have this browser. If you don’t already have it, go get firefox. Which, in and of itself is great. I mean, really great. Smoother scrolling, a great design, better built-in debugging, one-click bookmarks, the works. Not to mention (until now) a nice redesign of the Firefox site itself. But the new web developer tools and add ons, are just fantastic.

Here’s a short list of my new favorites (this assumes that you already use the staples)

• Stylish – Download this now. Even if you’re not a developer, you want it. I promise. You can download users’ style sheets for various popular sites, and even mix and match various style sheets for the same site, and simply ‘enable’ that stylesheet, so you never have to see the crappy site-specific style again(!!!) This opens up such a huge amount of possibilities not only with browsing the web, but with development. Take CSSZenGarden’s idea, apply that to basically every site out there. If users to your site have this plugin, you can offer them the css file (publically), and simply allow them to customize it themselves, and you never have to think about hosting (or supporting) multiple styles again! Now if we can only get everyone else using Firefox.
• CSS Viewer – Enable this add-on, and you can run your cursor around the screen, and get a nice, full markup of the styles relating to that element. It’s got it’s design flaws (I’d like more specific detail on which classes are related, what is the parent class, what’s the path of parent / child relationships to that element, etc…)
• SpeedDial – This is a fantastic “birds-eye-view” of your choice of grid elements, displaying a cached image of your favorite / most-viewed sites on one page, allowing you to see the changes (or bugs) at regular intervals. Set a shorter cache period and setup SpeedDial as your default blank page, and you’ll be able to monitor your dev sites in one screen, throughout the day. Pretty freakin’ great…. and a few more that I just find really usefull…
• PicLens
• ShowIP
• TotalValidator
• ScreenGrab
• YSlow

Top AJAX toolkits compared (pt 1)

Let me preface this post by saying that I am not a JavaScript programmer. I play with JavaScript. I have used it for nearly 10 years, and have simply never felt the urge to dive in and become a ‘master’ in any sense. However, with lots of sites popping up that are using stunning, cross-browser ajax (eg: netvibes), it have started to grow curious if it’s even necessary for me to learn the language, if there are such tremendous tools out there to do so much now. Having made this start to a journey, I’ve decided to review the ‘top’ (easiest to find in a google search) AJAX libraries / toolkits.

NOTE: If anyone who works with / owns / represents one of the sites listed below, and would like to offer some help on representing your toolkit accurately, feel free to contact me, I’d love to have your help.

I’m sure this is going to take some time, but I figured I’d get the ball rolling and just fill you in as I go. I’m researching the various AJAX frameworks for a project I’ve got coming up, and I realized that the number players in this field is actually growing, and the differences between these players seem to be shrinking. So, by what criteria could I choose the ‘best’ for what I’m doing.

First things first. Let’s identify the big players in the game. (if your favorite framework / toolkit isn’t listed, feel free to shout about it, and I’ll happily take a look). In no particular order.

1. Prototype / Scriptaculous
2. Yahoo UI (YUI)
3. Dojo
4. JQuery
5. MooTools
6. BackBase
7. Google Toolkit
8. mochikit
9. Spry
10. Rico
11. SmartClient
12. AjsJS
13. fleegix
14. Saja
15. qooxdoo
16. zapatec

(just to reiterate, this is not a ranking. I only used an ‘ordered list’ to be able to quickly reference these individually later)

Next, we’ll consider a variety of criteria including:
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Memebrs of the iPhone cult, unite!

I’m an iPhone-using, TechCrunch-reading, Wired-subscribing mellinial geek. There, I said it. I’m a geek. I stray for a while, and focus on music and art. I try my best, but I can’t help it. I’m a nerd. And I’m perfectly fine with it.

So, in the interest of all things nerdy, I’m going to tell you how excited I am about the iPhone 3G. The primary thing that bummed me out about the prospect of Apple releasing a new iPhone, was the notion that i would be ’stuck’ with the old one. The reality is, I’ve been absolutely dependent and addicted to my iPhone since the moment I got it. It’s been absolutely absurd. Embarrassing, sometimes. However, when I heard that the iPhone 3G would be faster, I got excited. Then I thought, “Man. that means I won’t be able to sell my current iPhone to get the new one, ’cause the demand will be so low for this ‘old’ technology, and so high for the ‘new’ one, that I’ll just be stuck.”

Then I came across this post which lists the top 4 reasons current iPhone owners don’t need the upgrade. Primarily, the iPhone 2.0 software will be a free upgrade to all iPhones! That made me feel better. I’ll get the developer SDK, games, and a lot of other cool features. Then I read about 3G, and I was bummed again. Wi-Fi speeds without wi-fi?!?!? How could I possibly live without that?
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Sliding Doors with CSS Sprites in harmony.

More CSS Sprites. This time combined with the ’sliding doors’ technique. I got lots of inspiration from the guys at A List Apart for this, but I thought their examples to be a little more wordy than I really wanted, so I thought I’d write my own. Here’s the working sample of this technique, with my own ugly buttons.

Let’s start with the images themselves.

Here’s ‘left.gif’:

And ‘right.gif’:

Now for the CSS:
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