I do a lot of online reading. Here's a sampling from my Delicious feed.
Massively on "MMObility: The rise of the browser"
I like this article's argument that the browser will dominate as the MMO game distribution platform of the future. I like it, but I don't know if I agree with it. The browser game business is booming, but so is the mobile app business. No surprise that the two are growing in parallel. And I think that's the point the article misses. Devices are changing, and so are the methods of delivery. Maybe the browser completely wins out, or maybe it just wins some piece of the pie. Only time will tell.
Glitch Developers Site
Glitch is a great browser-based 2D platformer MMO I've been watching closely, and playing in both alpha and beta as time has allowed. One of the things I like about Glitch's approach is to blend MMO gameplay with things that I love about the web. For example, there is a web resource (URL) for every object in the game. Now Glitch takes it a step further by publishing an API and a full developer site with iOS and Android SDKs. This is an MMO inviting mashups of its game. Pretty cool stuff. Actually makes me want to play the game even more.
Corey Goldberg: Taking Browser Screenshots With No Display
I've drunk the Selenium2/WebDriver kool-aid since the week I spent at Velocity Conf. The stability compared to the Selenium1/Windmill approach is reason enough, but I especially like the Python bindings. This short post shows some of the power and flexibility of the web driver bindings, and demonstrates taking screenshots via the virtual display.
Chop: Paste code snippets, add notes. Send to nerds.
I found out about this great little pastebin tool from an internal Launchpad mailing list. It really is an awesome tool. The coolest bit is that you can do inline comments on pastes. All in all, a very nice social code snippet sharing tool.
O'Reilly Radar: The iPhone, the Angry Bird and the Pink Elephant
I like the idea of the race to the bottom that the iOS app store is creating. This article explains that well and also explains why this might be bad for the mobile app store craze currently underway.
Don't Play Games With Me! Promises and Pitfalls of Gameful Design
I love this set of slides. Beautiful, inspiring, and a really nice look into the pros and cons of everything going gameful on the web. These slides are easy to follow on their own and are packed with great thinking and research on how (and how not) to make user interactions better with gameful design.
Hands On: With Wii U’s Touchscreen Controller, Nintendo Could Radically Change Games | GameLife |
Nintendo's new high-end graphics game console and controller Wii U has caught my attention. I love the idea of toggling from display on the TV to controller. And Batman Arkham City in this environment sounds amazing. I'm sensing another game console joining the over-crowded game cabinet at my house in 2012.
Superhero Hype: Grant Revealed in X-Men Destiny
I just tweeted that X-Men Destiny looks great. It was a link to this passing across my screen that caused that reaction. I really like the idea of a true character-progression driven X-Men game. If the graphics and mechanics are good, I could see this being a great game.
FavBrowser.com: WebGL running iOS RAGE
This is an impressive demo getting the iOS app RAGE running in a browser via WebGL. Be sure to click through and watch the video. It's impressive and also goes into some of the limitations of WebGL's texture rendering and particle handling.
Cory Doctorow: My new Ubuntu-flavoured ThinkPad is computing heaven
Cory Doctorow has glowing praise for Ubuntu on a Lenovo ThinkPad X220, which he describes as "undramatic, yet graceful."
FunctionSource: WebGL Inspector; The rich debugger you need for WebGL
Pretty cool looking Firebug-like tool for debugging WebGL. I shall have to take a closer look at this soon.
Kottke on Why Stan Lee is the Shakespeare of the 20th century
Kottke draws attention to the similarities between Shakespeare and Stan Lee via comments from Thor director Kenneth Branagh. I was a fan of Thor growing up, especially Walt Simonson's work, but I was skeptical about this movie at first. Only because it's the sort of concept that's so easy to mess up. The more I hear like this, though, the more I really, really, really want to see this film come Friday.
Massively on: Marvel Universe Online will be free-to-play, penned by Bendis
Massively has a great overview of the news from Marvel and Secret Identity Studios' live stream announcements last night concerning the new Marvel Universe MMO. I am very excited about this game. I've made no secret of my love for DCUO, but I was always a Marvel kid growing up, except for my mad Batman love. Just get my folks to cough up those long buried pics of me in superhero costumes as a kid and you'll see where my fan loyalty lies.
I'm glad to see the folks at Secret ID are trying to differentiate themselves from the superhero MMO crowd with F2P and playing as the iconic heroes themselves. Sure, I'm curious as others are about how this will work, but as Jeff Lind notes in the interview, either choice -- play as iconic heroes or as your own -- leaves questions and game design issues. But I'm glad to see someone doing a hero MMO and tackling this side for once. I guess my love for Marvel makes me more excited about playing as the heroes, too.
PS blog on: Update on PlayStation Network and Qriocity
All the cries of "when is PSN gonna be back up" have died down in this cold light of lost user info. Sony is still being extremely ambiguous about whether or not credit card info was gained. And it looks as if we'll be another week without networked PS3 games like DCUO.
Kyle Neath on Product design at GitHub
This is a great piece on how product is developed at GitHub. A nice quote: "We only hire smart people we trust to make our product better. We don't have managers dictating what to work on." Couple that with: "Aren't you hiring smart people who use your product? [...] Doesn't everyone at your company want to make your product better?" and I think you have a bit of the GitHub secret sauce.
Shantanu's Technophilic Musings on Making Kinect Work With PS3
Pretty cool to see a PS3 hooked up to a Kinect sensor. I've never been one to hack on my gaming devices, but being that I have so many now, this makes me want to cross-combine them in interesting ways like this. Maybe one day. (Via Slashdot.)
PyCon 2011 video: Javascript for people who know Python
My team on Launchpad is having to do more with UI, which means more JavaScript that a Python hacker can handle. I'll be passing around this video as it's a pretty good dive in JavaScript for Python hackers. Nothing new here if you're an experienced Python and JavaScript programmer, but I still enjoyed watching it.
Raph's Website » Replay as meditation
I love that Raph compares replaying a game to whittling. This is how he explains why people enjoy replaying games when the outcome is similar with each play. He also goes into a nice riff on the similarities between repetitive play and meditation, which matches my own understanding and experience as a gamer.
Mark Shuttleworth » Blog Archive » Next after Natty?
We have the "O" series name for Ubuntu now -- Oneiric Ocelot. I saw Mark with a dictionary in South Africa last week, and others guessing at what the name might be. And now we have it.
My thoughts on this week’s debate -- Matt Cutts
For those curious about some of the technical details of how Bing has been "copying" Google search results, see this post from Matt. Matt does a nice job of covering the specifics and raising concerns, without coming of snarky at all.
Firefox 5 is Months Away - FavBrowser.com
Hurray, Firefox 4 release likely next month, with Firefox 5 following soon after. I'm guessing competition has ramped up Mozilla development. I'm happy to see things ramp up a bit there, regardless of the reason.
Games Are Great, But We Need To Touch - Ideas Market - WSJ
It's interesting to see the reviews coming in for Jane McGonigal's Reality is Broken. I bought her book and downloaded to my Kindle yesterday, and I will likely start seriously on it this weekend, though I've skimmed it a bit. Seems that reviews, like this one, are obsessing too much on trying to make the point, "yeah, yeah, games are nice for real life but do not play them too much." I can't help but wonder, do we really have to say this? If someone is prone to quitting life and locking herself in the oft cited Mom's basement in order to game and do nothing else, this WJS review isn't going to convince them otherwise. And I seriously doubt there's any danger in McGonigal's book leading us into the Matrix. The only people worried about this are those who don't game enough.
Six Ways to Refuel Your Energy Every Day - Tony Schwartz - Harvard Business Review
mdz shared this via twitter (@mdzimm). Really great advice, and I will continuously try to remind myself of these tips. The last one is always tough for me. Due to the kids getting home roughly the same time I get off work, it's often hard for me to have a clean break or decompressing from work before home life starts. I need to get creative like this with ways to make a cleaner break from work.
Terra Nova: Separating Recession From Trend
A short but interesting post about the value in video games versus traditional media, where "traditional" means TV, film, music. In short, Cataclysm did $132 million in a day. A day! Wow!
Changing how we track Launchpad's bugs, questions and blueprints - Launchpad Blog
We've moved away from the individual Launchpad app projects on the Launchpad team -- i.e. malone, launchpad-code, etc. -- in order to track bugs simply under "launchpad." This is a change affecting how we develop Launchpad itself, not anything to do with other projects on Launchpad. Francis has a nice write up of why we're doing this. Launchpad squads are on the way!
