About two months ago I did one of my HTML5 game development workshops at Microsoft’s NYC office. It was a huge success with over 100 registered attendees. One of the highlights of my workshop was showing people just how easy it is to build an HTML5 game for Win8 in just a few minutes. By leveraging the Impact game framework, it is easy and fun to build a Metro game with very little modification to the core source code. I figured I would go through what I did before the workshop to get Super Resident Raver, a modified version of the game I show people how to build in my workshops and book, running on Win8.
May 5, 2012#
April 27, 2012#
My Adventures Talking About HTML5 Gaming
I’ve just returned from Toronto where I spoke and did a workshop at the “Future. Innovation. Technology. Creation.” (FITC) conference. This marks my second FITC talk and is easily one of the most successful talks I have ever done! Not only did I get to speak about a topic that I am incredibly passionate about, but I ended up with a packed room for both my talk as well as my workshop. My workshop and talk were on my own experiences with HTML5 game development, and I wanted to share some highlights as well as give people my own insight to the future of HTML5 gaming.
April 11, 2012#
Dropbox For Developers
Dropbox has become an indispensable tool for almost everything I do on my computer as well as my mobile devices. Dropbox is also one of the most powerful dev tools I use. One of the best features of using Dropbox is the ability to sync your code projects across multiple computers. In the following post, I will describe my Dropbox setup and go through the pros and cons of using Dropbox to keep all your projects in sync.
April 3, 2012#
Automating Impact Builds With Ant
Impact is one of the most powerful HTML5 game engines out right now, and one I have been spending a lot of time talking about via my book, workshops and even showing off with my recent games. One of the most attractive parts of Impact is just how versatile it is. You can deploy the game to the Web so people can run it in desktop browsers such as Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer, but also to a multitude of different platforms and app stores. In this post, I am going to talk about, not only how I apply my years of enterprise software development automation build skills to my own Impact games, but also show off some great time-saving features of build automation that will help you with any project you are working on.
March 28, 2012#
Room112 – PhoneGap Exploration
Whenever I start to play around with a new technology, platform or framework I usually plan out a small and easy to complete project that tries to address some of features I am most interested in testing out. To vet out PhoneGap I decided to build a simple app called Room112 to keep track of my hotel room number when I travel. This exploration document outlines how I approached architecting my app but also some of the issues I ran into while exploring how PhoneGap works.
March 8, 2012#
Four Days With Microsoft And Win 8
Last week I was in Seattle for a meeting with Microsoft about Windows 8. I felt like I was the only “non-hardcore” Windows developer at this meeting. I met with some of the Win 8 evangelist team, engineers and other attendees. Here are my thoughts about Windows 8 and its appeal to developers looking to make apps for it as well as some of the challenges the new platform faces.
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November 12, 2011#
Game Over: How Adobe Killed Flash
It has been a very interesting week in the Flash world. Who would have known that the biggest deathblow to Flash would have actually come from the company that is responsible for it? After announcing major layoffs, Adobe slowly started revealing their intentions to end Flash Player development on mobile browsers. Adobe tried to message that this was not going to be a big shift in their overall Flash roadmap but yesterday they reveled that Flex is being shelved and turned into an open source project after version 4.6. Make no mistake, Flash is now a dead platform and here is why:
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September 18, 2011#
Windows 8: Fulfilling A 5 Year Old Promise
About 5 years ago I spent over a thousand dollars on a device called the Samsung Q1. It was part of a new group of devices called UMPC (Ultra Mobile PCs). The Q1, and other UMPCs like it, were simple slate devices, without a keyboard, required a pen for input and were around 7-8” inches. They all ran Windows XP, had incredibly weak processors, not enough ram, terrible battery life and were supposed to usher in a new age of tablet computing. It wasn’t until a few days ago that a promise Microsoft made to people like me who bought these UMPCs was actually fulfilled. With the announcement of Windows 8 at Microsoft’s Build conference it looks like we will finally see a new slew of devices that assume the role of the UMP but are powered by an OS that is up to the task. Even better, I have a front row seat to contribute to the success of this platform by creating my own apps and games for it.
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August 19, 2011#
Interviewed By Brad Manderscheid
I was just interviewed by Brad Manderscheid on Google+ today and thought it would be good to repost it here. You can also follow the conversation that followed here.
July 25, 2011#
Getting Started With HTML 5, JavaScript And Canvas
For the past month I have been digging deep into HTML 5, especially building games in JS and Canvas. I have been fighting having to go back to JavaScript, especially since I have grown to fall in love with languages like Java and C#. It wasn’t until I went to Seb Lee-Delisle’s Creative HTML 5/JavaScript workshop here in NYC that my fate was sealed.
