HTML5 Dev Conf
I signed up for this on a whim, and I’m glad I did. I learned about a lot of new fun things out there.
The biggest booth at the show was for SpacePort, which can extract vector art from flash files and render it in SVG and CSS or OpenGL ES. They’ve also ported the Flash AS3 API to JavaScript. This seems aimed at helping Flash developers port their apps to native mobile apps and flashless web browsers.
I attended a panel about Three.js which I’m pretty tempted to use now, despite having already used the lower level features of OpenGL and GLSL before.
I was looking forward to Max Goodman’s panel on procedural audio in JavaScript, but he called in sick. I was still able to get some advice on syncing the audio in Beat Ship, the browser-based rhythm game I started on at last year’s TigJAM. Unfortunately the source code for this was lost when PixieEngine.com was re-architected, but it shouldn’t be too hard to rewrite. This will be my next project.
Speaking of Pixie Engine, I ran into the creators and they insisted I make my experimental game Factor Blaster more like Missile Command. We both agreed that spacial navigation just distracts the player from the real fun of factoring. I think I’ll place the player at the bottom of the screen and have the numbers rain down from above. I’d love to add some more variation in the weapons too. I’d like 2 to be a machine gun, 3 to be a sweep laser, and 5 and 7 could be chain reaction bombs like in Missile Command.
I also ran into Ryan Jarvinen from Eventbrite and it seems we’re both big advocates of the alternative vote. Some time ago, I made a nice web interface for running Condorcet elections with OpenSTV called TopTools. Perhaps I could have it import EventBrite attendee information in case you wanted to run some elections at an event.
I realize that this would serve better as a general purpose election tool than it would for the niche I’d selected for it. Also it needs to be able to display ties, especially when there aren’t enough votes for a definitive winner to be selected. Also I’m a little worried about my choice of doing logins with WebFinger. It seemed like an awesomely simple idea at the time, but I’m sure it’s just gonna scare people away since there are so many issues with everyone’s implementations of it — even google.
