I’m still a firm believer that technology will make a programmer out of us all due to the “standing on the shoulders of geeks” principal (discussed here), this is where the collective intelligence/skillset of web users as a whole is easily leveraged by those less able through the creation of modularised cloud-based tools and massive simplification of those tools. It’s nice to see those steps are being made here by the Ubiquity plug-in for Firefox, from Mozilla Labs....

Over the weekend I received a copy of the first issue of Unity Developer Magazine, thanks to Charles Hinshaw. I had high hopes for this magazine, largely because Unity has an incredibly vibrant community of developers and artists. I was not at all disappointed. The magazine contains a variety of features, including an in depth look at a big budget Edutainment game “Wolfquest”, incredible artwork created in Unity itself, an illustrated introduction to vectors, A* Pathfinding, creating dashboard widgets and a look at some of the hottest Unity productions from a selection of studios and independents....

Like many other Flash devs I’ve been following the discussions surrounding the ECMAScript 4 decisions and the Harmony project quite closely. There are a few bloggers out there that appear to be stating that ActionScript will become divorced from the standards. To be honest only Adobe can decide that, but either way, that’s only half the story. In particular, it does not mean that ActionScript will not be able to inter-op, and that’s key…...

I just caught this site via the blog of Iain Lobb (head of interactive at Bloc Media) who commented on my last post. It’s an incredibly slick site developed using the Great White branch of Papervision3D. The site is (for) a TV and online cartoon series, providing a nice cross media experience. The main things that stood out for me were the production quality of the games and the audio which is very high quality and just as importantly, very well integrated....

I just visited the (new?) JavaFX site in order to keep up to date on how the new kid to the Flash/Silverlight/”Rich” block was doing, and I was presented with an interesting site indeed. Make sure to click some of the “Resource” links on the right to get the full experience. The whole thing is built in HTML and JavaScript, with the odd Quicktime player for good measure. Unfortunately the site creeks along at 100% CPU with jerky transitions, ugly styling and flickering madness as the browser can’t figure out what to render, with Quicktime movie’s and HTML Divs strobing in and out of existence as you drag panels around....

I’ve been using Google Docs and Reader for a long time now. Reader is the only RSS aggregator that lets me whizz through hundreds of feeds fast enough to keep up to date and from various devices (tried feedburner and newsgator). Docs made it easy to share any document, presentation, todo list with a friend in 2 clicks, and now Docs and Reader have offline support (Google Gears) the worry about not having net access at any point is gone....

What a great idea from Flash on the Beach, there are now 5 three day conference passes are up for grabs on eBay, the starting price just £1. It will be interesting to see how much these end up going for. Whoever wins, I’ll see you there! Ticket 1 Ticket 2 Ticket 3 Ticket 4 Ticket 5

A huge challenge when developing web sites for mobile phones, either as a separate entity, or as a gracefully degraded version of the “desktop” version, is sniffing just what features the device has. This might include support for XHTML, JavaScript 1.5, Flash Lite (standalone or embedded in a page) and so on. I just caught a post on the Flash Lite Google Group regarding a new site, handsetdetection.com, which provides a free API for sniffing over 7000 devices....

Unity 3D, a high-end game development tool for web, desktop and soon the iPhone has announced they are now an official middleware provider for Wii. From the site: Unity’s game engine allows developers to create, modify and iterate on Wii game functionality with the following features: Live Preview: The play button allows developers to instantly preview their game inside the authoring environment exactly as it currently exists, regardless of the development phase....

I just received a link to The Eco Zoo site and quite honestly this is a step above what we might normally expect from a web site. Using Papervision a custom 3D engine in a slick fashion, switching between 3D environments, the tree/world and the pop-up book specifically, the site explores some exotic creatures. There’s a lot of attention to detail throughout, from the butterflies fluttering around the tree and the simulated cloth to the leaves at the top blowing away and the pop-up book pages which you can rotate around and discover the artist has even taken the time to draw the reverse of the characters in the scene....