TheNest

How Do You Annoy A Web Developer?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 14:57:00 +0000

What if...

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Levy) — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 20:18:00 +0000

The Doors sang the theme song to Reading Rainbow?
There's a shout out to Monster At The End Of This Book:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBRYsAfchkY

Exquisite Forest

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Levy) — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 18:37:00 +0000

Google and Tate Modern teamed up to produce a collaborative art project that will run for approximately 6 months beginning this week. Commissioned artist have started this forest of animated artwork by planting a "tree", representing an acorn of an animated idea. Collaborators then can add to that seedling, creating more branches as the artwork expands.
I once participated in an evening of collaborative animation which was titled Drinking and Drawing, where anyone who wanted to participate would be given a number of index cards and about 10 minutes to create a sequence based on the last frame of the previous contributor.
This project is much bigger in scope. Once you have collaborated, you can plant your own tree. You don't need to be an animator by training, but you should have an interest in it.

www.exquisiteforest.com

Review of Nexus 7

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Levy) — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 01:01:00 +0000

It's a very robust review, covering a lot of ground, including the new Google Now service which is similar to Siri, but more expansive in scope an is supposed to work alongside your preferences and browsing habits:

http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/29/3125396/google-nexus-7-review

How to Write CSS & JavaScript that Other Producers can Read

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 17:08:00 +0000

Reading other people's code is usually horrible. Make it easier for your fellow producers to edit your code!
Wired Webmonkey: Write Better CSS With 'Idiomatic CSS'

SEO: Response Codes Explained with Pictures

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 15:04:00 +0000

As Kortina knows, I never metaphor I didn't like.

SEO Response Codes explained using the metaphor of a bricks-and-mortar store.

Boing Boing Has a podcast re: apps for kids

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Levy) — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 03:23:00 +0000

http://boingboing.net/tag/appsforkids

4th Floor Table Installation Written Up on Microsoft Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Levy) — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 16:17:00 +0000

The poster calls it one of the best Surface installations to date. Nice!

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/surface/archive/2012/05/30/sesamestreet.aspx

Sesame Street Songs Allegedly Used In Guantanamo Bay Torture

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Levy) — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 12:32:00 +0000

A documentary titled "Songs of War" about Christopher Cerf for Al Jazeera alleges that songs from the show were used to torture Guantanamo Bay inmates.

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/aljazeeraworld/2012/05/201253072152430549.html

Angry Birds

noreply@blogger.com (Vanessa) — Tue, 01 May 2012 15:35:00 +0000

Bringing the digital world to the real world!

http://money.msn.com/money-video/stocks.aspx?vid=d7c7c414-632b-4c60-b51e-b2c861b9678b&from=en-us_msnhp

3D CSS

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Levy) — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 13:49:00 +0000

By dragging the link on the page to your bookmarks bar, you can turn any web page into a pseudo 3D one. Good thought experiment:

http://www.edankwan.com/lab/3dit

Ikea creates and all-in-one entertainment system

noreply@blogger.com (Joey Egger) — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:27:00 +0000

BBC Worldwide Invests in HTML5 Company to Expand Mobile Reach

noreply@blogger.com (Joey Egger) — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 16:40:00 +0000

via Gamasutra

In order to release its games on a wide array of mobile platforms, BBC Worldwide has invested an undisclosed sum in the California-based tech company Spaceport.io, which offers tools to help developers launch games via HTML5.

BBC plans to use Spaceport.io's tech to create new games and apps that will run on the web, mobile devices, as well as connected TVs. The company says that this investment will help it reduce development costs and expand its overall reach.

Over the past several years, BBC Worldwide has released numerous titles based on its popular television franchises. Among the most notable are mobile and downloadable games based on series such as Top Gear and Doctor Who.

IE Showing Signs Of Life

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 16:01:00 +0000

From Wired: Internet Explorer Market Share Surges, as IE 9 Wins Hearts and Minds

Google's Project Glass

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Levy) — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 12:20:00 +0000

Google's latest project is a wearable augmented reality device, bringing their services to the tip of your retina. I'm not sure what such near focus activities will affect the health of the eye, but it seems to be a very obvious direction for AR:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/111626127367496192147/posts

OLPC XO 3.0

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Levy) — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 17:56:00 +0000

This is a good article that goes over the merits of the upcoming OLPC tablet, to debut in the Q4 of 20012. Similar in capability to the Kindle Fire 1GHz/512MB RAM/4 GB storage, this will also feature a high contrast reflective display similar to the OLPC laptop. It will also have a shipping price of 100 USD, a fraction of the cost of an iPad. It is also built to be kid friendly, and can run either Linux Sugar or Android OS. I'd like to learn more about what kind of Flash build it could handle, but this seems like a great affordable device that can be introduced in the communities we want our content to be distibuted:

http://edudemic.com/2012/01/olpc-tablet/

Photoshop CS6 Beta

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Levy) — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 19:29:00 +0000

is available to check out:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/photoshopcs6/

Nice Powers of Ten Presentation

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Levy) — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 21:04:00 +0000

Starting at the middle, from smallest to largest. Very nice!

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120312.html

How to design video games that support good math learning: Level 1

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Levy) — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 20:00:00 +0000

Blog post about developing math games.

http://profkeithdevlin.wordpress.com/2012/01/29/how-to-design-video-games-that-support-good-math-learning-level-1/

Smartphone owners in the U.S. now outnumber their fellow Americans that own a mobile phone that isn't a smartphone

noreply@blogger.com (Joey Egger) — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 14:48:00 +0000

Via Cynopsis Digital

Smartphone owners in the U.S. now outnumber their fellow Americans that own a mobile phone that isn't a smartphone, according to new data from Pew Research. 46% of Americans own a smartphone as of February 2012, marking an 11% jump from the 35% who reported owning such a device in May 2011; meanwhile, only 41% of Americans own a mobile phone that is not a smartphone. This uptick is represented across nearly every major demographic group, including men and women, young and middle-aged adults, urban and rural residents and the wealthy and the less well-off. Overall adoption rates are at 60% for groups such as college graduates, 18-35 year olds and those living in households with an annual income above $75K. Seniors are the only ones lagging behind, with Pew Research finding only 13% of this demographic owning smartphones. With this rise in smartphone ownership, Pew Research also finds a corresponding shift in the types of phones owned by Americans. Specifically, 20% of cellphone owners in the U.S. use Android devices, up from 15% in May 2011; 19% use iPhones, up from 10% in May 2011; and 6% own BlackBerry device, down from 10% since last May.

HTML5 Open Source: Meet Zynga Jukebox

noreply@blogger.com (vegancooking) — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 18:47:00 +0000

not sure if we can add code like this to our games but this could help with the audio issues

via Zynga - http://code.zynga.com/2011/11/html5-open-source-meet-zynga-jukebox/

After revealing Zynga’s first open source projects in HTML and JavaScript, I’m pleased to announce the third addition to our collection: Zynga Jukebox, a high performance sprite-based sound manager for the web.

Zynga Jukebox was formally announced during my keynote at the New Game HTML5 conference in San Francisco today, but here’s some more background on why we set out to create yet another manager on top of HTML5 Audio.

Doing audio in HTML5 is crazy hard — like, trying-to-lick-your-elbow hard. Not a single codec supports all browsers and many browsers and devices come with huge performance bottlenecks when creating new instances of sounds. Then, there’s these weird limitations like on iOS: No multi-channel sound and playback must be activated through a user action (e.g. a touch event). All of this leads to great frustration, in particular if you are trying to make a game. Read: we need it more than anyone else.

In attempt to ease some of the pain, we created the Zynga Jukebox. It uses sound sprites – multiple sounds concatenated into one file – to work around performance and latency issues and abstracts its usage to the developer so you are still dealing with single sounds through the API. It also knows how to work around some of the iOS limitations: By constantly playing back silence, the Jukebox is able to trigger sounds programmatically, even when no user event comes in (you only need to activate it once).

Give it a try. It doesn’t make audio on the web perfect, but it’s the closest we could imagine…for now.

Finally, while all of our plugins are still technically alpha and we haven’t yet gotten around to creating great examples and documentation for each. We believe some are pretty solid: so solid, in fact, that they’re already used in one of our games. Our HTML5 version of Words With Friends on Facebook Mobile includes an early development version of Zynga Jukebox.

January 2012 ComScore Video Metrix

noreply@blogger.com (Joey Egger) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 15:22:00 +0000

via Cynopsis Digital...

According to the January 2012 numbers from comScore's Video Metrix service, the top five U.S. online video content properties in January 2012, in terms of unique video viewers, were: Google websites (152 million), VEVO (51.5 million), Yahoo! Websites (49.2 million), Viacom Digital (48.1) and Facebook (45.1). Overall for January, 181 million U.S. internet users watched nearly 40 billion videos, with the average viewer watching 22.6 hours of online video content. Video Metrix's data for the top U.S. online video ad properties as ranked by video ads viewed found Hulu leading the way with more than 1.4 billion video ad impressions. Adap.tv, the highest among video ad exchanges/networks generated 652 million video ad views. BrightRoll Video Network (598 million), Tremor Video (580 million) and Specific Media (397 million) rounded out the top five. Overall for the month, Americans viewed 5.6 billion video ads. In addition, comScore finds that video ads reached 47% of the total U.S. population an average of 38 times during the month. Among the other notable findings:

84.4% of the U.S. internet audience watched online video.
The length of an average online video was 6.1 minutes, while the average online video ad was 0.4 minutes.
Video ads accounted for 12.2% of all videos viewed and 0.9% of all minutes spent watching videos on the web.

3D Effects in... CSS?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:10:00 +0000

VERY interesting.
Webmonkey at Wired.com: Visually Stunning Redesign Showcases the 3-D Power of CSS

Visit acko.net using Chrome (not Firefox or IE) and scroll down. I love it.

Oh The Places You'll Go

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Levy) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:39:00 +0000

Because someone had to mashup Dr. Seuss with hipsters at Burning Man.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahv_1IS7SiE

IE6: Officially Dead.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:25:00 +0000

About time.

Microsoft Bids Farewell to IE 6 as U.S. Use Drops Below 1 Percent

Here's a breakdown of our own visits by Browser over the past 30 days.