As usual I am slow to write about such things. So last week Adobe fired hundreds of people and announced that they are giving up on Flash for mobile browsers. There is already much written about it. Lot of  “Flash is dead” buzz on tech sites which sounds to me like an ill informed. Some closer to Adobe people, who actually work in RIA, have a lot more sane views on the question. Here, here and here among the others.

My views and reactions

My first reaction was “Well, now Flash as we know it is dead”. Or more precisely it got a terminal illness. On other side what exactly changed? Right now really nothing. Flash was not really used on Android browsers.

So what changed is promise. Before, may be somewhat unofficially Flash had a “Write once,  run everywhere” promise. You could do desktop, browser, mobile apps with it. But now… Even though flash was not really used on mobile browsers it was somewhat there. Now promise is no more. And it is very important for future prospects. And it probably will undermine demand for Flash from marketing sources.

Mobile killed web

Reading posts and comments around this Adobe move I was trying to gather up things that happened since iPhone came out. And it seems to me that its not only about  iOS killing Flash. Its about mobile revolution fragmenting the web.

Simple example are popular web services. How many versions of their interfaces there are? Up to five. Web version for desktop and for mobile. And native versions for desktop, iOS and Android. Though native desktop app is a rare beast. On other hand on mobile web version may not be rare but its rarely used if native app exists. For one thing with app you do not need to login, app remembers tour credentials.

Some even prophesying that mobile web is dead, people prefer app stores and native apps instead. And for good reasons.  HTML5 if far from being able to compete with full-blown apps experience.

Right tool for the job

One trend that is stable among big Flash developers is to say “right tool for the job” and “differentiate yourself by learning new stuff”. In a way what they say is that Flash is becoming a more niche thing and if you want to have many jobs and projects to pick from you better to expand your skills and tools in to other niches as well.

I started to learn both HTML/JS/CSS and Flash some 8 years ago. Made few ugly sites in HTML, made few small toys on Flash and one ugly site. And started to do more and more with Flash. Why? It could a lot more, it was a lot easier and more consistent too. It was fun. So I picked Flash because it was easier, more fun, and it was a profession with a lot less competition at least locally while there was demand. But even then Flash was a niche tool. But its niche was and still is cool. It was all about animations, flashy interfaces, multimedia rich tools in a browser, games, interactive and generative art in browser like a demoscene. So by picking this I was in a way filtering what kind of work will come my way, and this kind of work felt a lot more fun and interesting then making some internet shops and usual visit card text/image sites. I also loved web, open, without gatekeepers, with lot of opportunities on making something.

Now after 8 years not much have changed, I would rather say that demand for Flash even boomed over last years but in realm of social games. And now checking for available works for Flash developers it feels like 70% or more are social games related. While other 30% are marketing related.

For over a year I was starting to feel that Flash niche stops to be that fun for me and I want to be able to do more. Slowly started to learn other web technologies. After a year, and now with announcement of Adobe… I must say that for me nothing changed in standard web technology world. HTML/CSS/JS improved a lot. I at last can make imageless pretty looking sites and interfaces. It feels good. But when it comes to actually making a complete rich app with data input/output, sounds, complex interactions and consistently with good performance across all browsers… Its still the same pain it was years ago or so it seems to me…

So for me, more exploration is on side of servers and simple sites, for rich app experience in browser Flash was and will  be for near years my tool for the job.

But that’s years. Probably few. What’s then? I do feel a need to expand my experience as a professional developer. And I see two choices before me. One I talked about above, as web developer. Another one I see is as mobile app developer, aether native or reusing my Flash skills and doing AIR apps.

As I said above, I picked Flash because it was fun and works coming my way were fun with it. As I see future of web development for me right now seems like not fun. At least rich apps future. Flash will be fading away everywhere where HTML5 can pick up, but it will be usual HTML hell of consistency, performance, missing features and hacking all around it. It will be a work with unfinished product. It seems to me its still too early to seriously get in to the HTML5.

While if we speak about native mobile apps… It seems to me that out of everything that happens in software development world right now mobile apps are most fun. An uncharted waters with many interesting possibilities. Many also prophesying that mobile is future of computing and that desktop is dead. Anyways, this market is poised to grow. So fun possibilities in growing market.

Yet it is a world with gatekeepers, world attached to success of certain firms like Apple and Google and what they do. Now by picking technology like HTML5 or Flash you already become somewhat dependent. Web standards while better still are dependent on all major players decisions too. Just look at IE, WebGL, WebM cases. But on mobile platforms you are even more dependent,  just remember Apple change of rules with 30% cut from in app purchases that put many apps in to a tricky position. Like Amazon…

Conclusions

•  Flash is not dead, it will stay alive as long as HTML5 will not pick up on all features Flash has, and it is long from it, 2 years at best, 10 at worst(I hope it will be faster), even then Flash may still manage to somehow stay ahead. So Flash seems to me still like a best option for cross platform RIA, especially with possibility to publish AIR apps in to iOS and Android markets.
• There is no single tool to satisfy all use cases. I would like to do it all, mobile apps, web apps, explore all possibilities, yet HTML5 is not ready, Flash has it holes and uses cases and native apps usually are even more niche and attached to platforms.

So I am confused. There is no single job out there that can provide you with broad enough possibilities, picking one feels wrong, trying to do it all feels wrong too.

So it is a stormy time with unclear horizon and without any safe cove to drop an anchor in to wait out. And I don’t see other options then to jump around, trying different new things, finding junior jobs in mobile or web to broaden skills, still doing Flash, and hoping that future will become more clear soon.

Continuation to previous post.

Update

Third batch of lectures and homework’s is out for Stanford AI-Course and I just updated the page and data for it.

Changes:

1. Switched captions layout from list to tables, now does not look broken on smaller screens
2. Added link to about, so far just my previous blog post about this(yeah, I am lazy to make a separate about page for it
3. Added update date to data, shown at the top of the page now

Remaining issues:

1. No iOS support, not planed too, I am under impression(which may be false) that its too much hassle to provide Flash-less alternative to YouTube JS API right now.
2. Broken under Android, was not intended for use on small screen anyways, not fixing it too

Source code

Cut to the chase. Here is the source code at GitHub. Its intended mostly for those who want to make similar thing for other YouTube based courses or make an alternative language version(English only now).

And its my first use of GitHub so “Hello World”

Anyways, most part of last week and weekend were taken by:

1. Trying to make PHP scrapper for subs which failed
2. Remaking my Flash/AS3 code in to AIR app project so that people could work with it(had it in fla Flash authoring format before which worked well only in debugging environment)
3. Formatting and adding comments to source code

Source code is published under MIT license, use it however you like but I will be thankful for mentioning where it came from

P.S Any help with PHP script, or more precisely, finding a way to download captions for YouTube videos trough PHP is welcome.

Introduction

So, last week Stanford ai-class has started.

Immediately found out that not being able to read  question for quizzes in text was a problem. And clicking trough video to see it in the subs was not that fun aether. Immediately got an idea to fix that for myself and make an exercise in HTML/JS/CSS out of it (I am kind of slowly learning it all trough small projects like this for last year).

Try number one: bookmarklet

First, I remembered of bookmarklets. Small javascripts saved as a bookmark which you can “execute” inside any page. Developers often put in some small useful codes to inject in to pages for analysis  or some other reasons.

After checking ai-class page and requests found out from where player gets subs. Whole link is large and contains lot of unnecessary parameters, experimenting with it  shrunk it down to smaller size. And here how it looks.

Then googled around a little for ways to make a cross domain request from JavaScript. Thing is that for security reasons in JavaScript making such requests is prohibited while for Flash a cross domain policy exists that allows domain owners to specify who can gain access. Found out that there is a partial workaround trough Yahoo! YQL.

In the end I failed with that idea as there is no way to really figure out which video is playing right now on ai-class site. At least trough JS/HTML. May be it is possible to somehow query YouTube player for that.

P.S Killed lot of time on hacking 3 levels of escaping of quotes. First quotes were for anchor href attribute in which bookmarklet code goes. Then quotes inside that code. And third quotes level in that YQL request I hate escaping!

Try number two: php curl

Next quick try was to test PHP curl and see if I can retrieve subs from those urls on server side and make a page out of it. Tried, failed, after lot of fighting with JS on previous step gave up fast. And I don’t have idea how to “debug” curl http requests on server side anyways.

Try number three: Flash local app

Well after some fighting with JS and PHP I fall back to dark side I am Flash developer for last 5 years soo… Something like an hour and I got this:

Just an app where I paste link to AI-Course video and get their subs formatted for reading.

Until homework started this was enough for me.

Try number 4: YouTube JS Api + XML

While doing home works I realized that only text for current video is not enough. Seeing people making lecture notes helped that realization. So I needed ability to get all subs together and search trough them. But wait, text is not enough. Jumping to other videos I need to quickly refresh my knowledge is a “must” too.

That’s how idea started to form, I rewrite my app to take in all videos and subs for them. Output it in one XML. Use it as data source for a page. And add YouTube player controlled from JavaScript  to the mix.

First things I went to check was how to get list of ai-class lectures automatically. I am a programmer and for me doing copypasting job is a disgrace. I better write a script to do it for me Poked around Zen GData library for PHP and its YouTube API. Turned out it was not so good for what I needed and there was easier way just trough links like this. Sadly it only lists public videos, so no homework’s. And also order is mixed, ended up parsing video names for ordering. Also turned out that only video owner can get subs trough their API So my hacky way of spoofing player requests seems to be the only way.

Anyways, rewrote my Flash app to get all videos from there, sort them, get subs for each trough old method and output an XML like this. Also ended up adding homework video ids by hand.

And then started making site:

• Made a PHP page with YouTube player and scripts to control it. Fast and easy.
• Used SimpleXML in PHP to parse XML and output a list of lectures with subs. Easy again.
•  And then part I don’t like about current standard web development came, layout trough CSS. It got lot better in last 5 years but its still feels like hacking around achieving what you need trough not intuitive means. That’s why Flash won me over 7 years ago

P.S I actually love CSS selectors idea, just layout part feels broken. And I love jQuery for bringing selectors to JS.

Result

And here is the result:

• You can open or close lectures separately. Or close/open them all together.
• You can read whole transcripts of lectures and search trough them trough standard browser means.
• And you can click on button to the right of each line to jump to that video on that moment. Magic!

There are still some problems though:

• Firstly, using lists for layout here seems to be a bad idea. Should have used table with two columns instead. Will try soon.
• There are some issues under Mac/Safari with referencing YouTube Player. As I am under winds can try stuff only blindly.
• And script for making an XML still is in Flash/AS3, will need to spend some time trying to port it to PHP, not sure it will work.

Source code

Ok, you can read more about source code in next post or go straight to GitHub repository where it is.

Actually it was yesterday, read about it on Google+ and already posted on Facebook about some of this.

Download Flash 11 here.

Check out Alternative Demos here.

But news that struck me most were this. Epic Games is ready to release support of Unreal Engine 3 for Flash platform. And they showed Unreal Tournament 3  working in Flash at Adobe Max 2011. Ouh boy what a year it will be for browser games. Unity shared a sneak peak recently too, and now Unreal Engine.

Flash is well posed to become a console of the web but I have hard time figuring out how it all will play out. We still have Flash agnostic iOS, not all devices will work well with this, we still have traffic bottlenecks. Years back it was considered useless publishing a game ove 10Mb in size. Today? May be over 60mb is useless? We will see but considering that modern games rarely take less then a gigabyte of space and some up to a dozen of gigabytes, it will be interesting to see how developers work around this

P.S Also turns out there already is a game using Flash 11 on Facebook. Its actually a re-release of older game developed on Java called Battle Punks.

Something like a month ago read that this year Standford University Professors behind their AI introduction course are planing to run a free online version  with video lectures, quizzes, homeworks and exam. As of today registration to this course is open. I am in. Are you?

After registering to Google+ I started to compare it to Facebook and it got me thinking on why I never really liked Facebook. Seems part of it is that some brands have a personality for me. And here decided to share personality I feel behind some of the brands.

Apple

Obviously one of brands with biggest personality I did not got involved with them until iPhone 3G, but after few months understood that its not my kind of product and firm. Finally switched recently.

Anyways my perception of them as a personality is “religious messiah“. Why? Well here is a list:

• Their keynotes remind me of those religious events, lot of emotion, tasty words and such.
• Same with their shops openings and design.
• And another obvious reason is Steve Jobs, I guess no comments are needed. Well just check that.

But that’s all things I don’t care much about, I mean I bought a phone and forgot about it right? Well no, sadly Apple reminds of religious organization in some other ways that do touch me.

• They handle problems and issues in similar to church way, denial and hiding(though I guess it is about anyone oversensitive of his reputation and public image).
• They want to make world simple for people by deciding what’s good and what’s bad for them, same as morals in religious books to some extent.

In the end I disrespect such things and even though I do find their hardware and to some extent software to be of good quality.

Facebook

I would call Facebook a troubled teenager. One who lacks tact, is stalkerish and jealous. And here is why:

• Almost any change and new feature and policy change  they roll out, they miscalculate with default privacy settings which feels as if they overreach. As if they invade your privacy and being young did not learn a tact of how to behave yet.
• Of course Mark Zuckerberg himself adds to this giving his past of young rebellious hacker.
• They also are jealous of their friends not allowing people to leave to other party and take their friend with them.

All this adds to uncertainty in that brand… Who knows what weird thing they will pull off next.

Google

As for this brand, I must say that until now I did not think or feel of it much in that sense. Google products always were just products that worked well, I never felt personality behind any Google product. They were just products and tools that were giving all choice and information to me. Not filtering, censoring, deciding etc. Also they always were a many headed hydra. Most of their products were weakly tied so you could use them separately or together. Not something I could say about Apple or Microsoft who try to tie their products together…

The only thing I ever felt behind Google in press that they felt like geeky idealists. But for now they were able to allow them selves this. I wonder if it will continue as Google tries to reinvent themselves, become less experimenting and tying their products together around same account system and Google+.  So may be they will show some personality soon. Hope they will not.

Other brands and personalities

Guess that’s it, do you feel any personality behind these brands or others? Feel free to comment and share that

So, three days ago I got an invite to Google+

I already heard about its roll out before, and actually was anticipating when deciding where to upload photos for public sharing (taken by my new Android Phone which is a separate story). Facebook is not public enough, I want to leave my DeviantArt account for Flash stuff mostly etc etc. So I went for Google Picasa app to organize my photos and upload some to Picasa Web Albums. Little bit more about it later.

What Google+ is

In short I would say that Google+ is holy union of  Twitter+Blog+Facebook. Why? There is written much about various feature of Google+ on the wen but I will stop at those who appeal to me:

• Privacy and visibility. Google+ has a built in people grouping called Circles which servers two purposes. Filtering network content by Circles. And filtering visibility of content you publish by Circles who will see this content. Second purpose allows you to both leave personal messages, share things with family, or share with anybody. In this sense it is more or less similar to Facebook. But Google+ has a broader visibility called “Public” which is accessible to whole Internet. And it is a Twitter/Blog like improvement over a Facebook that I always lacked. In these sense while Facebook is walled off and feeds on the web Google+ allows to give back to the web. It is a very significant and key feature to me.
•   Asynchronous relationships. While Facebook allows only friends status, Circles are asynchronous. Someone can add you to their Circle, but you may not add him. What it means? He will “follow” your public posts but will not see posts you made for your circles. So it allows broadcasting relationship. Facebook allows this trough Pages though.
• +1 a Facebook “like” competitor Google rolled out earlier. Now it gains a lot more sense for users to use as it is a fast small sharing of what you liked. So now users have reasons to do it. Now I do, while before I was not doing it.
• Authorship. Google raised a playing field around content author marking. Now recognized authors behind content are shown in Google search results. I think it can have a pretty big consequences for accountability of content. Now you can go and see contents author public account on Google+, potentially see his interests, employers, bias
• HangOut – a much mentioned feature based on a google video plugin. Managed to get a taste of it only yesterday. Some may call it a SkyPe killer but I don’t. It is an up to 10 people video chat app in a browser. My experience with it I could be put in short like “SkyPe made fun”. After it SkyPe feels like a strict, uptight business meeting application. I don’t know what Google did on usability(and I will need to investigate it later) but HangOut feels light, fast, and… fun… It feels like a party at friends place, you just jump in, start discussing, sharing, watching synchronized(rewinding and video itself) youtube video, jump out. Then jump in again. So, HangOut is not a SkyPe killer. They are different. You can’t use HangOut for some things you use SkyPe for and reverse is also true.
• Gorgeous public photo galleries. I did mention it above. Here are some photos taken by my SGS2 android phone. Not big implications with this feature, just best looking galleries I seen so far in social networks. Have a suspicion that it is Microsoft inspired as looks similar to Windows Phone 7 interface. But I guess Microsoft was inspired by some sites too.

I think those are first things that come to mind after using Google+ for few days. I guess you can already see how with “public for web” posts it serves as twitter and blog, while with privacy and Circles it serves as a Facebook.

What Google+ can become

I talked about things on the surface. But some linger in the future or under the surface. It seems to me that with this move Google has chances of making internet truly social in a way Facebook never could  because of its more closed nature. Google+ gives back to the web. Also Google now can use +1 and authorship to effect search results and rankings. Which can solve some of Google search quality problems. I do hope though that they will allow turning +1 effect on and off to get “unbiased” results.

Also trough same +1 Google gets their hands on one of most crucial things for recommendations. Lists of things people like. Now Google can start providing similarity browsing and recommendations on all fronts. I do think that +1 in such context is the most important feature for Google, and us. Its a feedback we are giving to the Google so that it can improve its offering to us.

Problems

Nothing is perfect so here we go:

• Its little bit confusing. Already seen people who are very computer savvy misunderstanding how asynchronous part of Circles work. What will your granny understand then?
• Privacy control is not fine grained enough. Like two examples from my experience. I post a public photo for web to see, and friend or even girlfriend posts a personal joke for example. Now whole world sees it. Why? Because comments inherit privacy status from parent post. So you are ending up with a choice of “too public” and “too censored” sometimes. Another example are people in your circles. You can choose what circles are shown(all or say celebrities you follow) and how public it is(only your family or whole world?). But you can’t make it so that whole world sees people you follow while your family sees all. And there are many other such small but very significant privacy control issues. Hope they will fix them. I sure am sending them feedback on all occasions BTW their feed back is awesome, never seen anything like this.
• There is also one two sided problem, dependency or coupling. One of biggest advantages over other firms Google always had is that its a multiheaded hydra. All projects drift independently not hurting and rarely improving each other. Well it started to change a little before but now it clearly comes to an end as Google+ seems to be posed to bring it all together. And some of us know how well it works for Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple. They ruin separate projects and user experience to tie  down their offering together, locking they users to use them together. I really hope it is not a fate that awaits Google and all its users. Though I already heard of bad consequences of this for some people. Mostly on a side of Google merging all kind of accounts across all its products in to one account.

There is more of course, but service is only rolling out and I hope they are working on a clock of addressing it as I think Google+ has a big big potential. So far my feelings are similar to Google Wave roll out. I am very excited and pumped up as I never really liked Facebook, and do like Google+ a lot. But there is a crucial difference with Wave and Google+ for me. Wave was all cool and hypish as is Google+, but with Wave I entered few times, played with it and rarely returned since. Google+? I am using it each day now, publishing photos, cross posting from Facebook, started using +1, and am working on adding some of Google+ related feature to my blog and page. So, my use of it differs a lot, hope Google+ future will differ a lot too. So far there are claims that they already reaching 20 millions.

Over last months of 2010 I was coming to realization that I want to be able not only to make multimedia Flash apps in web but also build HTML pages and services around them. So decided to start slowly learning some. Also with HTML5 making core web stack more and more potent it would make me more prepared for challenges where HTML5 will be a better choice then Flash for rich internet applications.

Not that I don’t know or did not know some. I have basic knowledge of HTML/CSS/JS/PHP/MySQL. Kind of standard stack used today for various cases. But here my knowledge is gather from various small cases and web examples. Probably only part of it where I did get some formal education is relational data bases. What I wanted was to broaden my knowledge in all this.

Asking friends for ideas about good books to start from I was often asked “why books?”. Today you can learn anything from the web, thousands of examples, tutorials and documentation sites and active developer communities allow anyone to learn to program anything.

Thing is that I find it to be a bad way to start. Tutorials and examples often concentrate on solving something specific, are not always made with big picture in mind or sometimes even made badly and teach you bad things. I prefer to start from some book that give a broad and not deep view, showing how it is meant to be done without going too deep in to the details(details I will dig out later if I will need). I need this to get some ground under my feet from where I can start. And then explore the web myself knowing for what to look, what’s good and what’s not so good etc etc.

For starters I picked a little bit unusual direction As I mentioned I more or less know PHP and I wanted to try something new. Also for some time I was curious about Google App Engine. Pocking around GAE I found that probably best languages for that platform right now are Python and Java. Well I knew Java years back and don’t want to return. So I went in direction of Python.

In last December I was ordering some books from Amazon and ended up ordering 3 books on web technologies.

Google App Engine

First book from those I started to read was specifically about Google App Engine. This book covers whole GAE platform as far as I can tell. On programming part it includes both Python and Java specifics, classes and code examples. It helps you trough your first Google App Engine application. Big part of it is Data Store. Then it comes trough various other features of GAE like memory cache, google account integration apis, various other built in apis.

For me most interesting part was Data Store. I am pretty familiar with relational databases and ideas behind them and was always curious what Data Store is, how it works, where better to use it and this books gives pretty good overview on that side. Actually something like 1/3 of this book is about Data Store related stuff.

Some interesting things about App Engine. It was designed with “return answer as fast as possible”  ideology for rich web apps. One related to that interesting feature is that app can return result first and then start working on updating data, indexes etc. I guess that possible to do with any stack but I never looked on it from that optimization point.

As far as Data Store goes it reminds me of simple Object Orientated Database. It basically stores entities by unique keys that may have properties and something like classes forced by code. Also Data Store allows building indexes to run queries on some of the property types. As far as I can say there are 3 significant differences from SQL database:

• Query language is simple, does not allow joins and some types of queries that need calculations
• You can retrieve entities not trough queries but directly if you know their unique keys, it is lot faster then trough query
• It is possible to store an array as entity property, it also allows running queries that target content of arrays so you can get entities who have some kind of values in their array typed property, you can store keys in such array making kind of Object Orientated version of one to many relationship between entities

Another thing is that keys are constructed in a way where first part of key is application ID, and you don’t even see it, which means that each app can only get access  to entities it has created. Can’t access other apps data directly. Also there are limitations on how many entities you can access at once which along with other GQL limitations makes GAE a bad platform for solutions that for example need t work with large amount of data providing statistical info on it.

I guess that would be it on that book. Overall it gives good overview for GAE providing a good start point if you want to know what GAE can and can not do.

CSS Mastery

Another topic I was curious about but never was really getting to know it better was CSS.

Basically its something I knew what it was for but did not knew general ideas behind it and how it is really meant to be used. This book claims to be a book for those who have been using CSS for some time but don’t feel they are experts yet. Or people with basic knowledge of CSS. After reading this book I must say that its rather a book for starters. It rather teaches clean and simple CSS/HTML showing where common pitfalls are and all.

This books covers essential parts of CSS, selectors, techniques of layout, advanced CSS3 features and how to do something like that in CSS2.1 using old methods and tricks.

I think best part of this books is that it teaches how it should be done and why. Why HTML part of pages should be designed as meaning and structure while all styling should go in to CSS. Author adds small examples from his experience which make it pretty clear why it should be like that.  Or another thing is how using hacking to fix problems is a bad idea as problems are fixed as browsers are updated. So your hacky fix now becomes a bug.

Some 7 years ago coming from Java/C/Pascal background I started to dig in to HTML/CSS/JS and Flash. Flash slowly win me over. It was a way to develop Apps while HTML seemed like way to developer styled text pages along with a bonus of serious cross browser inconsistencies/bugs and limitations. Over these 7 years things seemed to improve especially on JS/CSS front.

Sadly coming from Flash I still find that even CSS3 is insufficient to style things cleanly. Firstly today style is not only about static visuals. Its about animations, reaction to user actions, its about visual behavior of interfaces. Now CSS3 includes animations but that’s not enough. I think big problem is  that you can’t reference values in CSS. For example one of examples in the book shows how to make 3 text columns to be of one dynamic height. Thing is that you can have them aether of static height or they all will scale according to size of text inside them. As you can’t reference values in CSS what author proposes is to make all columns of large height, then use container of those columns in “hakcy” way which resizes according its content actual size. Now container is of size of highest column. And now use overflow property to cut out unnecessary height of columns. Of course such trick is possible only with simple column style. Now then all I wanted is to make 3 columns to share same dynamic size. And I end up with doing lot of trickery to get a limited solution. This kind of lets me down…

Another example is vertical content centering on page. Solution looks pretty clear but is limited too. Just make your content top padding 50% which will move its top side to center of page. And then, with different technique, move content up by half of its height. Yay it is centered. Sounds even intuitive and logical in idea. But you can’t target values in CSS. So you can’t target its own height in position style. So you can’t center object vertically if it has dynamic size in HTML/CSS… Or at least it seems so.

Well anyways this all is CSS problems. This books does good work communicating good and correct way of dividing content and style of your HTML/CSS pages. I guess many HTML/CSS problems can be solved with JSS/jQuery filling in position of visual and other behavior for HTML/JS/CSS at least for now.

Python Web Development with Django

Another book I only just started to read is this one. I thought that it is a good idea to learn not PHP/Python language directly for web development(as that I can do myself). What I wanted to learn is how to develop good web solutions too. How to architect your engine, authentication, user content, HTML output components etc. I wanted to know best practices in how to develop your engine/framework for web site building. And what’s a better way then learning some framework and seeing how they done things there.

Another thing with Python books is that Python is a language used for broad number of things. While PHP is mostly used for web development Python started elsewhere as general purpose language like C. As a result majority of books don’t cover Python use as web development language almost at all. And thus majority of those books are of no interest for me in current situation. For that reason picking Python based web development framework book seemed like a good idea too.

Now first chapters of this book gives incremental introduction to Python first which is perfect I knew for a while that Python used spaces and new lines as part of its syntax instead of various braces. I always was finding that it is both good and bad. Good that everyone writes in same style as it is enforced trough syntax, also makes language less bloated with special symbols and more readable. Sadly in some cases it also makes language less readable as you can’t arbitrary style some part of code for better readability.

I just only started this book but so far I must say I really like some features of Python. They make language a lot smaller when performing task with array for example. Here are few interesting examples:

• string[1] – like in any other language it returns strings second character
• string[-1] – here good things start, it returns strings last character, so if index in [] is less then 0 array length is added
• string[:1] – now what? Turns out that Python extended this operator to allow ranges. In this case it will return first two characters of this string.
• string[1:3] – now this is full syntax returning second, third and fourth symbols in the string.
• string[1:] – and this will return whole string without first character

Anyways I have still much to read from this one so no more comments on it so far.

Other books and some practice

Basically this is it from this book order but there are two more I would like to buy. One on JavaScript/jQuery and one on some PHP framework to improve my knowledge in those directions. Also I have few test projects planed to try and use these technologies. After reading book on CSS I already updated homepage a little(here how it looked before), planing to do more work later on it. Also planing to try and do two projects for practice on GAE later.

Just bought one Humble Indie Bundle 2 for my self. And two as gifts for later. I already have Cortext Command but I always wanted to buy/play Osmos and Braid but never was getting my self to but them. Thus Humble Indie Bundle was a hard offer to resist Revenge of the Titans seems good addition too

Open game development

Things that Wolfire do interest me a lot. I was thinking for a while(few years) about how AAA games industry and often indies prefer to stay at a distance from their clients. For AAA industry it often feels as if you are facing a faceless giant that does not see, care or bother with you. For that reason I slowly start to pay them with same disrespect. They may make good games but it feels like some large soulless machine spiting out stuff for consumption… Something that makes me feel bad about the purchase.

For few years I was thinking about various ways and business models that would make game development closer to the people where customers know what’s behind the scene, can influence, interact and engage with development and developers while supporting them in various ways be it testing, ideas sharing and crowd funding.

And Wolfire with their Overgrowth are trying to do just that. Good to see such developments. Humble indie bundle initiatives Wolfire made are interesting in same sense though probably not exactly what I want. But still good.

Interesting features of HIB

Here are things I find to be brilliant about Humble indie bundle:

• Allowing people to choose their own price is a jewel here but it is hard to foresee all the cases where developers loose or earn money with such an offer, but it definitely is a buzz generating part of this
• EFF and Child’s play charity are part of this, but even more important that project allows users to choose what proportions of payment go to what. This I think brings more meaning in to the purchase by making users to make a choice. Now it is not meter of pure consumption. As with amount of price here user makes a choice about who he is and what he wants in various dimensions. I think it engages user more with action of purchase making him more aware of what goes where.
• Stats of average price given by OS platform. It is interesting in many ways. For example you can see that Linux users pay twice as much then Windows users and Max is in a middle. And you can see proportion of platforms. That actually shows that Windows market is bigger in numbers but almost equal in money to Linux here Interesting observation considering AAA companies prefer to say “There is no money to be had on Linux market”, yeah right… If you do not try then yeah there is not money to be had. Another interesting thing about this is that it provides a base point and forces user to answer a question of who he is. Are you cheap? Are you generous? Are you average and just like majority of people?
• Then there is top 10 contributors top. This one partially works like a previous adding moral and competitive motivation for users to pay more but this time I see what I hoped to see with first HIB. Advertisers. At the moment 3 out of 10 top payers are advertising something paying the project together something like 2k$. Not not that much I guess but I think there is promise in that idea.
• Also majority of games are selling for a while. Hype already ended for them. As I mentioned I was thinking but not bringing myself to buy some of those and basically my money was money they would not get otherwise.
• They picked a right time to do this in combo with gift option. As I mentioned I bought few copies as gifts as well.
• There is number of less significant things, no DRM, probably a world wide release, digital download being available for a while etc

There are of course some things that bother me a little:

• Bundle version bothers me a little, last time I had 50%+ of games, that was alienating me to not participate or motivate to lower a price as I payed one already for some of them. And low price because of that may lower average price stats and in this way influence others choice as well. I guess you could tackle this with trying to sell new games like that or adding ability to say which games you want and which you do not even though you still get all of them.
• This offer is 7 days long… This bothers me because as usual with such stuff people would manipulate it. Buy like 100 and resell later for bigger price when it will not be sold anymore. Of course such exploit is little bit effected by “pay what you want” and “no DRM” parts of this but still it holds.

Conclusion

HIB and Wolfire explore things that I am very interested in and my respect to them for this. All that is very interesting on many levels and could be a start of many interesting game development business models I wish will succeed. Bringing all models together is what is right and what HIB tries to do may be not in very refined way so far. Motivation, morals, engagement of buyer. Social media. Charity. Advertisement place for big contributors/sponsors. All it together in as easy to buy form as possible. Right way to go don’t you think?

Just a small sharing of fun thing. Click the image to follow to the site.

Interesting HTML page. Kind of animated advertisement where animation position is attached to page scroll bar. Reminda me of this funny breakanoid built on HTML elements where HTML buttons were used as blocks, radio button as ball and scroll bar as player controled pad. Sadly I forgot a link…