Update: A build that fixes the Flash-related loading problems (see below) in Firefox has gone live. That build also fixed the loading issues with the game on iOS devices and added some (very) basic support for touch events (both iOS and IE10 / Windows 8). Play it at www.cuttherope.ie. Monday was a big day Pixel [...]
(UPDATE: I added a more careful version of how I feel about the future of Silverlight to the bottom of that section.) I spent last week at BUILD (all caps?). What a good week for Microsoft! Now that I’ve had a day or two to consider the big announcements and shake off the reality distortion [...]
Last week we quietly rolled out an updated version of Kaxaml. It’s a “point” release which (wikipedia will tell you)means that it was more of a maintenance release than a feature release. Don’t let me undermine it’s significance, though. That bit of maintenance took us from targeting .NET 3.0/3.5 to targeting .NET 4.0. That’s a [...]
This is really neat. It’s a very very early digital 3D rendered film (family lore is that it’s the first, ever). It looks old because it is. It was created in 1972 by Ed Catmull (the founder of Pixar) and Fred Parke with a little help from my dad. I also think that this is [...]
Someone asked me the other day how I created the parallax effect on the nerdplusart.com homepage. It’s actually pretty straightforward math to create that kind of effect (which I’m sure I borrowed from somewhere) and wrapped it up into a handy panel called CameraPanel when I was creating the landing page. It’s called CameraPanel because [...]
I’ve been meaning to write something about this for a long time! Over the summer we created Agent 008 Ball, a spy-themed HTML5 pool game. Creating it was a blast! We put a little video together to talk about the design process. You can check it out below. Also, here’s the case study for the [...]
I love HTML5 and I also love Silveright. I’m actually not too broken up about the emphasis on HTML5 at the PDC this year. HTML5 a nascent technology, it’s true. There are issues: We built agent8ball.com in about 4 weeks. It likely would taken about half of that in Silverlight. Also, we dealt with all [...]
People think about apps differently than they used to. For a long time, applications have been a pretty thick layer in our digital sandwich: we paid lots of money for them and expected them to do big things. Those apps still exist: Photoshop, Visual Studio, Word. But this weekend I bought three apps and paid [...]
Kaxaml Update I had a great conversation with Rob Relyea (Mr. XAML) yesterday about the future of Kaxaml and he shared a lot of very useful pointers about how to use some upcoming .NET 4.0 features to make Kaxaml super awesome. Looks like he’s already written much of the code for us! So here’s the [...]
UPDATE: There were some issues with the Silverlight app before but they’ve been fixed. I was using a custom MP3 encoder to get live audio visualizations in the app but it was crashing in certain browsers. Everything should be working now (sans visualization), but don’t hesitate to let me know if you’re running into issues. [...]
