Barklund.org

This library by polygonal.de looks really nice. I would most definitely be using this for future development.

With a colleague of mine, Morten Reinholdt, I have started to work on a new flash gaming website called Dexgames. Actually we started on the idea several months ago, but now we both have the time to do some more actual work on it.

The concept is very much inspired by many other gaming sites. The ones that I personally have frequented some times are:

• Orisinal
• Donutgames
• Miniclip

Just to name a few.
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Bibliotekr (a badly hidden pun on Flickr) is an idea crafted by a group of persons trying to create a book-sharing site “competing” with the Danish libraries. And one of the organizers had thrown together a small Hackathon, which I just had to attend.
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Today we launched a new website for one of the major Danish mortgage provider, Totalkredit. They are known by all Danes due to their tv-ads (produced by TBWA\Copenhagen), that everyone either hates or loves. This is a very big client, and thus they require a very big website. But as they are for the people and tries to communicate directly with the common man, the website need not be corporate, but must be rich with content, easy to use and with many features that will create returning visitors.

Well, all this I did not have much to do with, that concerns the concept department. But concretising, technically verifying and realizing this concept is very much my job. The project has taken many months but it is now finally complete. Or well, such is never complete, but the first version has been launched at least. And this site is (technically) amazing if I should describe it. The amount of JavaScript used is huge and much of it uses MochiKit heavily. The JavaScript is used to enliven the page in a very interesting way.

The whole page works without JavaScript in the classical fashion (clicking links, reloading the whole page with the new page), but with JavaScript enabled, all links are caught and handle via Ajax instead. This technique was introduced to me by Jeremy Keith and his somewhat cute term Hijax. In order to do this, but not combine markup with content, large portions of the HTML (very large in fact) are built in JavaScript. For this need MochiKit.DOM is really handy.

Other features of the site, that makes this a very satisfying job to have completed:

• It is of course search engine optimized (Hijax preserves this)
• It uses a very concise, readable markup and works as mentioned without JavaScript (the properties of Progressive Enhancement)
• The URL is modified on every major page change using fragments in order to allow deep-linking and bookmarking (this is partly self-developed, partly borrowed from SWFAddress)
• And given the above, that “back” and “forward” buttons of the browser works (unlike many other full-Ajax websites)
• The site includes Google Maps (you can’t go wrong with that!)
• The site is tested and optimized for Internet Explorer 6 and 7 as well as Firefox 2 (and friends).

Enough talking, here is the site: http://www.totalkredit.dk – “unfortunately” most of the site is in Danish except for a small investor-part.

Adobe has released a new version of Apollo AIR (yup, that is the new name along with quite a boring logo) and to promote it, they have also announced Adobe AIR Developer Derby – a competition to see who’s best at their new runtime.

The prizes are quite amazing and given the long duration of the development time (deadline is in September), anyone can create some pretty amazing applications. But one things puzzles me about the license, that they require applications to be released under: is attribution-requiring licenses accepted? And what about copyleft-licenses? The official rules are pretty clear on what the license must permit Adobe to use the content for (display, commercial use and derivative use), but does that mean, that if my application is released under say CC-BY-SA-2.5, is that accepted? And what if I include Wikipedia-texts in it (GFDL’ed) and some Flickr-images (under free licenses) will Adobe then be willing to credit me, the main 5 authors of every article from Wikipedia (which is what GFDL requires) as well as the creators of all the Flickr-images that require attribution?

I’ve sent a mail and hope for a positive response. I will keep this entry updated on the matter.

And for once, I am not talking bad about our company clients, but the clients in a client-server architecture.

Flash memory cheats have always been known to any good flash game hackers and ditto developer, but some still don’t know about them. Thus, as shoemoney recently posted a competition to get the best score in Desktop Tower Defence, “some guy” of course fired up Tsearch and throw a lot of points his way. The result was of course, that he won (even though he cheated), and afterwards he posted a simple guide to do it.

That is why should should always have a server telling you what to do when. More on this topic in the months to come - as I and a friend is developing a brand new game site including high-level security.

Google Maps Street View is pretty amazing. The detail, the 360 view, the small increments between images. Just see these poor guys driving down Park Drive N. Google is quite amazing. This new street view has mapped 5 cities in the US.

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Thanks to Digg, the cult RTS now earns the indy developer 20 million page views and high four figures in revenue a month. Expenses: server costs, and a supply of Red Bull.

Personally, I am a huge fan of this game - it is so simple, yet so advanced and strategic. It reminds me of the two games, that in the recent years have had me losing sleep (and I rarely do that to a game): Total Annihilation and its conceptual successor, Supreme Commander.

I’ve discovered GreaseMonkey. Yes, I am a bit late, but once I finally installed it, I sure love it. Though the script, that I needed, only existed in a very simple version.

I have thus taken the initial version of the Google Calendar TODO list by Matias Pelenur and the modified version by Gimite Ichikawa and created a brand new version that I submitted to UserScripts.org.

First thing this new version does is, that it uses the eventStatus-field for setting whether the todo has been done or not. And then there is a flush button to flush (remove) todones. And finally the todos and todones are sorted using the status and title. This will be a work in progress and will be developed further upon.

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I’m currently working on an AJAX-driven site also using Google Maps’ externally accessible API. But I have as several others been frustrated about the fact, that the GMarkerManager-class does not contain a clearMarkers method. So I combined the open-sourced source with the latest closed-source release, and mashed stuff up like this:
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