Okay, I’ve been out of the loop for a little while – moved across town (and thankfully into a rather pleasant house, instead of an apartment), and even though we were completely moved and had the important stuff unpacked and setup (read: computer, tv, blu-ray player, and coffee pot), we didn’t get the cable and internet installed until this past weekend.
I’ve also been trying to figure out where I want to move this blog. WordPress.com is great unless you want to do anything other than just post stuff; then you gotta part ways with your cash. Blogger.com – Google’s blogging platform – is pretty good, but just not quite right. I also looked into Tumblr and Posterous, but I just can’t make sense of how to use them. I’ve been using WordPress in some fashion or other for pretty much all of my online life, so that’s what I’m used to and everything else mostly gets a blank stare.
But, I’ve found a good (and free) host that I’m gonna try and move to over the next week, so we’ll see how that goes. I won’t be limited to just having WordPress either – it’s an actual web host with PHP and database support, so I can play with some project ideas I’ve had in mind for a while too.
Speaking of projects, I’ve started doinking around with HTML5 for a little video game, just to get a feel for what you can do with the new toys it brings to the table. So far it isn’t anything worth showing off, but it’s a “Flood It” style game, where you’re presented with a board of randomly colored squares and you change the colors of a group of squares each turn until the board is a single color. If you’ve got an Android phone, you can get an example here, and I’m sure there’s plenty of others for iOS or Windows Mobile, to say nothing of online versions. (It’s an excellent time waster – trust me.)
Like I said, it’s giving me a chance to play with HTML5’s features. Right now I’ve got it set to draw the board and change colors, all using the new canvas element and JavaScript. I’m looking at adding some other stuff that’ll make use of local storage – tracking how well you did in a given board, for example – and maybe other features as I think of it. I haven’t played with any of the new CSS3 stuff yet, but that’s mainly because I’m just trying to get it running – all in due time 🙂
I’ve also taken this opportunity to explore other JavaScript libraries, and I’m using MooTools for this project. I really wanted to use Prototype, but it hasn’t been touched in quite some time (at least by web development standards), so that was a bit of a turn off. Dojo is an awesome library, but it’s overkill for this – I’ll probably use it for other projects I have in mind, just not this one. And to be perfectly honest, I can’t stand jQuery – I like some of the concepts it encourages (plugins and method chaining) but the lack of built-in class declaration features and its focus on DOM manipulation just kill it for me. (I’m definitely an OOP kinda guy, and more programmer than web designer.)
MooTools looks good so far though. It’s got OOP features and a custom eventing mechanism (which I’m sure the other libraries provide as well), and those are worth playing with. And it’s something new to me – I’ve used all three of those other ones in projects before.
It time to earn food for my daughter, so this little babble fest must end. Stay tuned though – I’ll definitely put up the game when it’s ready, and when I get the blog moved over I’m gonna probably be more active (which means flooding the internet with shameless pleas for you to buy my book).
Catch you on the flip side.
–Matt
Matthew Cory 