Diablo II was a huge hit. At the time, it was a near perfect conclusion to the hack and slash action role playing game. After its release, people loved and played the game so much, it appears no one else had any ideas on how to improve and progress the genre. Apart from Dungeon Siege not many games even tried.
But now it seems the genre is making a come back. And it’s mostly thanks to the indie programmers.
Well, it has finally come to this. I’ve put the last batch of vinyl records up for sale on eBay. After that, it’s all digital for me. While vinyl still survives for some, it’s a very distant memory for most. Hence this final ode to great trance and progressive that was once the exclusive domain of vinyl. Now, a lot can be both from iTunes or specialized stores like Beatport. And I’ve got a Grooveshark widget to prove it.
Website performance has recently been in the spotlight once more. In fact, it should never be out of the spotlight if you want to keep your customers happy. This site is no stranger to bad performance. It’s a typical WordPress problem. You’ve got a nice blog and install a few plugins and before you know it, your site needs 20 JavaScript files and even more CSS files. But how to avoid this?
I’m going to warn you before you read on, this post does not have the definitive answer, just a few ideas that, I hope, will stimulate some needed discussion.
The Humble Indie Bundle is the latest example of a growing trend: You’re free to set your own price. The Humble Indie Bundle contains 5 great indie games that would usually retail for about $80, but you get to choose your own price. Looking at the current statistics, the average is way below that price.
If you’ve been programming Java on Google App Engine, you’ll encounter them sooner rather than later: the loading request. A loading request to your application is a request that forces an initialization of the environment that runs your application. Depending on your application, the libraries you use, the size and the usage a loading request can take a long long time (over 20 seconds) and happen frequently. It’s something to be aware of. But what to do about them?
I’ve dabbled a bit in custom fonts for websites (using the @font-face CSS property), but this gave me mixed results. So I dug a little deeper on how to get things right. Turns out, it’s not that easy and requires a little knowledge of a lot of things. Here are 5 resources that will help you get started.
I’ve featured a number of Google projects before, most of them I liked. Some look strange and pointless. But I’ve always found the documentation to be outstanding. Maybe a little too technical for many, but for some reason, it’s always just right for me. The Google Data API’s are just one more example. Currently I’m learning the Google Documents List Data API and it looks like another winner.
Those following me on Twitter (hey, why aren’t you?) might have noticed an upswing in my Twitter usage lately. For the most part, this can be attributed to Mixero, a fairly new Twitter client. I hear you thinking the world isn’t big enough for yet another Twitter client, but this one has a few options that you might want to try out.
Flexible and intuitive group and context management are just the starters.
Until last weekend, I had been ignoring the latest gaming craze. Namely social strategy games, most known are the Facebook variants, Farmville and Mafia Wars. Since I try to stay up-to-date on what’s happening in the multimedia web world, it was about time I dove into the genre to figure it out. I picked We Rule, because it runs natively on my iPod Touch, which makes it easy to carry around and play it anywhere I have WiFi.
Here’s what I found.
While some believe the infographic is dead, I happen to think a graphic representation can help. A good infographic summarizes a lot of information in a condensed and visually interesting style. It’s the way I remember stuff.
There are a lot of brilliant articles and blogposts out there that have a lot of great information. They are interesting reads, however I have trouble retaining that info. Yes, I have those articles bookmarked, but they’re often too long to quickly review.
So I present, the article remix project.