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Archive for October, 2009

October 28th, 2009

Unity3D Ball and Chain – Part 1

Making the transition from Flash and ActionScript to Unity and its JavaScript/C# has been very smooth, thanks to their detailed scripting reference and very active forums. Being one of those people when faced with flat-pack to assemble, grabs a hammer and gets stuck-in, there have been plenty of sticking points which have had me reaching for the instructions.

This is a tech demo of Unity that was created over the weekend to overcome some of the challenges that might arise when working on commercial Unity work. Initially it was created as a one off, but after finding and solving quite a few problems, I thought it might be nice to share my solutions to some of these problems as I develop the project in my spare time.

Controls: Up & Down (or W & S) to raise or lower the spinner, scroller adjusts spinning speed, and Space Bar to release the ball.

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Posted by Chris // 4 Comments // Tagged in : , // Posted in: Development //

October 23rd, 2009

Let’s talk about the iPhone

I had a very interesting day at Over The Air 09 in London a month ago – both the keynotes, sessions, and attendees were heavily geared towards turning web developers into mobile developers. Widgets got bounced around a lot. At the opening of the conference, an informal poll revealed that out of the 200 or so attendees present maybe only a dozen were ‘native’ (ie, Obj-C, .net, etc) software engineers. The keynote speakers genuinely all seemed to believe that native apps were on the way out, to be replaced by cross platform widgets. (more…)

Posted by Nick // 1 Comment // Posted in: Development //

October 21st, 2009

Blank Canvas

Reminiscing.

This is a post about the new HTML5 canvas element. If you could indulge me while I reminisce when I was a student completing a Diploma in Digital Media for a moment. Our first ever Actionscript based project was to create an interactive application that an artist of the past, who did not live in the digital age, would have made if they did live in these times and had Flash as a tool. I choose Len Lye, an experimental New Zealand artist that is famous for his kinetic sculptures and experimental film techniques.

I remember the joy, writing AS2 using Flash 7, of being able to freely create and experiment with code and interaction without any concern for technical detail or expectation other than it worked, ran at an OK frame rate and looked cool.

Those carefree days quickly disappeared as I left the comfort of my Diploma and entered the real world. Since then it’s been a non-stop learning curve keeping up with technology, expectations and tight deadlines.

If you would like to cut to the chase and have a play with my canvas experement click on the image below, or click on the keep reading link.
impressionist screenshot

See my Experiment on ChromeExperiments.com

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Posted by Mark // 1 Comment // Tagged in : , // Posted in: Development //

October 14th, 2009

Selling SEO

I have been catching up on some SEO articles in the past few weeks and I have really started to detest the whole marketing and sales of SEO. SEO is not something that should be forced, but should be natural, if a site is well built with clear naming conventions then it should be easy for the user to navigate as it should be for a spider to crawl. If a site is usable and accessible to a human then it is only natural that a robot will have a similar experience with your site.

It takes far more skill and knowledge to build good, useable websites than it does to make sure that keywords/links are forced into places where they are not comfortable.

Forcing SEO can also be a distraction for a designer, when SEO is sold it can result in the designer being forced to add elements to a page that that suddenly become out of context, this could result in an unhappy designer who’s time could be better spent making the site user friendly.

There is also an argument to suggest that fully optimising a site for search can affect the user’s experience due to additional content that could possibly deemed as confusing to the user, and also taking up space on the page that would have been better holding a more functional feature such as a search box itself.

For me it is simple, if you want to pay for SEO then pay for sponsored links, otherwise spend extra money on a well thought out site, built and designed by a team who build and design sites properly.

Posted by Gary // No Comments // Tagged in : , // Posted in: Design, Development //