Rawkes Weekly: 19th September 2011
The forth installment of the all-new Rawkes Weekly. In it I go over events of the past week and give you some of my favourite links related to Web development and general geekery.
Well, I'm back from the Mozilla All-Hands out in California. What a week it was! I met some splendid people (note: I'm sure everyone at Mozilla is splendid) and had a great time trying to take in all the cool stuff that was being talked about and demoed. My brain is pretty full now.
On a slightly more random note, I nearly experienced death-by-handluggage on the way home. For some reason the luggage compartment above my head decided to spring open upon our approach to London Heathrow. Trying to hold it shut whilst strapped tightly to your seat was certainly interesting. Still, I survived the harrowing ordeal (it really wasn't that bad).
With great sadness I can announce that I'm postponing the Rawkets multiplayer HTML5 gaming workshop that I was putting on at Bournemouth University this month. Unfortunately I've just got too much on my plate at the moment and the workshop is the only thing on my schedule that's flexible. Something had to give, but fear not as I plan to put the workshop on in the relatively near future.
Links of the week
- Patterns For Large-Scale JavaScript Application Architecture
- A thorough post by Addy Osmani on useful programming patterns for developing big JavaScript applications.
- WebGL and HTML5 Challenges For The Future
- Browser-based gaming isn't going to take off in a big way until certain milestones are reached. Here are just a few of the key milestones for 3D gaming.
- Mobile HTML5
- Compatibility tables for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian, iPad and other mobile devices. A little like caniuse.com but still super-useful.
- Web Font Plug-in for Photoshop
- Ever wanted to use Web Fonts on your website but didn't because it was a pain to mock up the designs in Photoshop? Well your prayers have been answered with this plugin that allows you to use Web Fonts within Photoshop.
- What's different in the new WebSocket protocol
- WebSockets are in a constant state of flux at the moment, but they're slowly starting to settle down. This post highlights some of the key features in the newest WebSockets protocol.
- Keyboard Heatmap
- I'm a big fan of data visualisation. It would be fascinating to use this realtime "heatmap of text character distribution" to visualise areas of the keyboard that are used most on Twitter. You could even give each Twitter user a unique heatmap profile based on the keys they use. Or you could just use this for something else entirely. Just sayin'.
- Cube - Time series visualisation
- Internet Explorer 10 and WebSockets
- Want to know what the best non-Mozilla news I heard last was? It was the announcement by Microsoft that IE 10 will finally support WebSockets. I can't wait!
- MongoDB 2.0
- If you use MongoDB then you might like to know about the latest release. I'm particularly interested in the performance improvements to Map/Reduce.
Track of the week
Canvas (Instrumental) by Imogen Heap. A beautiful instrumental track from one of my favourite artists. Definitely check out the rest of her music.