Gaming Ottawa is a new not-for-profit gaming community in Ottawa, Ontario. Started October 2010, the group has seen enthusiastic growth and now has 500+ members and 3 sponsors. GO, as their known, hosts monthly tournaments, weekly online leagues and provides a friendly and active board for the community to connect and expand.
FITC Toronto 2011 was yet another year (the 10th in fact) of inspiring and stimulating talks from experts all around the globe. Here’s the hilarious title sequence made by legendary creative firm MK12. Parental discretion is advised. No, really.
Eventpress is a proposed event management system which can be unobtrusive and provide a simple event publishing means or be very detailed and create complex nested events which can interact with a community. It borrows inspiration from software such as Autodesk Maya, GIT and redmine. It will be a wordpress plugin, following the trend of bbPress and BuddyPress.
The problem I wish to solve is that of creating events which interact with a community. That community could be members of Wordpress, bbPress (standalone or plugin), buddyPress or all of the above. By using a highly modular and object oriented structure, an event author can create very simple or very complex events with the same framework.
PocketShip is a unique game which allows players to join a communal experience on a projector (or any other display) by visiting a site with their handheld device. Visiting pocketship.dyndns.org presents an app-like interface where users customize a spaceship then fly their ship around a shared environment with other users, with the occasional mini-game to spice things up.
The ability to fully simulate your latest creation in a staging environment is what separates the best from the rest. Once endowed with such powers, publishing to a live site just to see how it looks seems about as smart as dipping your finger into boiling water to see if it’s the right temperature. Staging environments are not simple though – they require a unique install of Wordpress, a file comparison interface and a bunch of other things. Plug-in’s are a powerful thing but cloning the entire structure of it’s parent is not something plug-ins are capable of. If you run your Wordpress install from something other than a server you have full control over, setting up a staging environment is a near impossibility. Most Wordpress users don’t run their own server let alone know what “Apache” really is.
There is hope though! You can use Wordpress’s “preview” powers to create your own quick and dirty staging environment.
While part I focused on the quarrel between Adobe and Apple, the future of Flash is much larger than the ramblings of an over-dramatic control freak. Flash has been a definitive tool for web interaction. It’s lived through the indirect blow of AJAX by being more animation-centric and object oriented. It’s lived through the increasing functionality of Java by, again, being more animation centric and having a very hands-on design view in the Flash development environment. HTML5 however, is taking direct aim at animation, graphics, video and even 3D applications. Beyond the momentum of the current Flash-comfortable army of web developers, where will Flash sit in the future of the web?
Joshua Mark is an experienced and enthusiastic designer and developer. Recently graduated from Carleton University with a degree in interactive multimedia and design, he is also founder and CEO of Archonic.
