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An App In Under Five Hours

The other day on my long train ride from my home and college, I had an idea. I was sick of my fear of missing my stop whenever I was in a train (or even worse, on a bus, because Irish towns look identical), and I thought that it would be handy to have an app that would alarm you when you were near your destination. Then, I proceeded to make it (it’s here if you want to skip reading the post – switch off auto-lock on your phone first). Continue reading ‘An App In Under Five Hours’

How to get hidden, autoplaying audio in html5 on iOS

How to get hidden, autoplaying HTML5 audio on iOS (now with added hackiness!)

Let me start this article the same way I started my previous article about this topic: don’t autoplay audio. Autoplaying audio is the worst thing on the web and nobody will visit your site if you play audio without permission. It’s a bad, bad thing and people will hate you for it. Your dog will run away and your best friend will kick you in the face.

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ACM-ICPC 2010/2011 Programming Problem – High Score

It’s getting closer and closer to the ACM-ICPC Programming contest in UCC this year so now more then ever we need practice. If you’re not up to speed on what it’s all about check out Carl’s first post on another ACM problem. So let’s get straight to the problem. I will present the problem in as clear and simple manner as I can, as the actual problem sheet is a little off putting if you ask me. You can download the pdf for it here. Continue reading ‘ACM-ICPC 2010/2011 Programming Problem – High Score’

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Flax HTML5 Game Engine Development Diary Part 9

So in my last post I promised a video demo of the current development build of the Flax HTML5 Web Game Engine. Well, I have kept my promise, though quite late. Below you can see the video. Unfortunately due to a number of things not much has changed since I went crazy over Christmas coding. The main reason for this is the fact the house got completely flooded over Christmas after the extreme cold caused a pipe in the attic to burst. Continue reading ‘Flax HTML5 Game Engine Development Diary Part 9′

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Flax Engine: GWT Asynchronous HTTP communication with PHP back-end

Well here is the first of our successful modular time-boxed tasks which I spoke about earlier this week in Flax HTML5 Game Engine Development Diary Part 6. Earlier this week after I had fixed up a few bugs I committed a completely working build of the Flax Engine. Continue reading ‘Flax Engine: GWT Asynchronous HTTP communication with PHP back-end’

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Mandelbrot Set in HTML5 Canvas

As you might know, Benoît Mandelbrot sadly passed away two weeks ago. A great mathematician, he almost single-handedly created a new aspect to mathematics, fractal geometry. Having worked with fractals (using the open-source Apophysis) for several years, I felt I owed something to the man, so I thought I’d make a Mandelbrot set using the canvas tag.

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Base64 encoding versus traditional image hosting benchmarks

While testing different methods of loading images for Flax’s tilesystem, I toyed a little bit with images encoded in Base64, rather than loading them from an external location. We ended up not using it, and I’ll explain why. Now with added (preliminary) benchmarks!

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