Last Tuesday (June 21st) I went to an unknown to me place called The Waldorf Hotel for the HTML5 Summer DevFest. Was an awesome web talks and beers day and really got me excited about all things web related. I’ve said that before about the #WPIEBCVan talk but this is exactly what I needed. I was in a slump and after going to other talks, conferences and meet ups I was beginning that the good ones really are hard to find, but no I was wrong, this was awesome.

The day was kicked off by a nice intro by John Bristowe (@jbristowe) really just showing how awesome HTML5 is and can be by constantly reciting his link blog, which to be honest I do look for inspiration, make awesome web. Next up was Brian LeRoux (@brianleroux) of PhoneGap fame (or infamy). TBH honest I can’t really remember the details of what he talked about beyond the extremely meme slides. It was just really cool hearing him talk and chatting with him afterwards about what they have to do for PhoneGap to give people an great application/service.

^^(@jbristowe and @brianleroux doing html5 DJ)^^

The rest of the day kind of went by in a haze but the rest of the speakers were Boris Smus (@borismus) talking about mobile web and touch events, Brian Fling (@fling) talking about how mathematical, psychological and just pure iteration design is. Brian Flings talk really did help me think about design from a far different perspective. Then there was Tom Dale (@tomdale) talking about SproutCore, and finally there was Thomas Lewis(@TommyLee) who made me admit it, publicly, that I do use <tables> far more than I should even though I know they should be left back in the 90s with <marquee> and <blink>. He actually went on about an IE development in the form of CSS grids which definitely perked up my ears.

Massive thanks to John Bristowe (@jbristowe), Boris Mann (@bmann) and the Vancouver HTML5 Meetup Group (@HTML5Vancouver) for putting the event on and I am well looking forward to the next one.

Over the weekend of June 17th I finally partook in my first game jam. I’ve helped out a many a Global Game Jam but finally thought that yeah sure my game coding skills are very lackluster and normalized databases don’t make for good gameplay but when I head Full Indie was holding it’s first ever game jam I just knew I had to give it a go.

I honestly had no idea what I could put my skills to and had a creeping feeling that I’d be useless to any team, have to learn something completely new in 48 hours or a bit of both. This feeling was calmed a little bit when I was at an IGDA Vancouver meet up at Radical Entertainment the Tuesday before and met James Karg (@Twisted_majic) who was also taking part in the Full Indie game jam and we batted around some ideas about Twitter. On D-Day we got talking again and with the inclusion of Cody Labossiere (@codylabossiere) we started to hammer out any ideas that came into our heads. (I had met Cody previously at another Full Indie meet up).

The main theme given to us was “Spawning”. This was due to it being Fathers Day on the Sunday and all fathers have spawn little mini thems. As you can  see from the photo above we just went with any idea relating to spawning we could think of, even Kevin Bacon got mentioned. Once some core themes were out there we started on any game idea we could think of, these ranged from god games to fertilization. We kept trying to think of better core concepts but it just wasn’t happening, once bacon was mentioned earlier pizza was soon planted in our heads and this made our stomachs growl like nothing else so we decided on a small break and some food.

Once we had pizza half stuffed in our faces we knew we were missing something ….. beer. So a quick trip back to the jam via a liquor store we were sorted. We kind of all agreed to drop all the half ideas we had and just do something with Twitter. Only a half full of half “maybe …” sentences later and we came up with a word battle fighting game. #Fighter was born. (that’s not the final name. actually it’s not even a working name, I just thought of it now).

The premise of the game is to sign up easily using your Twitter account and then challenge friends using keyword hash tags and then just do battle using Twitter, somewhat, normally using predefined hashtags as battle commands. This is all record by our server and then determines the winner. A simple conceptual idea I had for explaining it, Pokemon but through Twitter, and less animal cruelty. It is a rather simplistic core concept but we all had very busy weekend plans besides the game jam, which involved drinking, and so the game never got to a working state. I do apologize for  this as it was my coding skills that weren’t able to deliver in a short time frame. Though I do believe that with only an hour or two of work I can get it working in some form. I really just need to set some time aside for it.

The Full Indie game jam was a brilliant experience and I cannot wait for the next one to come up. Hopefully then I will not have so many beers and other plans on the weekend and actually come out with a working prototype. Until next time #KAPOW!!!! Also photo credit and beer cheers to Chevy Ray Johnston (@ChevyRay)

And so it begins. I’m at the Full Indie Game Jam at the moment and after a few hours of deliberation I’ve teamed up with  @Twisted_majc and @codylabossiere. And you wouldn’t have guessed but it’s a game involving TWITTER!! What’s a web dev to do. Hm ….

Right, anyways, quick update. Now back to programming.

Anyways, that really is all. Currently at Make Web Not War so will do a post on it soon. In the meantime just check it out on Twitter, @WebNotWar

John Geoffrey Wins At Getting A Job

Wednesday last I stared work at QuickMobile. WOOOOOO. As Patrick Payne (@quickmobile), CEO/Founder, said today, we’re not called Quick for nothing. The business is based around smartphone apps and mobile websites. Due to this it is a very fast paced environment with app talk going on everywhere. Submissions this, version that. Thing is, I LOVE IT! I have been nursing a nerd tenting since I started. I’m sure the sheer excitement will pass soon but I love just working in an environment where it’s peoples job to talk about this stuff. With my web background, I’m working on the mobile web side of things, mainly dealing with  data. It’s well cool.

This really has just been a short update on what’s been going on as an Irish man abroad, and well, you’ll get more frequent updates from here on out. Also, read through the Scott Pilgrim books again. Loves them. Also, that’s where the “winning” comment came from.

IT’S HERE! The very first episode of The Creative Van is now live for your listening pleasure. For those that I haven’t discussed this with yet, The Creative Van is a podcast I’ve started to help showcase the creative industry in Vancouver. I’m looking to interview people in the film, music, games and web industries and hear all about what they’re up to and where they think the future is going. Since I’m personally interested in the games industry it really was expected that the first episode would be just that.

Episode 01 :: Nels Anderson and Graham Jans

During this episode I let Nels Anderson and Graham Jams take control of the mics and talk all about Vancouver and it’s place in the games industry. They talk all about the indie scene, the IGF, SIGGRAPH and their call to arms for all Vancouverites.

• Nels Anderson works as Technical Designer Klei Entertainment and previous worked as gameplay programmer at Hothead Games. Check out Above49.ca.
• Graham Jans works as Designer at Frog Toss and is currently working on Zombie Minesweeper. Check out GrahamJans.com.

Music for this episode has been provided by SG Wilson. Check out his website at Geokda.co.uk for lots of great tracks.

Many thanks to Nels and Graham for providing the talk for this episode and to Stuart for the music. Also I am still looking for somebody to do some art work for the podcast and the upcoming website, so contact me for details. I hope you all enjoy it and if you want to talk about anything or want me to interview specific people, just email: info@thecreativevan.com

Bezerk

I kind of knew of this sound, “Intruder Alert! Intruder Alert!”, before but thanks to it being featured in my favorite episode of Futurama it has become implanted in my head.

All Your Base Are Belong To Us

Is there much else to say about this? I just love the way the evil guy (Cats) says it:

Transformers

The two films, and the soon to be released third film, have a place in my heart. Namely due to the sound design. I just pure love the films up really loud with LOADS of bass.

The Matrix

The part when Neo is being a bold boy and playing with the mirror, the sound when the mirror goes down this throat. I love that.

Grum – Cybernetic

This whole song is just pure orgasmic on my ears. This one NEEDS to be loud with huge bass to fully appreciate it.

A lot of these samples all have speech synthesis in common and I am, albeit slowly, trying to write a small application relating to speech synthesis mainly for myself. I’ll be sure to post about it when there’s something more tangible done as for at the moment it’s just me reading a few papers on the subject and trying to play around with public libraries. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed these sounds as much as I do and if you have any suggestions of your own, please just post them below or message me.

Whilst I’m on the topic, the EA campus in Burnaby is HUGE and COOL. I was in such awe at how cool the place was that I totally forgot to take any photos (hence the stock photo of the campus from above). It’s amazing what games can pay for. :)

As I was in at the re-launch of IGDA Vancouver I got word that IGDA Scotland are trying to restart again. It’s looking like that with the game development environment changing in such radical ways the community does really want to help everyone out and help everyone grow together. So if you’re in Scotland, check them out and help out as much as you can.

This Is what I have come up with so far. Essentially it’s just a video of me staring right into the screen and watching everything you’re doing on my website. (I joke of course, about the watching, but you know there are some people out there that would probably believe that.) It’s a rather simple way of having the background on as a video, just have the video element on a lower z-index plain than the rest and all positions are absolute. I rarely like making positions absolute but it was the best way I thought for doing this so far.

You can check out the website by just clicking the image above to see it in a live format and if you have any thoughts or problems with it please let me know: me@johngeoffrey.com . Also to help anyone else that may want to try this on a Windows Server 2003 machine, don’t forget to add the MIME Types for video files:

• video/webm
• video/mpeg

Yesterday I was at the Microsoft bootcamp for HTML5 showcasing IE9 and Windows Phone 7 app development at BCIT. I hadn’t done anything that had me filled with such nerd love in a while. If IE9 and Windows Phone 7 were a person, I would totally lust after them from afar. The day was split into two sections with the first dealing with HTML5 and IE9, and the second dealing with Windows Phone 7 app development.

Morten Rand-Hendriksen (@mor10) – HTML5 and IE9

I had felt like I knew most of the ins and outs of HTML5 but obviously after listening to Morten, I most definitely do not. There are parts that I’ve played around with, others that I haven’t and he really did open my eyes on how to use them, namely SVG. Mention graphics and I tend to run the other way but I think I may dabble in it’s pool of vectors and see what I come up with.

Next he talked about IE9 and this is where I very impressed. Having been using OSX for the last few months I have completely left IE9 alone. Even when I was using my PC I still used Opera or Chrome so this was my first taster of all the new features. I want to first mention just how fast IE9 seems to be. During the presentation Morten was switching back and forth between his slide show to live examples of what ever he was talking about and on most occasions he just started up a new instance of IE9 and bam, it was just there. At one point he had clicked Firefox by mistake and in the time it took for that load a page he had started IE9, showed what he was talking about and back to slideshow. Somebody said it was Firefox 4, which was very bad.

Now onto PINNED SITES!! This feature in itself I just want to have a Windows environment at hand again. Essentially with some meta tags a web developer can make their website a “native” Windows application using IE9′s engine. To install the application the user just has to drag the currently opened tab to the task bar and bam, applicationed.

<meta name=“application-name” content=“JohnGeoffrey.com” />
<meta name=“msapplication-tooltip” content=“Visit JohnGeoffrey.com” />
<meta name=“msapplication-starturl” content=“http://www.johngeoffrey.com” />
<meta name=“msapplication-window” content=“width=600;height=600″ />
<meta name=“msapplication-navbutton-color” content=“#fffaf0″ />

That’s really just the basics to it but it’s so easy to do and cool to boot. It can be further extended to allow for notifications for RSS feeds to Twitter/Facebook. Not only that, if there’s a media player on the page you can add more tags to gain Windows Media Player functionality for the task bar, i.e. pause, play, next.

Atley Hunter (@atleyhunter) – Windows Phone 7.

In the past I have dabbled in some iOS and Symbian development but nothing serious, just trying to get  a feel for it. One thing that has slowed me down is the initial, what goes where and what does it do. Even for the simplest app of Hello World on iOS has a stupid amount of code to do it. So that’s why I was a little blown back by seeing Windows Phone 7 development for the first time, it’s essential XML and C#. Both of which I have worked with and I am happy to look at. Hello World is essentially changing an XML tag from the automatically generated code when you start project. Bam. Done.

Overall it was a very good day out in BCIT, even if I did miss most of the lovely sunny day that was happening outside. If you’re interested in either of these topics there are actually other events and competitions happening soon to dive into:

• Make Web Not War - One of Canada’s first cross-platform conference showcasing the latest techniques and technologies available to the ever-evolving web community, jointly sponsored by Microsoft and Open Source communities across Canada.
• The Great Canadian Apportunity – Windows Phone 7 competition – “What if you had the chance to create an innovative app or game for a visually-stunning, developer-friendly mobile platform, and win some incredible prizes in the process?”

Also, got a well cool t-shirt. It made me lol. Here’s a photo of it, also note my professional pose. :p