The Kodu Blog hinted that we can expect a release in June. Well, June is nearly done my friends and adding 2 and 2 to get 4 (that’s right isn’t it?) suggests that as Xbox Live sees new releases every Wednesday we might expect the release to happen on – Wednesday. This Wednesday, it’s the only one left in June. My logic is flawless. Worship me.
I’m really looking forward to Kodu. the idea of quickly and collaboratively getting a simple game up and running really excites me. And, hey, given the way things look I’d say that ’simple’ is just the beginning. I imagine that if there’s no limit, or at least a very high limit, to the amount of logic you can include, then complexity could be a real possibility. Read the rest of this entry »
Why can’t Firefox just do as its told? I love the browser, its extendability, speed and the awesome bar is, well, awesome but when I tell my computer to shut down, why does Firefox have to throw a wobbly and bring everything to a halt?
Last night I bolted out of my house to finally get round to playing Sam and Max on Xbox. I closed up in good faith, following all the steps necessary to switch from standby to shutdown, closed the lid and left. This morning I got back to find that my netbook was still on, it’s LED screen super heating the keyboard it had been pressed up against for hours. Read the rest of this entry »
Scrollbars are a pain on web and they are even more of a pain on mobile.
If you’ve ever had to develop a website that does anything imaginative with it’s width then you will have encountered the inclusive / exclusive discrepency among browsers. For example, should your page length exceed the vertical size of a browser window, a vertical scrollbar appears – trouble is some browsers fee the need to subtract the width of the scrollbar from the width of the page – causing horizontal scroll on the page.
Of course, on mobile phone you can’t chnage the size of your viewport but because every phone can be different problems arise when trying to create a mobile website that works across all devices. Because mobile devices tend to lack the javascript support that we all enjoy in big web browsers it is not simly a case of denying the bars so that everything works.
Wapple Canvas allows you to build mobile websites in a ‘build-once / publish-many’ manner. The Exhibit engine takes care of making the site work across all devices. Read the rest of this entry »
Today we have made an improvement to our User Variable handling.
Things were very secure before, perhaps a little too secure. User variable had to come into the system prepended with a ‘wv_’. Because so many third parties aren’t as flexible as we are perhaps I got too carried away and expected that this would be OK for everyone. Read the rest of this entry »
I found a funny little piece linked off the BBC web monitor.
Its about a user interface designer, Dustin Curtis who had such a bad time booking a flight online with American Airlines, he posted them a redesign.
Dustin Curtis' redesign for AA.com
Quite what he expected from their website is unknown, as having flown AA I personally wouldn’t expect a good experience anyway. But this is definitely worth a look simply because of the reply he got from an AA.com employee. Read the rest of this entry »
Wapple Canvas allows you to build mobile web sites. You probably already knew that.
In this post I hope to explain and demonstrate the cool techniques and technology we have developed to make this a simple, fun and effective process and show how the way we have done it helps Wapple Exhibit optimize pages to work perfectly on every device without dumbing down to the lowest common denominator. Read the rest of this entry »
I had already done a fair bit of PHP OO, having come a long way since I first saw a $this-> and panicked. But this book really turned my mind on its head. Suddenly everything became clear and I began to structure code much more effectively and could suddenly see simple solutions to seemingly complex problems.
Since first reading this book, my coding has improved a hundred times over. I put together what I realise now is our own custom framework for mobile development. A crazy session handler, object repositories, layout decorators and content bins. But this latest piece of code that we added just last week to wapple Canvas is probably the piece that I’m most proud of. Read the rest of this entry »
Wapple Canvas now allows you to pass in definable variables into and through the system.
We’ve always made sure that we maintain a high level of security into the Canvas platform. After all, we really don’t want just any variable going in and given that we interface with so many third parties (many of whom rely on REST) we can’t risk variable names crossing over and causing strange behaviour.
So, The Wapple Exhibit engine has a really cool request handler singleton which protects the core from unknown variables. basically, if we don’t like a variable used in a url, we trash it. We also have a huge amount of variable validation, with each one transformed into an object that can self validate. Inside the codebase we are able to query, set, nuke and modify variables from anywhere and the whole thing is stored and retrieved along with the session. So variables have a level of persistence. Read the rest of this entry »
