Software, Fitness, and Gaming – Jesse Warden

Blog

  • GameTap: Broadband Games On Demand

    The press release for GameTap from Turner makes it sound like GameSpy, except you can actually download games and play them vs. just having GameSpy facilitate collaboration. XBox Live does this pretty well for a v1. Sounds like old titles are included; I’m hoping some of the old skool classics from SNES make it. I know I’d pay to play Final Fantasy 3 again legally.

    Another quote from AJC (username: cow | email: cow@mailinator.com | password: cowcow):

    Turner Broadcasting enters the video game industry today, announcing a new broadband Web site called GameTap that gives users access to hundreds of titles – from classic gobbler Pac-Man to the frenetic skateboarder Tony Hawk.

    More info @ Kenny’s site.

    Via Kenny B.

  • Google Wants You to Blog During the Weekdays

    Google ads pay squat over the weekends. I’ve noticed spikes in my earnings when I post entries either regulary, or when I post an entry that has a higher than normal click-through during the weekdays.

    I had 2 such entries over the weekend… but Google paid me squat. This isn’t the first time this has happened, but this is the first time a seriously clicked through set of entries did not contribute to earnings.

    I take that to indirectly mean Google advertisers don’t pay Google much for weekend ads, and thus Google only wants to you blog during the week.

    I don’t need Google ad revenue to run my site, but I can’t help but be influenced since it pays not only for my hosting costs, but my other 2 hosting costs beyond this site (dev site for hosting files, and Flashcom hosting).

    I’m kind of irritated by this too; I feel like I’m being bullied by a big company, having them influence my blogging behavior. Because the service is opt-in, free, and all I have to do is what I’ve been doing, blogging, many may argue I shouldn’t complain.

    However, wanting to maximize my earnings is a good thing, and I guess I don’t understand why blogging on the weekend doesn’t contribute to that.

    Weird. What if I don’t want to blog during the weekdays? Does that lessen the value of my entries because they are on the weekend? No! In fact, I’d argue that is the slowest blogging time, and I want to give people something interesting to check out if they are bored on the weekend; I should be rewarded for that if a reward structure is already in place.

    Not sure why this irritates me so, but it does.

  • Image Slideshow Using FAME

    Her majesty suggested I put my money where my mouth is, and show an example created using the technologies talked about in my previous post. Therefore, I created a dynamic image slideshow using FAME (Flashout + ActionScript Development Tool + MTASC + Eclipse). I did not use the Flash IDE in any way; I coded and tested all within Eclipse.

    Click Here

    FAME Slideshow Source – ZIP

    This is awesome!

    However, one thing is abundantly clear; even with the ability to utilize Flash MX 2004 components… we need an open source component architecture.

  • I Tried Eclipse, ASDT, MTASC, & Flashout – FAME

    I ran through the tutorial in the Towards Open Source Flash Development article. Upon compiling my first open source SWF, a “Wow!” escaped my lips through a nervous laugh; my hands started to shake. When I got the Alert component part to work, the same thing happened again… “Wow! HA HA!!!”

    There are a plethora of instructions, both on the site, and in each of the pieces’ intsall instructions… but none of it was painful at all to install and configure. And Eclipse, geez, so far it feels pretty nice. I’ve tried for 4 years, unsuccessfully, to use another external editor other than Flash to create & manage my ActionScript in. I won’t know for another few weeks if we have a winner, but I must say, I like the workflow so far. Why?

    I don’t have to leave… sort of.

    The “hack” as it’s described ActionScript.com’s site doesn’t feel that hackish at all. You just instantiate your class & include the necessarey components in the library. That’s not hard, nor evil feeling at all; it’s a fact of Flash development life.

    More investigation is necessarey to see how it compiles my current projects, how diffucult it is to set them up in Eclipse, and what, if any, code is needed to change to ensure it compiles correctly with MTASC.

    So far, the tabbed interface, a Project panel that actually works well, an Outline view (which has yet to prove its usefulness), all visible at the same time with colored code… feels nice. The Flashout tab makes things feel professional. I have a SWF, traces, and compiler configuration controls built right in.

    Why am I using the Flash IDE again? This is cool! Let’s see if I’m singing the same tune in 2 weeks; that’s been my Acid test over the past 4 years. I am recently starting to have to utilize Java at work, so that adds a few points for the Eclipse route.

    I encourage others to try it out.

    Reference links:

    I’ve been trying to come up with an anacronym from the letters of “E”, “A”, “M”, and “F” to describe these various technologies that make up this new workflow. FAME, perhaps?