Developing Upwards

Triple Town is the first released game on the Amazon Kindle. I was really excited to try this out, and I'm happy to be one of the first to write a review. Now, I know there are going to be a lot of nay sayers about the obviously lacking computing power of a device like the Kindle, which was designed to be lower power and function to read books, not run games. However, we should all be very familiar with the rules about limits in design: they can push us into greater heights. Is Triple Town the end all of gaming? Of course not. Is it a damn fine game that I'm happy to spend some time with? Absolutely. Triple Town is what you get if you strip an RTS to its core and make into something of a puzzle game. Danc has a great write up on the design limits that needed to be worked around and where a game like this fits into a map of what works and what simply isn't fun, and finds a snug little place for itself. Honestly, I'm loving the game. Not just as a neat novelty to hav

This is my son standing under the Flying Speghetti Monster. This is a nice photo, but maybe I want to zoom in on just my son. Further, maybe I want to do this on the client-side, not on the server-side. There are a number of reasons I might want to do this. The most obvious is displaying a thumbnail that expands into the full photo. Rather than load two images, we can load a single one, crop the image to get the thumbnail, and expand it into the full image when the user wants to see it. We might start by looking into the CSS clip property, but we'd run into an immediate problem: the result is just floating in dead-space! The image will be clipped as we specify, but this only hides the clipped areas and leaves the image otherwise in-place. A better solution is to take the original layout of the image and reposition and resize it and adjust the clip, so that the region we specify by the clip property is expanded to fit the full size of the space we gave for the image.