Every game that makes it onto Miniclip is a momentous occasion for us and our latest is no exception. It’s called the Kelloggs Corn Pops Challenge and you have to complete the 4 mini-games to unlock your extra bonus. The style we were working off was pretty mad. Kind of a cross between the cheesy, early Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and Yo Gabba Gabba. All credit to the good people at Kelloggs for letting us (Digital Outlook) put this one together. One of our other games is at 34 million plays and counting, so fingers crossed for this one!

It’s been a real labour of love. Each of the mini-games were based on a physics engine and it plays really well. The sounds really add to the experience and there are a few riffs in there from the ever resourceful Reason. Check out Jop’s blog for some more details but if I were you, I’d just play it.

One thing to note, an easter egg if you like, the mad looking guy at the end (the one with the wig) is actually the developer, Jop! I think Warhol underestimated the 15 minutes of fame thing…

Corn Pops Challenge Play these super-awesome challenges, unlock the golden cereal pieces and win!

Play this free game now!!

I had a fiddle with the Apple iPhone developer kit last week and it was a relatively painless experience. I had an app, albeit a useless one, up and running within an hour, like so. Apple applied the same philosophy to their development tools as they did to their consumer-facing products. It was fun, simple and even a Visual C newbie like me could figure the basic out.

Just done the same to Google’s Android developer platform. Wow, what a difference. Where Apple installs lots of applications, tools and nic-nacs to fiddle with, Android can barely bring itself to unzip the scattering of .jar files and nasty looking anonymous files into a snappily named folder “android-sdk-mac-x86-1.0_r1″.

Hmmm ok. Discarding my own “if you need to look at the manual, it’s not very good” philosophy, I followed the ugly-as-hell installation instructions. What a can of worms I’ve just opened. I need to download a third-party development environment such as Eclipse 3.4. I Google it, visit their website but can’t figure out what to download. Eclipse IDE for Java Developers? Eclipse Classic 3.4.1? Don’t know. Didn’t bother… boredom setting in…

Once you’ve installed Eclipse, you also have to install the Eclipse Plugin (ADT) with it’s own set of tecno-babble installation instructions.

So now I’m ready for my “Hello Android” starter experience. I believe the expression in OMFG! How nasty and difficult can they make it?

Ok, what’s my point? My point is the internet exploded because of two things. Creatives and Flash. Before flash, developers used stuff like C++ or HTML. Some used Javascript but on the whole, they smelled of wee and old pastry and knew the names of all the planets in Star Wars. Coders stayed in their cave and designers stayed in theirs. Then designers found a tool they could play with without too much programming. They could make content for the internet that was fun, irreverent, thought-provoking, high quality and cheap. Tradition coders didn’t get involved as ‘Actions’ were too crude to make anything out of. I loved it and so did many others. I made Flash 4 games, sites, I solved problems and people started to see the internet as a fun place rather than a place where games had interfaces made with grey Windows UI buttons. Here’s the first site I ever made in Flash 4 btw, and it ran off text files! :)

The beauty happens when people cross the lines. The epiphany where code and creativity combine to create something greater than the sum of the parts. Content exploded. Games, videos, animations, crazy (and often pointless) websites popped up at an astonishing rate to feed the new demand of the first dot-com boom. I’d been using the web for 6 years before flash came out and in one year, it was astonishing what was happening.

Spool forward a few years and Flash updated its coding engine to Actionscript, then Actionscript 2… and now Actionscript 3. Coders can come to flash from C++, Java etc. and get developing straight away. Unfortunately, flash has started to get too complex for those pioneers of creativity, the bedroom creatives out there. Coders now have a bigger cave to sit in and designers are too busy playing with their iPhones to notice the gap that’s opening up again. Most are too young to know how it ‘used to be’. Those of us that remember know it was a sterile, fractured, dysfunctional and ugly place to be. If someone has an idea, it’s imperative they have the tools to express themselves without barriers. Creativity isn’t just for designers, it’s for everyone. I can’t express how important it is to offer tools to allow those with ideas to create them, to innovate, to inspire and drive the internet forward.

As an example, look at the winners of Android’s $10 million Developer Challenge. I’m sure they’re very clever, but please, these were judged the best in the world!

What Google have offered in this case is embarrassing and depressing. I’m a big fan of a bunch of their stuff but this smacks of slapping their name on someone else’s technology and turning a blind eye to their values. I cannot use their ‘open platform’ as it’s closed to anyone other than hardcore coders. Ok, you can argue that the Apple Xcode Visual C experience is pretty nasty, but the doors are wide open and welcoming. Google has locked theirs, dug a couple of moats and put a huge, angry robot on guard to quickly beat the enthusiasm out of any passer by.

Maybe that’s why they called it Android…

The new iTunes 8 has been out for a few weeks and I finally got around to installing it. Interface is interesting. I think it’s better… maybe. I’ve yet to try the Genius ‘similar songs’ picker thing as it come with a pretty scary privacy warning. Here’s a taste…

The information sent to Apple includes details about the media in your iTunes library such as track names, play counts, and ratings. This information will be stored with an anonymous Genius ID and not linked to your iTunes Account. When using the iTunes Store or Genius sidebar, Apple will also use your purchase history to give you better recommendations.

Hmmm, not sure just yet.

However, I had a wow-moment when I saw the new Visualizer (the old one is still there if you like it btw). If you don’t know what it is, it’s a real-time ‘screensaver’ that reacts to your music. It’s under the iTunes ‘view’ menu or Apple-M on a mac fires it into life. The new version is simply awesome. It’s the ultimate proof that in the right hands, maths can be excruciatingly beautiful. If you have it running, press ‘M’ to go tough all of the various styles. My kids spent about an hour staring at it, that’s longer than they spent the entire weekend watching TV!

Incidentally, I’ve been playing with the Apple developers kit and the ‘Quartz’ compiler is amazing. Quartz is the environment used to create visual effects such as screensavers, iTunes visualizers, graphic filters and so on. Literally drag and drop coding and the results make the eyebrows of even the most hardened anti-Mac fan boy rise a few feet above their egg-shaped foreheads. Will post something soon.

STOP PRESS

Complete coincidence but the day after writing this post, I attended a presentation by the the creator of the new iTunes visualiser, Robert Hodgin at Flash On the Beach in Brighton. One of the brightest people you are ever going to meet. I dare you to watch his render of Magnetosphere and disagree. All built in Processing… if I had a cloning machine, my clever alter-ego would be learning Processing as we speak. Simply mind-blowing in the right hands!

Yep… I make my first iPhone app and it really is that simple to compile. No reason for the Chuck Norris image really, I had to use something. I don’t actually have an iPhone yet so I even find the emulator fun to play with at the moment.

The Xcode development platform absolutely rocks but if I’m honest, I only get half of it. It really is a half and half thing. The half I get is the interface constructor, the UI libraries and so on. The half I don’t get is the slightl weird Visual C syntax of the code. If you know C or maybe even AS2 or 3, some of it will be familiar but the rest is propper strange. Most of the answers to “why?” are “because you have to”. Still, I fully realise its my lack of cleverness rather than Apple’s dev platform. They seem to have done pretty well with it so far.

Anyway, I’m off to get some more skill, so watch this space.

I deal with these guys a lot at Digital Outlook but never actually embedded their Arcade widget… easily rectified. It’s not rocket science, just go here, choose a game and get the code… except the embeddable flash apps are bigger than the ‘standard’ 450 pixel width of WordPress (this blog). You can alter the flash tags to be 450 width but it does come out a bit small. Works though…

You can do it to single games too…

Here’s an embeddable promo for a game we did for Mr. Men. Last time we checked it had done 32 million game plays in about a year. Not bad! Why not add a few to the total…

Mr Men Pinball Activate multiple targets for bonus points in Mr Bump Pinball!

Play this free game now!!

We’re off on a family holiday to Borneo soon and my 5 year old son is especially excited. He sees orangutans as part of his extended family and is particularly looking forward to the creepy crawlies and snakes. He’s so excited in fact, that he took himself off to his bedroom for half an hour and packed his own suitcase. The contents give an interesting insight into the inner workings of a 5 year old boys mind.

Packing consists of…

1. Chicken Little mini-wheely case
2. Pair of Nike gold shin pads
3. Pirates of the Caribbean wallet
4. Pirates of the Caribbean sweatband
5. Instantly expanding frisbee
6. Ben 10 cards
7. Wall-E pocket pinball game
8. M&M circus master figure
9. Home made ‘sock snake’
10. Santa hat
11. Pirelli cap
12. Dinosaur egg with integral eyeball
13. Sponge plane
14. Assorted magnets
15. Dragon heart jewel
16. Plastic giant cockroach
17. Vampire teeth
18. Dinosaur (Ankylosaur)
19. Beaded lizard keyring
20. Fold-away magnifying glass
21. Compass
22. Wooden cage (for catching snake heads)

On first pass, pretty random. But with my Ray Mears hat on, not a bad spread. Reflective shin pads for signaling aircraft, cap to protect from the scorching sun, sweatband for temporary bandages, Ben 10 cards to sort out minor differences with fellow survivors / natives, home made sock to distract predators and so on. Even the S hat can be used to filter disease carrying particles from drinking water

Ok, maybe the M&M figurine is a bit superfluous but all in all, not bad.

I was walking down the road the other day with my 7 year old daughter. The houses on this particular street had windows in the shape of a quarter circle. Where each of the terraced houses joined, the windows were reflected, effectively making a half circle.

My daughter mentioned this and said she liked the shape. We usually have fun chats about things we see so I casually asked “what shape would four quarters make?”.

Of course, she was obviously going to say ‘a circle, daddy’ and I would feel rightfully smug at my well educated daughter. Her answer was “Well, it depends how you arranged them… it can make a sort of lumpy line like a dragon’s back”.

Never underestimate a 7 year old!