redfloatplane

This seems to have worked almost perfectly in the current Webkit nightly for me, and I think it's really a stellar example of what can be done with browsers. Now we just need one of the comic book giants like Marvel or DC (or even a smaller publishing house) to "publish" a few pages of issues in this format. I'm sure sales would go up dramatically.

I would really love to know just how long it took to make this, though, regardless of the actual artwork (the html-ification of it), because the time it takes probably isn't viable for my webcomic utopia.

I'm using GWT to build a html5 (excuse the buzzword) game engine. It's brilliant. The documentation is first-class and it works perfectly.

If you have experience working with java, and know your way around the web, you should be fine. The only real limitation I'd come across was developing UIs, but this solves that problem.

I actually have a bit of a penchant for watches, but that's it. :)

No, thank you.

It's refreshing to see that people won't just immediately attack me for the opinion. It's such an uncommon view here, especially in my age group, that I get a lot of flack for it.

> Do you have this irrational hatred in other areas too?

Yes. I don't like tattoos (though I love art in general). Don't like piercings either. Can't complain about lazy people (unless it severely impacts me), and I'm perfectly happy with religious people, as long as they don't try to push their views on me. I'm sure I have a bunch more of these things, my ex-girlfriend would probably be very happy to remind me of them.

I'm not about to restrict anybody to do anything. I certainly used to be much worse about this sort of thing (to the point where I didn't speak to my father for about a year until he stopped smoking (that was quite a few years ago now, I think I was ten or eleven)), but since college and since meeting a bunch of new friends with better outlooks on life, I've tried to simply live a drama-free life. One in which I create no hassle for myself or for others, which includes not openly criticising people for their choices like I used to.

However, I won't enter into a relationship with a smoker (even a little bit once a month), heavy drinker, and I'd think long and hard about someone with tattoos. Couldn't really tell you why. Not much of an issue these days either. Game development is such a woman-friendly career choice. ;)

Not sure if I answered your questions there, just typing as I think. :)

> it would be preferable to just move these concepts (navigate back and up) right into the web page, or the web application

By web application, I presume you mean for example google docs, rather than a browser.

This would make it even less consistent, wouldn't it? Some pages/apps wouldn't have these controls, or they would look different or be in different locations across different pages/apps.

"Back" and "Up" are virtually indistinguishable for an average user. Hell, I'd be surprised if I could give a good description about the difference, and I know computers inside-out.

> There is absolutely nothing preventing web applications from giving a superior navigation experience than a one-size-fits-all web browser buttons.

Except for the users...

I wasn't really arguing that, though it brings up the fact that if you do it for long enough, it'll eventually become the standard. ;)

Not sure just how far I want to get into this, because most of my points are admittedly indefensible and most of it just stems from a long hatred of smoking.

I was anti-beer for a very, very long time as well (until virtually six months ago), though coffee has always been my vice.

I'm Irish, and I'm fairly young (approaching twenty soon, which puts me very far in the minority on these matters. ;))

Mostly, I simply don't see the point. I understand the need to socialise and the like, and the need for friends. However, I think that if I make friends when I'm in a different state of mind to my ordinary, day-to-day thinking, then are they really my friends?

Furthermore, I don't like having a crutch. I don't think anybody truly needs to get drunk/high/drink a pot of coffee in the morning to get them through the day. If you do, you've probably made some bad decisions and you should think long and hard about where you're going in life.

I also simply hate the stoner mentality. Why the hell would you want to just coast through life? I mean, make something of yourself! Make your parents proud!

I know, however, that I'm painting a large number of people with the same brush here. I know that many of the people who smoke weed sometimes aren't stoners. I have almost no problems with people who smoke weed every once in a while, just as I don't have problems with people who go to the pub sometimes or with people who drink the odd coffee. I do sincerely have problems with people who smoke pot every other night, or every time they hang out with people, or every time they get even a little stressed. (Medical marijuana doesn't count, though, provided naturally that it's actually necessary. I'm not going to judge people when they're in huge amounts of pain.)

The thing is, though, that past this little speech, I can barely defend my arguments. It's not that I just don't get it (though that's definitely a factor), it's also that I simply have an irrational hatred of smoking.

Go easy on me in your rebuttal, I'm only meek. :)

(this comment is aimed at you, but it's sort of pertinent to the article also)

You simply can't rip out a UI convention like that. Think about how many browsers there are. Virtually all of them use the back button and an URL bar. Say you made a browser without those, with an innovative new navigation system. Think it'll catch on? Extremely unlikely.

When you take out one of the oldest conventions in the book, people are going to use it for five seconds, 95% of them will decide they hate it, and will simply use what they're used to.

Consider iTunes 10. iTunes 10, released only a week or so ago, changed the UI in a minor way. Somewhat minor, anyway. Here's a screenshot: http://cl.ly/2OWb

Now, this looks a little different to your average Mac OS X app. Judging by my twitter feed, about 80% of my followers changed the window controls back to the old style (http://cl.ly/2ODf) as soon as the option became available.

They did this despite the fact that it makes sense. Having the controls vertically saves space and provides an extra thirty pixels (or so) to view their music.

Making sense doesn't matter in even rather minor UI changes like that. Like the old adage, a frog put in boiling water will jump straight out, but a frog being boiled will never notice.

Consistency is key when it comes to UI conventions, and it's _extremely_ hard to change the tide. The only way to do it is if other leading people do it also.

For example, Opera started using tabs on top at about the same time as Chrome did (don't quote me on that, I'm trying to make a point). Then Safari tried it, and now Firefox 4 has tabs on top as well. The only way to facilitate change is to not be alone in making it.

Furthermore! "Some sort of bookmark/search/wiki replacement navigation system needs to be developed." Do you have any ideas as to how to implement that? (I'd honestly love to hear them, I'm not trying to bee too much of a sanctimonious dick. ;))

While I'm more than a little anti-marijuana, I commend you on your use of tech in ways they weren't intended to be used. Original hacking. ;)

Brilliant, thank you!

>you can't agree or disagree with putting innocents in jail, killing people

Yeah, you can. It depends on your own personal philosophy, but the most common idea where this could be supported is (a slightly extreme version of) the greater good, or perhaps if you believe that the ends justify the means.

Disclaimer: I know very little about Cuba and Castro. Just being argumentative.

No, we built our own little wrapper, basically doing the same thing as we did for audio. A few JSNI methods, more than anything. It does almost the same thing as GWTCanvas, only with far less functionality, and more toned to our needs. We did this for two reasons:

1. We didn't need 80% of the functionality that's in GWTCanvas (and canvas in general), and the 20% that we did need was a little buggy. We thought it'd simply be quicker and more efficient to build our own rather than modify or fix GWTCanvas.

2. <canvas> is, to paraphrase Tim Schafer, slower than molasses going uphill in january, on crutches. Might as well be using Flash, really. It also doesn't work on some browsers (we're unofficially, quietly, don't-tell-anyone-I-said-this, going for mobile device support as well), and doesn't work the same way across all browsers either.

What we've done is use a graphics abstraction layer, so that when the time comes that we implement it with the DOM (which we're slowly working on, but canvas will do for the moment), we need to change virtually nothing in the rest of the code.

Afaik the other half of the Flax project is writing a blog post as we speak about how we implement Canvas. I'll be sure to submit it to HN. ;)

<spam>

I actually wrote a short-ass tutorial on that a while back, too. Mostly it's just JSNI, though. http://flax.ie/how-to-use-html5-audio-tag-with-gwt/#more-152

My engine code for the audio component is more or less the same as that, actually. I gave a small, quick explanation on that the other day: http://flax.ie/flax-html5-game-engine-development-diary-part...

</spam>

I found it fairly easy to do. We load the html for each sound object into the page, and then statically play/pause/stop/load them via the tag name. There's a JSON file, which contains a bunch of AudioContainer objects. When they're constructed, they construct their own HTML (so, the audio tag), and loads it into the page. Then we have a static-ish Audio service to make play/pause etc pretty easy. The JSON itself is made in our (as yet hypothetical) map editor. Must get to work on that, actually. ;)

I'm not massively happy with our solution, though. It works, but it's more complex than I feel it should be, considering that the actual implementation of it in js is so easy.

edit: I should point out that the entire point of the engine is so that you don't need Flash, which is why we're using <audio> rather than one of the pre-existing frameworks, like gwt-voices, which we would so totally use, if it didn't use Flash underneath somewhere.

Haha, that's virtually identical to what we're doing, except with GWT, so we can hand off some of the tough stuff to the underpinnings and don't have to deal with js's strange object-oriented system (at least to us, C++ programmers ;)).

So you didn't use the audio tag's <source> option? Did you find that too slow?

(also, I don't know if it'll help you at all, but I got audio working nicely on iPhone/iPod/iPad and wrote this tutorial about it http://flax.ie/how-to-get-hidden-autoplaying-audio-in-html5-...)

Edit: By the way, does your map editor output as JSON? We went through a bunch of crap getting serialisation/de-serialisation working across client/server, but you probably wouldn't hit any of those problems because your code isn't "compiled"

I certainly hope the Justin Bieber song on his desktop was an easter egg. ;)

I have the utmost respect for you. Myself and a college friend are currently working on a html5 game engine, but we're doing it in GWT, so we code Java rather than Javascript. We decided to do that because, well, it's goddamn difficult to make a really good game engine in js.

So, in summary, holy shit, that's absolutely amazing. Hats off.

I have two questions, though: How do you do your particle effects? Also, I noticed when you went through some code, you seemed to only point to Ogg Vorbis audio files. How does your sound system work?

(also, heh. Lesbian porn easter egg in the making-of video)

Edit: I should mention that our engine is (will be) open source. Not stealing your ideas, just really interested. ;)

Reminds me of the ifixit team on Apple product release day.

To be honest, I'd use GWT (http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/overview.html) for this kind of thing. Does the same thing, only it's Java -> Javascript. Been around for four years now, and hell, it's Google. Their documentation is excellent, for a start.

If I weren't so comfortable in Java, though, I'd definitely think about using this.

Strange, must be something conflicting with it on my end.

This immediately crashes Safari 5.0.1. :(

Works fine in Chrome though. Pretty awesome, I love it!

Every single time a new version of IE is released, I think "Hooray! The masses will be able to see the web as it's supposed to be seen!" and then I'm crushed.

Every. Single. Time.

Man, for some reason a mobo in a single square inch sounds like a great idea.

Must… resist… RDF…

I've never seen anyone abuse the enter button like he describes. On the other hand, if they did, I'd block them before they finished their second message.