Antipode

In an irresistibly-titled post, Peter Berger writes about why games that aren’t fun right away are going to have a harder and harder time getting interest:

I have finally come to peace with the fact that I no longer have any interest in playing games that require as much effort as my job. So, sorry, no Sims 3 for me. … This feeling of spite has been compounded by the fact that I’ve been playing (and buying) tons of iPhone games recently, and then also bought a Windows game for $30.

The Firefox guys are working on a new project called Electrolysis for separating Firefox into multiple processes, like Chrome. This has been my #1 feature request for Firefox for quite some time, and now they’ve got their proof of concept running. Considering the size and age of the Gecko code, though, I won’t be holding my breath quite yet.

Today the lead Textmate developer made his first blog post about Textmate 2 in about two years:

I am trying to slowly turn this boat. With this post, I hopefully am showing that a hand is at the wheel. I know I’ve been quiet too long about my plans. I can’t make up for that, but going forward, I aim to do better.

It’s good to have an update, since it was previously scheduled with Duke Nukem Forever, which is finally, mercifully, dead.

Good news everyone! The Chromium developers have now stopped their fork of WebKit in favour of using the latest WebKit at all times¹. Moving forward, supporting Chrome should be even more trivial once you support WebKit in general.

1. via Robert Accettura. [↩]

Francisco Tolmasky of 280 North was, like most JavaScript developers, frustrated with some aspects of debugging. Unlike most JavaScript developers, he’s started patching WebKit to improve the experience:

Anyone who’s done a significant amount of profiling with Firebug has probably run into the dreaded question mark functions at some point or another. … So in order to solve this issue once and for all, we decided to define a way to explicitly give functions a name for debugging: the displayName attribute. … The other thing we focused heavily on doing these last couple of weeks was completely rewriting the Bottom Up View of the WebKit profiler.

This should be a big win for people writing thick-client web apps with Cappuccino, GWT, SproutCore, and the like. It seems 280 North guys aren’t going to stop challenging what people think are Javascript’s limits.

Mozilla and Google have recently put out proposals for 3D graphics standards for the web. Chris Blizzard of Mozilla has a good summary on the differences between Google’s O3D and Mozilla’s Canvas 3D:

So these two 3D things from Mozilla and Google are pretty different.  Not really competitive, either, because they have such different goals.  The Google software is a very high level API 3D graphics API and what we’re proposing is more akin to the low level graphics API that those high-level systems are built on.

He makes a great argument for why concise, low-level standards are better than monolithic yet impressive ones.

The Bottom Feeder is a great new blog by indie game developer Jeff Vogel. In his otherwise great article about how to price games, he makes one terrible misstep:

Braid lasts about 6 hours, or about $2.50 an hour. A little on the pricey side, but the game gets away with it by being so fun. Our newest game, Geneforge 5: Overthrow, lasts about 30 hours, or less than a buck an hour.

Games’ value is not based on length! This sort of thinking may be appealing to children or the unemployed, but most people don’t have a quota of game playing hours that must be filled. Instead, games need to be priced on how much enjoyment they provide. I had as much fun playing the four-hour game Portal as I did playing the open-ended game Burnout. I played Burnout for longer, but they were worth the same amount (maybe $25) because they had the same amount of total enjoyment. A game that spread that amount of fun over 100 hours would actually be worth much less, since I would never finish it.

Let’s have a round of applause for the guys at Mobify.me, who launched the mobile version of A List Apart today. It’s a lot of fun watching guys you’ve hung with since university go out there and kick some real butt.