Some random Sunday fun: a live Pong game where you can enable/disable the lines of code driving it. Fun for at least a few minutes.

Launchpad is a fun machine-building science Flash game, sponsored by the UK Science Museum. It has a clever UI, and includes a level editor.

Also see my flash games for kids page.

Tile based games, a lengthy set of topics covering concepts and howtos on making Flash-based tile games. A good site on isometric flash approaches, and some speedy scrolling examples.

A good example of what’s possible with HTML, JavaScript and SVG. So many possibilities!

Wow, BoingBoing has gone all out with the flare. Today I counted 39 ads, ranging from unobtrusive chicklets to full flash-animated nonsense. At least they have a full RSS feed, otherwise they would have lost me already.

I bumped into a few nifty Javascript tools today: a 6502 assembler and emulator, and a full charting tool — both written in Javascript.

Scribd (a recently funded YouTube-like document sharing site) takes an interesting approach for sharing documents: in a flash app, and in multiple formats. It can even read texts out aloud.

A flash-based comic strip generator. This one is mostly usable too.

An Adobe developer complains about porting Flash 8 to Linux. Sounds like they made things difficult themselves. Going against the grain is always going to sting a bit.

Today I was thinking about how to write a web app that draws comic bubbles. There are many parts and solutions to the problem. It’s one of those things that gets complex quickly, unless you’re willing to remove some of the harder features.

I need to spend some time thinking about compromise, as a perfect solution is unlikely given the tools available for web applications.

Some of the problems:

• Embedding special fonts
• Resizing irregular bubbles
• Adding/positioning bubble parts
• Positioning fonts based on irregular edges
• Clipping bubbles to strip edges
• How/where to render (client or server, svg, js, raster, etc.)

I can see a few different approaches. Each solves a few of the hard problems, and each has its own rough spots.

One approach would be to perform the rendering on the server side. Something like Inkscape could be pared down to run as a web service. Comics would be stored in SVG, but rendered to GIF/PNG to embed in the web pages. Comic authors would edit their strips using rich Javascript approximations (edit boxes over the rendered form), and readers would see the already-rendered strips. This allows for high quality rendering, for authors who wanted to go to press with their strips.

Another approach would live within the limitations of xhtml/css/javascript. Fonts would be limited, and all rendering would be done client-side. Features could be added to this as browsers matured, but would depend heavily on browser vendors and compatibility. This approach would initially limit things like clipping, available fonts, etc., but would likely be easier to build.

There are dozens of other approaches too. Flash or the canvas widget could be used, or something written in Java. Luckily I don’t have time to start today, so I’ll have to let my subconscious gnaw on it for a while.