While I have been spending some time here and there working on the game I’ve picked up a couple of other projects which will likely find themselves out in the world before my space game.

Next steps are to dig in to Cucumber (according to Erik, it might not be as useful for writing specs for my game because I’m working on that solo, but will likely be more useful for collaborating with others), revisit Selenium (especially in regards to using it with Flash), and to check out WebRat.

I’m also going to dig in to ASUnit and FlexUnit soon too… as soon as I get more of the game’s backend in shape. ASUnit was written/is maintained by the uber-awesome Pattern Park guys, so it’s going to get my attention first. I’m also really interested in the new integrated unit testing in Flash Builder 4 (the Eclipse-based IDE formerly known as Flex Builder), but I’ve gotta upgrade to Leopard before it’s possible to check out Adobe’s latest betas. (Does anyone have an “extra license” as part of their OSX family upgrade pack, and if so, would you maybe be willing to adopt me so I can be part of your family?)

One of the fun diversions I’ve been enjoying is a super-casual game called MyBrute. Basically, you create a cutesy anime-ish warrior and duke it out in three daily fights in the arena, randomly acquiring new skills and weapons when you level up. For a game which requires so little user interaction (the fighting is completely automated) it’s a surprisingly pleasant way to spend ~5ish minutes a day, rooting for your character.

Lastly, Semantic Seed has offered the SJ Ruby Hackfest some space to meet for weekly/bi-weekly evening hackfests. That’s super-cool, and I’m stoked about it. If you’re interested in coming out to hack during the week please let me know what evening(s) work best for you. I’m hoping to accommodate as many folks’ schedules as possible.

I’m really regretting NOT taking a more TDD-like approach from the get-go. The tests I’ve been writing have exposed bugs I didn’t even realize existed and have helped me focus on specific bits of functionality vs. chasing rabbits down whichever rabbit-holes seem promising. TDD is awesome! It’s not just about tests… it’s about writing better code and helping see the actual path ahead. What’s NOT to like about that?

Zed Shaw has a great blog post on Hemispatial Neglect which has me doing a fair bit of thinking about my blind spots and acceptance of things/the “status quo.” I really appreciate what Zed has to say, and I think he’s often hilariously funny. The Hemispatial Neglect post, and his thoughts on directions his Lamson project could go are really thought-provoking and interesting. Zed makes me want to learn Python… once I get my game alpha released, maybe. (Or maybe not, ’cause if I dig Python I’ll be tempted to rewrite bits of my game yet again. Re-writing != Releasing!)

I went to Flashcamp at Adobe HQ in San Francisco last night and had a great time. I rode up with Big Badass Ben Floering and got to see some VERY cool stuff demoed. Flash Catalyst (formerly codenamed “Thermo”) is really awesome-looking and I’m going to dig into it super-soon (maybe tonight) and play around. It’s a very cool/interesting/promising tool which will hopefully help bridge the “Designer/Developer Gap” somewhat. I’m definitely intrigued/interested. The new support for CSS Selectors in Flex are very cool too… finally, it’s starting to look more like traditional web development though there’s still plenty of Flex attribute naming weirdness. It’s definitely a welcome step in a more sensible direction.

Personal highlights of Flashcamp for me were more aligned with talking with folks than seeing the demos, though.

I got to say howdy to one of my Software Development Idols, Peter Armstrong (Ruboss Technology Corporation/ RestfulX), who told me that he’d come down from Canada to Flashcamp to catch up on Flex 4 stuff and that he was going to lock himself in a hotel room for four days to get some work done on his book. Awesomeness. I should write a post about some of the reasons Peter is one of my heroes… he’s a really super-cool guy who not-enough-folks know of and are missing out by not knowing.

While I was sitting/blabbing with SILVAFUG South Honcho Keith Sutton Adobe was having a raffle. While neither Keith, Big Badass Ben Floering, or I won anything we were glad that Bess Ho won a copy of CS4 Master edition. I have to confess that I’m a wee bit jealous, but as Keith pointed out “it’s nice to see someone deserving win cool stuff.” Keith and Bess did a presentation at the last SILVAFUG meeting(s) on Designer and Developer Workflow. It was definitely goooood stuff.

Homeslice Carl Tanner (Captain Proton) won a gift certificate for a beer store, which was kinda funny ’cause I think he’s pretty straight-edge… but hey, winning something is winning something, y’know?

I also got to blab with Badass Uberpimps Luke Bayes and Ali Mills (ASUnit, Pattern Park, Project Sprouts, PureMVC Presenters, AssertTrue, and like 95% of all the other cool stuff on the internet) which was, as usual, a good enough reason to head up to the City in and of itself.

Ali and Luke both gave my “new (old) look” a thumbs-up and Luke whipped out a picture of his fantastic mohawk from when he was 17. I had to show a picture of myself from a month or two ago to get a couple of people to be able to recognize me. Sooooo funny!

Luke spent his Memorial Day weekend “making OpenID work.” He forked Bort on github and has a demo version up on Heroku. I aspire to be even 10% as prolific and awesome as Luke and Ali. I find them both to be amazingly cool humans who do amazing stuff. I always feel inspired by those cats.

I also had nice chats with Chris Luebcke, Josh Tynjala, Radley Marx, and a whole slew of other fine folks. One of the ladies working at the event even waltzed with me for a moment!

Executive summary: Flashcamp was good times, fo sho.

Today’s hackfest has been good… less hacking than yacking, but that’s good stuff too! I’ve been having a great running conversation with Stephan Branczyk about, well… everything!? He’s totally my kind of h4×0r… into plenty of interesting things. Our conversation touched on:

QR Codes and scanning UPC/ISBN codes from one’s phone

Nokia Phones:

Stephan’s recently acquired Nokia E71

The very cool Nokia N97, which will run Flash Lite apps (Woo!)

A Flash Lite/Nokia app contest and the Open Screen Project Fund

The Art of Game Design book (non-affiliate link)

Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment (non-affiliate link)

The Unity Game Engine

Uber Game Designer Nicole Lazzaro’s presentation on emotions in game(s|rs).

From Casual Content:

Nicole Lazzaro, founder and president of XEODesign, is an award-winning interface designer and the leading authority on emotion and the fun of games. Her seventeen years of research defined the mechanisms of emotion that drive play and reshaped the fun of over 40 million player experiences including Myst, the Sims, Diner Dash and smart pens. She has helped clients such as EA, DICE, Ubisoft, Monolith, Sony, Playfirst, and Maxis explore new game mechanics and audiences. A frequent speaker, she enjoys sharing her research on why people play. Prior to founding XEODesign in 1992, Nicole earned a degree in Cognitive Psychology from Stanford University and worked in film.

Testing Frameworks:

Selenium

Windmill

The hipness of Moo Cards

Stephan is demanding that I publish something… and demanding that I sling some code… so I’m hitting “publish” and will clean this up when I get home.

I also had a nice chat outside with a couple of dreadhead kids while I was feeding my monkey… so many interesting people.

While the music they play at Hydration is a mixed bag (literally… they mostly play mix-cds) they were playing a great song by Jason Mraz (feat. Colbie Caillat) which I rather liked:

It’s been a good couple of days… now it’s time to get back to my tests. I’m down to 13 failures (out of 160 tests), which are all mostly related to some changes I made to the way ship inventories work. I’m getting kinda sick of thinking about ship inventories but I’m getting close to having them WORKING with TESTS, so of course that’s a thing of beauty!

PuTTy is like Windows Methadone

Adobe AIR to the rescue.

HelloTxt has a mobile client interface written in HTML so making a simple cross-platform desktop app was as simple as firing up Flex Builder, adding panel and HTML components, and specifying HelloTxt’s mobile client interface’s URL as the HTML component’s “location.” I then twiddled around with a little bit of styling and config. stuff but that wasn’t necessary to make it work.

<mx:windowedapplication title="Grrrgregg8r" height="550" width="300"
  layout="absolute" xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml">
  <mx:panel headerheight="10" bottom="0" right="0" top="0" left="0"
    layout="absolute">
    <mx:html bottom="0" top="0" left="0" right="0"
      location="http://m.hellotxt.com/" />
  </mx:panel>
  </mx:windowedapplication>

A cross-platform desktop application in five lines of MXML. Pretty dang nifty if you ask me.

A compiled/working version of Grrrgregg8r is available by right-clicking the link below and doing that “save as” thang.

Grrrgregg8tr - An AIR “microbrowser” for HelloTxt

During his presentation, someone suggested turning down the lights so that it’d be easier to see his slides. Susser joked: “Hey, if we do that they you won’t be able to see me!”I shouted “we don’t need to see you, ’cause I have a tattoo of you on my arm.*”

Susser retorted “it’s nice to have fans!” and resumed his outstanding presentation.

I was sitting next to my new friend Harlan and asked him if he’d draw a smiley face on my arm (with eyebrows and a subtle eyebrow piercing) and put “Susser Rox!” underneath it. When the presentation was over, I went up to Susser and said “dude, I’m serious… check out my tattoo!” and rolled up my sleeve.

Harlan took this picture, which I think clearly shows how Susser responded:

I really love being a tiny guppy in the huge Rails Community lake.

* I think I did my standard “stammering” thing, so I may not have actually said precisely this, but it’s definitely what I meant.

Flex Stuff:

• Flex MDI: Simplifies multiple-window(document) interfaces. Way cool.
• dpunit: Flex Unit and Integration Testing, apparently different from FlexUnit.
• FlexUnit: Flex Unit Testing
• Spectra: A cool Flex Newsreader written by Microsoft. (via Bruce Eckel’s blog)
• Degrafa: A Declarative Graphics Framework for Flex.

Rails Stuff:

• Dr. Nic: Generating New Gems
• Gemspec Reference
• Single File Rails Application
• Yaml for Ruby Documentation
• Sake: System-wide Rake (HANDY!)