IE9: Microsoft Strikes Back

After pretty much ignoring Internet Explorer for the last few years, I'm surprised to find myself using the latest and greatest version this morning. And so far? I like it.

The first thing I did once I got the new browser beta up and running was to check out my own site, where I've got a pretty good idea of what previously didn't work well (or at all) in IE. What I found surprised me:

What Works

• Surprisingly, Canvassa! IE9 runs my little HTML5 Canvas game quite well, in fact.
• My resume looks great. The only advanced feature it doesn't do right is liquid columns, but that's relatively minor, really.

What Doesn't Work

• My portfolio doesn't work. Time to revisit some of that code.
• The new "pinning a webpage as an app" functionality doesn't look very good for my site yet; I need to figure out what <meta> tags to include to make it look better.

Everything else seems to be working well. The new developer tools are nice, addon-disabling feature was pretty sweet, and the minimal browser chrome gets out of the way on my tiny netbook screen and lets the Web shine through. Overall, I've got to hand it to the IE team: this is a great step in the right direction, and I for one welcome the return of the Browser Wars... because Competition = Innovation.

JSConf 2010: Final Thoughts and Links

Today I saw in my blog reader that Guillermo Rauch over at DevThought has posted his list of JSConf links, similar to mine (Day 1 and Day 2). He's got a few links I haven't got in mine, but I have some he doesn't, too (he only listed Track A talks). So in the interest of cross-pollination, I've updated my posts and will give him a heads-up of my additions as well, when I can (my work firewall blocks his site for some reason).

Also, in the interest of pointing out other coverage of the best pirate-themed JavaScript conference on the East Coast, here are a few other blogs that have posted cool wrap-ups:

• Cowboy, a.k.a. Ben Alman, posted this great summary of the talks he attended, complete with photos
• Kevin Dangoor posted a similar wrapup to his own blog, with some nice commentary on Day 1 talks.
• Ted Leung did a great overview of the conference as a whole
• Rey Bango posted a bunch of awesome video interviews he took while attending. Go. Watch. I'll wait.

Oh, and in only-slightly-related news, I'm now on Reddit. Don't know that I'll post there much, but thought it was worth mentioning.

Finally, a note on plans. I think enough people appreciated these "In Case You Missed It" posts, that I'm going to try to keep doing them — at least when the conference interests me. Here are the next few I've got my eye on covering, time permitting:

Conference	Date
GDC Canada	6-7 May
Google I/O	19-20 May
TXJS	5 Jun
VSLive!	2-6 Aug
GDC Austin	5-8 Oct
JSConf.eu	25-26 Sept

Cloning Zelda: Meet Canvassa's Little Brother

I recently received an email from Rune Andreas Grimstad, requesting my permission to use some of the data assets I created for Canvassa (specifically the map data and sprite tiles). You see, he's doing a Zelda clone of his own — for Silverlight (like his blog title suggests, "It should be fun").

Anyway, I'm happy to share... especially since the game design and sprites aren't mine in the first place! ;) But even my code is there to be shared — that's why I put it on GitHub, after all. Anyone else who wants to use that stuff can either fork the Github repo directly, or just grab it and use it. All I ask in return is a quick note like Rune's, to let me know about the project, so I can link back to it and throw a few clicks your direction.

Updated download: Bat'leth 3.1

This weekend I've been working with Bat'leth, a tool I wrote a number of years ago for text processing and data format manipulation, on a project for my Computational Linguistics graduate work that I'll be blogging about soon. As I worked with it, I noticed that it was looking quite dated. It didn't support XP-style controls, some of the button images were inconsistently styled and not properly masked, and so forth. (I also found a bug or two!)

As I wrote a few days ago, I have a love/hate relationship with my old Visual Basic code: I love how easy it is to hack together a "quick and dirty" tool when I need one, and I hate how hard it is to make it actually look polished and modern when finished. Then I stumbled across an add-on for VB called vbAdvance. It extends old-school VB in some very welcome ways, including the ability to compile an XP manifest file into your apps so that they support the newer visual styles (other cool features include the ability to create DLLs with function exports, console apps with no GUI, and several other nifty bits). Though originally commercial, it's now classed as "unsupported freeware," so if you or anyone you know does any work in classic VB, this is well worth your time.

Anyway, thanks to vbAdvance and a little surplus time this weekend, I've updated Bat'leth to version 3.1, now available on my downloads page as both an install package and full VB6 source code. Enjoy, and let me know if you find this at all useful.

Next Cloning Target...?

I know I owe a Canvassa update, and seriously, it is coming -- I've just been distracted lately. By things like this awesome fan-made MegaMan game being made:

A few months ago I met Ryan McGrath at JSConf 2009 (a Javascript developers conference), and he mentioned to me that he'd been toying with making a web-based MegaMan game. His comment, and seeing what MegaPhilX and N64Mario are doing with this custom MegaMan engine, has put the "bug in my ear," so to speak. So at some point in the future when I'm done working on the Zelda clone... well then, looks like it may be MegaMan's turn.

Firefox 3.5

Quick post this week; there's too much going on in my personal life (see my root blog for details) for a full update.

After months of anticipation, Firefox finally released version 3.5 today. And I must say, so far it seems very worth the wait. If you're still using Internet Explorer (even the better-but-still-nonstandard version 8), you owe it to yourself to give Firefox a try.

Also, to make this just a tiny bit more related to my blog, I tested the latest Canvassa pages (the game, Bestiary, and Mapper) in FF 3.5, and they all seemed to benefit from the new-and-improved JavaScript engine.

Next week (or sooner), I hope to have a new post up in the Cloning Zelda series... if I can just get the item states / animations resolved.