Four months after my last post, and here I am with a new blog post. If there ever is an award for the tardiest blogger on the planet, the least I can expect from my nomination will be a podium finish of sorts. From my last blog post till date, my addiction – hold your horses, it’s not opiate based –got stronger until it finally had a stranglehold. Scrabble Free. Boy oh boy, one of the best games for both the iOS and Android platforms although I favor the UI on the former, specifically on the iPod Touch. It has that perfect je ne sais quoi quality. Oh, oui oui!. Recently, testing out the game on a Samsung Galaxy Tab I had gotten for my sister found the app wanting a little bit in terms of usability but I cant be too picky knowing the lengths the coders over at EA in Montreal have gone to get it working seamlessly with the original iOS players through Origin. I will concede that creating a nice UI with Java is akin to pulling teeth. Been there.
Besides, onto other things, I spent late fall and early winter keeping tabs on the Pointer Lock(nee MouseLock) API implementation by David Humphrey and his team of brilliant students at Seneca College in Toronto. This is a subset of Mozilla’s WebAPI effort which aims to provide an HTML5 phone experience. The curious thing was that I didn’t set out to know the intricacies of a DOM API implementation, I just sort of happened onto it through a simple bug fix which just evolved. Briefly, what had begun as fixing Firefox playing media at volume although specified within its media element’s attributes to be muted after loading, ended with the implementation of the defaultMuted attribute to reflect the status of the muted attribute. They were a lot of aha moments but that was the point which i can definitely say, my understanding of the interrelationship between the content & dom portions of the codebase and the HTML specifications as detailed was enhanced. I am currently working on implementing support for a couple of attributes for the input element. Fun stuff so far. More on that later. XPCOM is another beast to tackle but our skirmishes have been enlightening all the same.
Christmas? Another memorable one where I broke out in cold sweat in a ladies store. No, it wasn’t Victoria’s. That’s a feat too daring for one as ‘shy’ as me. Why do us guys look so awkward in the women’s stores?Perhaps…an atavistic fear of other men discovering we have ‘softer’ sides?
Valentine’s Day? Don’t Ask.