Topic Archive: Games

Facebook apps: Not too late to compete on the user experience front

Brian Dillard, Thursday, May 29, 2008 @ 4:12 pm

Despite the hype, Facebook's a frontier rather than an established metropolis. There's still room to ride into town on a white horse and save the day, earning yourself a healthy reward in the process. Exhibit A? The so-so user interface standards of the social network's most popular applications.

I recently, belatedly started playing Scrabulous with various friends and I'm shocked at the just-okayness of its UI. The lack of an on-screen legend for the mechanics of the variously shaded bonus squares? Puzzling. The drag-and-drop interface for shuffling tiles around in your tray? Maddeningly persnickety. The mismatch between the word lookup feature, which uses thefreedictionary.com, and the application's own, internal whitelist of valid words? A real bummer.

Scrabulous provides an adequate ripoff of a venerable and justly loved board game. But the rough edges of its user experience suggest that Facebook still has plenty of room for folks who know how to polish a UI till it gleams. Sure, first-to-market advantage gets magnified on social networks. But as these new application platforms mature, I'm convinced user experience design can provide a compelling means of product differentiation.

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GWT Conference: Tools Panel

Dietrich Kappe, Wednesday, December 5, 2007 @ 7:49 pm

The highlight here was Fred Sauer's HornetBlaster game. Yeah, not what the browser was designed to do, but still kind of sick.

I had to serve up the softball question of "Is GWT code bloated." Ray Cromwell had the best response. Dojo mail is bigger and slower than GWT Mail. And GWT Mail will get faster and smaller just be recompiling with new versions.

Technorati Tags: gwt, ajax, tools, games

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Another GWT Tutorial

Dietrich Kappe, Friday, June 30, 2006 @ 9:00 am

Update: I've posted 36 GWT Tutorials, a more up-to-date list of GWT tutorials.

I know I promised this would be ZK week, but my code reading is going a little slower than I expected. So let me work in some more news about GWT. I know, I know, you're sick of GWT (or maybe you're not). But there's a nice new tutorial over at java.net. It's called Kickstarting Google Web Toolkit on the Client Side and it provides, in increasing order of sophistication, three example GWT applications: a simple "Hello World!" app; an amusing Zork type adventure game ("unlock door", "go north", "read plaque", etc.); a cool little animation made up of a few simple yet effective pieces.

This is probably the best GWT tutorial I've see to date as it actually tries to do something beyond flinging around some labels and text fields. Of course, the tech publishers are probably hard at work on a book that builds a non-trivial application with persistence and rich features. This will have to tide you over until then.

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More AJAX Games - Battleship

Dietrich Kappe, Friday, June 2, 2006 @ 9:00 am

How long before Pong? Battleship, a pretty easy game to implement, has made it's appearance as an AJAX powered game.

It has a few defects: if you reload the page it repeats the dialog and puts you back into the setup phase which made the UI get out of sync with the game state. Also, my opponent was apparently unable to shoot after he hit my first ship. The chat function was marvelous for commiserating about how the game didn't work.

The game makes use of many of the most popular Javascript libraries.

<script src="js/import/prototype.js" type="text/javascript"></script><script src="js/import/scriptaculous.js" type="text/javascript"></script><script src="js/import/effects.js" type="text/javascript"></script><script src="js/import/window.js" type="text/javascript"></script><script src="js/import/dragdrop.js" type="text/javascript"></script><script type="text/javascript" src="js/chat.js"></script>

I'd say it's good for one play before the tears of boredom stream down your face.

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March of the Games

Dietrich Kappe, Monday, April 24, 2006 @ 9:00 am

It seems the evolution of games that happened on the PC and on-line is repeating itself in the AJAX arena. First come the board games -- see Ajax Chess, 64Pola, and Morfiks -- and the muds -- hive7, then the low fidelity arcade games, then the first person shooter games. Is AJAX Doom too far away? Yeah, probably.

The chess games are actually pretty lousy, more experiments in Ajax rather than real apps. I've written a few chess games in my time and will take a crack at one that incorporates back-end access to a chess engine. Why reinvent the wheel? Just expose a FEN web service wrapper over a winboard engine like crafty.

The truth is that for the first person shooters and other higher perf stuff, flash is better than AJAX based apps are likely to be (See here for everything from Doom to WarCraft to Mortal Kombat in Flash). In truth, if you scratch below the surface a bit, what differentiates something like Flash and Java Applets from AJAX for any sort of application is the install and startup overhead. OpenLaszlo can communicate with the server just fine, thank you, and Java Applets have been able to do that since the beginning. So why all the hype over AJAX now?

Now that it's all wrapped into the browser, it seems tempting to move to AJAX. It's already in there, so they can't resist like they can with Flash and Applets. What are they going to do, turn off Javascript?

But for everyone from those developing public facing to intranet apps, there's reason to look beyond the buzz of AJAX. If you're making the move to interactive, rich client user experience, is AJAX really the right choice? Do you trust your Ajax framework vendor enough or do you have deep enough pockets to keep your apps up-to-date with the changing browser landscape? Is the kind of rich client experience you are after achievable with AJAX? Why didn't you go with the other technologies in the first place and settled on a forms-and-reports conventional webapp instead?

Go over your reasons again or you may find yourself implementing Doom in AJAX.

Update 1: pitstreet.com has an assortment of Javascript games, including some that employ AJAX. Their usability leaves something to be desired. Just try to find the chess or reversi games.

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