Douglas Edric Stanley worked on a nice twitter “tool”. Zzzz grabs twitter-messages and show them in a nice and friendly “tree-environment”. Unfortunately you cannot add your own account or a custom keyword-search. At the moment, all that the thing shows are tweet-messages, that use “zzz” or “zzzz”. But in the end, exploring all the “zzzz” is far more interesting, than another twitter-application. Read detailed about the app at Douglas Stanleys blog. (via)
A quick announcement. NES-Emulator FCEUX got a new feature, that let you play the old games with a control, similar to Kirby on the Nintendo DS. Look at the video, to get the concept. I think it is also called ‘rainbow riding’. This is so beautiful. Just recently, we had announced the moving-blocks feature of FCEUX. (via)
Now this is a hard one. Because is it so radical. Nintendo continues with its most radical game design so far – the Wario Ware (please correct me on that one, if you know it better). It is a collection of mini, or better micro-games, that loosely connect into one big play. Or better playability.
The next thing, that can be seen on the horizon already, is WarioWare: Made in Ore. The game will be basically the same as Wario Ware, but multiplied with one more measure of new radical creation of content. Because, the user will be able to add own mini-games to the Wario Ware channel. The microgames can be created and customized with the Nintendo hardware and the editors, that come along. Nintendo is planning make some sort of online-shop named “Game Shop Ninte” available, where you can upload own levels, as well as download, share and remix things other users made. Also the best levels of the month should be picked. Now say what?
Enough theory. Here is some evidence.
Absolutely at the roots of Super Mario, with that spacial dash of microgames.
Create graphics and basic animations
Create “Cart Art”
More videos of this i.e. at Offworld.
The Pragmatic Bookshelf is about to release a new book with the name “The Passionate Programmer” by Chad Fowler. It may be not as inspiring as the masterpiece “The Pragmatic Programmer“, but a perfect read for entry-level programmer and people new to lean, agile and pragmatic thinking. I highly suggest the reading of this demo-chapter (pdf), about “incremental development”: Just be a little bit better, than yesterday. From the chapter:
“You also need to be happy with small amounts of “better”. Writing one more test than you did yesterday is enough to get you closer to the goal of “being better about unit testing”. If you’re starting at zero, one additional test per day is a sustainable rate, and by the time you can no longer do better than yesterday, you’ll find that you’re now “better about unit testing” and you don’t need to keep making the same improvements. If, on the other hand, you decided to go from zero to 50 tests on the first day of your improvement plan, the first day would be hard, and the second day probably wouldn’t happen. So make your improvements small and incremental but daily. Small improvements also decrease the cost of failure. If you miss a day, you have a new baseline for tomorrow.”
E-book download is already available for purchase. The printed version will be shipped around the 10th of May 2009.
Screenshots from 2000er Music Tech V2.0 Game Boy
Chipmusic-musician and music-lecturer Pixelh8 decided to put up a free-for-download version of the software-synths he made for GameBoy Advanced and Nintendo DS, called the “Music Tech Pro Performer“. He says, that already music-students of his lectures use the software. But he is “getting more involved in music education and software it’s nice to see something being used by lots of people instead of just me and few others.” Well, pragmatic thinking? At least, the software is free for download, but you should be aware, that the copyright remains at Pixelh8. Yes, you can use it in music productions, but no you can’t use the sounds for making sound-libraries or distribute the software yourself. (via)
Music Tech Pro Performer Nintendo DS / GBA
Andrew said “Hello” via E-Mail, just after spotting posting on the ToneMatrix-synth here on this blog. He is also in programming audio-visual systems. Andrew is into Processing and the works on his webpage Kosmotrope instantly caught my interest. He works on exploration of audio-visual systems, that connects generative audio-system with clean graphics and an overall balanced design. We managed to do a little interview. He currently lives in Kentucky, United States.
Screenshots from Closest.
