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Revolutionary: Web Wii Wares
Every Tuesday, Mike Sylvester brings you REVOLUTIONARY, a look at the wide world of Wii possibilities. When WiiWare was announced, it seemed like a godsend for the garage developer wishing to make Wii games for mass appreciation. But details on how to get your hands on a WiiWare development kit and the costs involved are not public knowledge, and the official launch of the distribution channel (on the Wii Shop Channel) isn't going to be happening until some time next year. So what's a Wii-loving, budget-restricted developer to do in the meanwhile? Making games for Wii's Opera Browser is one option.
Experimental web app could bring AIM chat to iPhone
While the jury will of course be out until June 29th as to whether web-based chat apps like Meebo could be used on the iPhone to work around the lack of a true, built-in chat app, David Cann has developed an experimental web interface that might bring AIM to next week's highly-anticipated gadget. The service is up and running already, allowing users to log into AIM using Cann's page, but the adjective 'experimental' is used for a reason. First, it's suffering some rocky performance due, in part, to being dugg, but it's also based simply on some JavaScript that Cann is running with his own servers (while this might scare some privacy advocates, Cann promises users that he isn't harvesting any information or chats. Do with that what you will).Cann's iChat for iPhone service, as it's called, is also fairly limited in functionality, at least for now; this definitely isn't your Mac's iChat. Right now there are no groups, no buddy icons and opening more than 4 chats apparently is not recommended. Usage is also limited to only 10 minutes per session also, probably to help Cann sleep at night while he's tinkering with polishing this.Still, if at least some form of iChat is strongly desired or simply a necessity for some iPhone users, this iChat for iPhone could overcome the hurdle for at least a few potential customers. Of course, we're all expecting Apple to provide a more serious solution at some point, but as with so many other Apple-related offerings, we'll just have to play the waiting game.
The line between web and "real" apps on the iPhone
Rogue Amoeba apparently wanted to jump in today and be the first devs to thank His Steveness for presenting developers with a complete and terrific iPhone SDK this afternoon. Or-- in their sarcastic case-- the lack thereof.Yes, as you can see in the resulting comments, Mac developers aren't real thrilled that so far, the only way to develop for the iPhone will be to brush up on their AJAX, Javascript, and Ruby on Rails. By saying at the keynote that developers would be able to run web-based applications on the iPhone, Jobs opened a rift that's been widening: OS X developers say that they don't want to create web apps-- they'd rather work on "real apps."Later on in the RA thread, a commenter named Joe gets to the point: web apps are quickly becoming real apps. Even Apple's release of Safari for Windows points to the idea that the ultimate way to be compatible across all systems is to put programs (Gmail, Google Reader, even Twitter) in the browser. Web developers must be thrilled-- they all just became official iPhone programmers today.There's a big drawback, however, and it's not just that Mac devs who want to write for iPhone will have to blow the dust off of their old Javascript books. It's that the trade-off for compatibility is usually quality. If Apple had released an SDK for iPhone today (or when they do-- just because we didn't see it today doesn't mean it won't come next year), Mac devs say they'd be able to make even better applications-- because that's what they do for "real" hardware.
Make your own talent tree
If you haven't seen this yet, it's pretty funny. A site called Unleashed Gaming has broken out a nifty little feature: it's a javascript setup that allows you to create your own talent trees. Now you too can not only create your own specs and share them with others, you can actually create all new talent trees.A few of them have been popping up in different places. Linde offers a Hunter's wishlist tree that's chuckleworthy (the 51-point Marksmanship talent is called Swoop: "The next item you loot costs 0 DKP"), and Menae has made a much more cynical (and therefore hilarious) Priest talent tree. Finally, Priests are able to get Holyform (the tooltip says that the talent was really put in place just to shut the forum QQers up), and my favorite is probably (one of) the 51-point Shadow talents: with Improved Shadowform, "Your character is replaced with a Warlock."Unfortunately, just like the WoW Item Creator, there's no way to track what other people are making-- I'd love to see a list of the "ten most-viewed talent trees," just to see what people are coming up with. But this thing is definitely a lot of fun to play around with, whether you're trying to perfect what Blizzard does, or just mock them. If you come up with a good one, post it below.[ Thanks, Ootah! ]
Drosera - A JavaScript Debugger for WebKit
The WebKit group released a new tool called Drosera last night. It's a JavaScript debugger that will work alongside any WebKit application, including Safari. This is welcome news for the web design community -- any tool that can help JavaScript to work more fluidly in Safari is a good thing.
Creammonkey is great - but where are the scripts?
I found a Safari plugin by the name of Creammonkey, which is more or less an attempt at bringing Greasemonkey's abilities to Safari's side of the fence. For those unfamiliar with Greasemonkey: it's a Firefox extension that allows savvy javascript ninjas to add functionality to websites and services, such as enabling colored labels in Gmail or displaying in-bound links for a site you're visiting.It's hard to argue that the idea of adding functionality to websites isn't cool. Even in its infancy, the promises of Creammonkey sound really slick, but my one problem so far is: where are the scripts? Creammonkey is more or less a platform, and I'm having a really hard time tracking down any scripts to plug into it - including those pictured in this screenshot I borrowed.So, to the devs of Creammonkey (or the fantastic folks at PimpMySafari): could you put together some links to scripts that'll help make Creammonkey shine? Also, to you TUAW readers: does anyone care to link scripts they've found or created? Let's get this javascript party started.
