Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!

This past Sunday, I took my younger (14) son down to Austin to check out the Maker Faire. We had a fantastic time. We started off by watching the life-sized mouse trap game. Wandering idly past many craft booths, we got to the fabrication/rapid prototyping/automated machining area. It was mind-boggling! I haven't kept up with developments in this area, and I was blown away by the open-source multi-material rapid prototyping kits, 3D printers, CNC Routers, self-copying 3D printers, and astonishing laser engraving systems. At the laser engraver's booth we got a little Aztec calendar "printed" at 600 dpi in three dimensions from a solid sheet of balsa wood.

Next, we visited several areas where you could get hands-on and make T-shirts, circuit boards, kites, and other neat stuff. We dropped off some clothes at the Swap-O-Rama-Rama, but never came back to make our own customized duds from other peoples' donations. We played with jets of air, watched a "robo-thespian", oohed and aahed at the pyrotechnics of the Ring of Fire, and drooled over the display of Estes rockets. An enthusiastic rep told me all about building my own street-legal car, which my son agreed would be a great project for the next two years if we just had a spare $10,000 lying around. We saw evil robotic pumpkins, including a pumpkin Dalek. We saw mousetrap-powered toy vehicles. We admired dirty car art.

Taking a break from cool technology, we moved on to Cyclecide. This was a fenced-off area with pedal-powered sort-of-carnival-rides and weird, wonderful mutant bikes. We ended up spending over an hour riding around and having an absolute blast - my favorite was the 4-foot tall bike, and my son enjoyed providing taxi service with a bike that had two comfy chairs attached to it. Thoroughly sun- and wind-burned, we finally tore ourselves away to eat and drink.

There were amazing decorated cars, and an arena full of robotics. The Robot Group was out in force. Some of the robots were excruciatingly cute. Frankly, I was somewhat dazed by this point. Finally, we watched the Diet Coke and Mentos fountain demonstration, applauded vigorously, and headed off to the Cheesecake Factory for dinner.

Feature Progress / TODO List / Open Thread

This post is linked from the sidebar, so that it remains accessible for a long time. It has three purposes related to game features: keep you updated on which I am working on now, show you all of the suggestions, and provide a single place for new suggestions and discussion.

Evan is currently working on: Ensuring that everyone is able to play.

TODO List (will do, eventually) (no particular order yet)

• Interface options: "Classic", compact, large fonts
  
• Team-relative list of words found/not found/only I found
• Facebook application
• Google gadget
• Alternate scoring options: "no errors" bonus; only unique (or <=X%) count; 1 point per word; unique bonus; only N+ letter words
• Extended score display: # of words guessed, # of valid words, percentages found
  
• Clean up word list
• "Private" games
  
• Other languages (German, Italian, and Norwegian have been requested)
  
• Statistics / rankings / hall of fame
  
• Snapshots / game history.
  

Suggestion List (may do, if enough people support)

• Audible end-of-round clicks (option)
• Allow players to attach personal info to their name (location, IM, email, etc)
• Casual games: 5+ minute rounds, longer intervals
• Allow "Qu" cube to be treated as just "Q" (option)
• Alternate word lists (Scrabble, simplified, etc) selectable by player
• Press a key to submit the guess but not erase it, so it can be extended/edited.
  

Let's all go on Safari

The show-stopping Safari bugs are dead. The Beta is now OS X-safe.

I learned two valuable lessons about Safari:

1. window.console.log() is a nifty way to trace your code's progress, and it works with both FireBug and Safari . . . sort of. Pass it anything more than a simple string, such as objects that FireBug will cheerfully use to augment your console log, and Safari will fall over dead.
2. If your web site has only one frame in its frameset, don't put "noresize" on that frame. Safari apparently takes that to mean "for every page after the first that I load in this frame, don't show it until the user clicks somewhere." Who knew?
   

4AM Destruction

A quick tip for programmers working on web applications:

• Do not commit code changes at 4 in the blessed AM.
  
• No matter how much you think it will help.
• Even if you sometimes operate under the name "4AM Productions"

Bad things will happen, and you will set yourself up for a day of really lousy technology karma when you get up in the morning six hours later.

Why do I mention this? No particular reason. On an unrelated note, my forehead is sore and I seem to have damaged the surface of my desk somehow.

News that isn't

As you have surely noticed already if you are a WEBoggle fan, I started another pledge drive and used it to announce the beta of the new version of the game. As with the last pledge drive, many of you have stepped up to support me and the game, including quite a few of you who startled me with your generosity last time.

Lots of you have been banging on the beta and giving me great feedback. Several nasty teething issues have been discovered and dealt with - the scoring bug in IE is dead! Note to myself and to other JavaScript programmers: beware of subscripting strings using "x[i]" notation - IE chokes on it, and prefers "x.charAt(i)", despite all the other browsers dealing with it just fine.

One show-stopper bug remains: I have multiple reports of the game taking Safari down hard. Once I've dealt with that, I can move on to the great suggestions I've received, such as preference options for "Classic" interface mode and large fonts mode. I'll have guessed words go into the list in reverse order (most recent guess at the start of the list) and include invalid guesses in the list (along with the reason for invalidity). I'll improve the interface. I'll add an account page for changing email/password, managing sub-accounts, and Deluxe game settings.

Then I'll be ready to take it out of beta and really get going on Deluxe features, including better and more flexible game board customization, more options such as allowing invalid words to be typed, audible round-end alerts, alternate scoring rules, "private" games, and more.

Mind the Gap

You can probably tell that I'm not a "natural" blogger. I hesitate to post unless I've got "real news" of some kind, and this tendency runs counter to a major purpose of this blog: to give you a feel for how things are going behind the scenes. So, I apologize for the long hiatus and resolve to do better.

WEBoggle news: My complete rewrite of the game engine is ready for beta testing. It seems to me to be stable and largely bug-free, but we won't know for sure until y'all give it a try. The rewrite had two goals, each of which has been met: reduce the load on the server, and give the client more power and flexibility. The interface is still rather plain and ugly, but makes more sense - there is a sidebar from which you can reach all of the important parts of the game. I've adopted a free JavaScript library that allows me to do nifty interface tricks, and that is more thoroughly debugged than my home-brewed stuff. Preferences are now permanently saved, even if you play on a different computer. There are new options: click-to-pick instead of click-to-rotate, and turning off highlighting of letters. Team scores indicate how many members the team has. There is a new "unified" word result list available, which is used in the new default layout. Your guesses are scored instantly, without waiting for the server (but if the connection to the server fails, a guess can be "lost", so that your score is reduced in the last round scorelist). Each player in the scorelist has a menu (click on the name) from which you can "ban" that player from your sight. Use it to get rid of those rude folks who use racist or otherwise offensive names.

Finally, the bad news, or at least news that you may not like: the name is changing, and the new game requires you to give me your email address. The beta is at http://www.wordsplay.net, so-called because that was the least-lame name I could come up with that is (A) available as a domain name, and (B) not close enough to "Boggle" to leave any chance of legal complications. It requires you to choose a password and "activate" it by verifying an email address before you can play. Please understand that I made the decision to do this only after a great deal of thought, and I have tried to make it as easy as possible to get started playing. But there are too many advantages: it enables many features that depend upon server-side storage, such as permanent preferences, ban lists, and statistics; it helps with the development and maintenance of Deluxe accounts; and it allows me to ban abusive players. I promise not to abuse your email address or share it with anyone else. I hope that most of you will embrace the new.

Personal news: I am still about three weeks away from getting bar exam results, but I have passed the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam with flying colors. All of my grades are in - I tied for the high A in Practice Court III - so I've officially graduated magna cum laude. My old employer very generously kept me on throughout law school despite the serious effect of my studies on my ability to work; I committed to devoting August to my accumulated tasks, and to wrapping up my work neatly enough that they can replace me. Also, I planned to wind up or simplify a bunch of computer administration that I continue to perform for my family. Also, I planned to work on WEBoggle. Also, I hadn't had any significant amount of time to relax and enjoy life for many many months. Also, I need to find a place to start my legal career. See where I'm going with this? August was insanely busy, and swallowed September as well. It has only been a little over a week since I got most of my plans completed. Now, all that remains is WordSplay (nee WEBoggle) and job hunting. On the bright side, I have read quite a few books for pleasure, seen several very good movies (300, Intolerable Cruelty, Ratattouille), watched some fine television (The Daily Show, Robot Chicken, and now Pushing Daisies), and developed my ping-pong skills.