Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Find: 'Binary Tetris' source code will fit in a tweet

Sweet!

The Verge - All Posts
Binary Tetris

Like minimalist games? Then you won't do much better than Binary Tetris, a reworking of Tetris into dots and pound signs. GitHub user Aemkei, who has previously translated Conway's Game of Life and a 3D "library" into code of 140 characters, has recreated Tetris in enough JavaScript to fill a tweet. The game's blocks come only in one shape, and there's no way to rotate them, but it's an interesting proof of concept that can be played here. There's also no scoring system, so we amateur players can get a break from the competitive Tetris masters in our midst. For fully annotated code, click through to the source link below.

Find: HTML5 bullets: Sencha issues developer scorecard for Chrome on Android

Chrome is a big leap forward for android and html5 webapps. 

Ars Technica

Google issued a beta release of Chrome for Android last week. The port, which brings Chrome's feature set and excellent support for Web standards to Android, is a major improvement over the mobile platform's current default browser.

As we reported in our coverage of the beta, Android's default browser has historically had difficulty handling sophisticated application-like Web experiences. The new port of Chrome has the potential to remedy that weakness and bring highly competitive HTML5 support to Android.

Monday, February 13, 2012

Tool: Weave for visualization development

Not sure what's different or better about this... Need to take a closer look. 

FlowingData

Visualization with weave

Web-based Analysis and Visualization Environment, or Weave for short, is open source software intended for flexible visualization.

Weave (BETA 1.0) is a new web-based visualization platform designed to enable visualization of any available data by anyone for any purpose. Weave is an application development platform supporting multiple levels of user proficiency — novice to advanced — as well as the ability to integrate, disseminate and visualize data at "nested" levels of geography.

It looks like everything is done through a click interface, and you can piece together modules and link them, etc. There is some setup involved, but there are a number of video tutorials and documents to get everything installed.

Source code also available on GitHub.

[Weave]

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Find: Super Bowl 2012: Nothing Curbs App Usage Except Madonna

Flurry

The Super Bowl is an American phenomenon, now largely considered a de facto American holiday.  As the premier media event, it regularly attracts record-breaking audiences.  This year, Super Bowl XLVI, played on February 5, 2012 between the New York Giants and New England Patriots, became the most watched television program in history, drawing an audience of 111 million viewers according to The Nielsen Company.  Prior to this, the record was held by last year’s Super Bowl, which itself had overtaken the number one spot held for twenty-eight years by the final episode of M*A*S*H.

The Second Screen

Also breaking new ground this year was the concept of the "second screen," which illustrates that while watching TV (the first screen), people often interact with second screens such as smartphones and tablets.  To avoid losing attention paid to the first screen, marketers increasingly are exploring ways to complement the first screen experience with the addition of hash tags, QR codes, voting and more.  Among the most ambitious was Shazam, a music and media discovery service, which worked with ad partners such as Toyota, Best Buy, Pepsi, Bud Light and Fed Ex to drive additional second screen interactions related to advertising via the Shazam mobile app.  During the halftime show, for example, viewers could get the setlist, buy music and download mobile apps from the artists.  Shazam reported millions of audio tags as a result.

Aside from a handful of innovators like Shazam, Flurry believes that the second screen is still largely more disruptive than complementary.  If a consumer is not paying attention to the television program in front of her, she is likely using an application to post social updates or play games.  For example, if a Super Bowl ad isn’t holding a viewer’s interest, playing another round of Words with Friends is a likely activity.  Monitoring app usage provides Flurry the ability to understand this tightly-coupled, inverse relationship between the first and second screen.

Massive Second Screen App Audience

For this report, Flurry tracked U.S. app usage, per second, over the course of Super Bowl XLVI, mapping application session starts to each television spot aired, game time segment, the halftime show, and more.  We further studied behavior differences between males versus females.  With Flurry Analytics in over 160,000 applications, the company detects app usage on more than 90% of all iOS and Android devices per day.  Let’s start by comparing the size of the U.S. application using audience to Nielsen’s report of the number of people who watched the Super Bowl last Sunday.

Flurry SuperBowl App vs TV AudienceSize resized 600

The left-hand column shows the number of users Flurry estimates launched applications in the United States between the hours of 3:15 PM PST to 7:15 PM PST on Sunday, February 5.  During this four-hour window, in which the Super Bowl was played, Flurry estimates that nearly one-third of the U.S. population used an application.  Compared to Nielsen’s estimate that 111 million people watched the Super Bowl this year, the two audiences are similar in size.

Flurry SuperBowl AppStarts perSecond V4 resized 600