Find: Developer releases source of HTML5 mobile game, sheds light on challenges

Looks like a valuable resource!

Developer releases source of HTML5 mobile game, sheds light on challenges

Inspired by the buzz around HTML5, game development studio Wooga recently attempted to build a complete mobile game with standards-based Web technologies. To share the results of its year-long experiment, the company has published the game’s source code on GitHub under an open source software license.

Wooga also published a blog entry that describes some of the lessons that their developers learned from the experience. The company sees considerable potential in HTML5 gaming, but says that the technology isn’t quite ready yet. Wooga is releasing the source code with the hope that it will contribute to the Web development community’s body of knowledge.

"The reason we’re making Pocket Island open source is so that talented developers all around the world can learn from the team’s work here at Wooga, before breaking and improving on it," the company wrote in a blog post. "The promise of HTML5 is still an exciting one and while the time for mass market implementation may not be in 2012, we’re confident its time will come."

Viz: The changing hue of movie posters

Looks like a nice dataset. 

The changing hue of movie posters

A couple of weeks ago, software engineer Vijay Pandurangan had a theory. He decided that movie posters have, over the years, become more dark and more blue. Rather than moving on with his life, he decided to analyze the color data from 35,000 posters produced from 1914 to present day. The result, which you see above, shows that his theory was correct.

At the top of the image you'll see data from 1914 and at the bottom that from present day. Pandurangan also produced an interactive version that gives detailed statistics for each year, as well as a clearer graphic that doesn't take image brightness into account. You can find both, along with an explanation of his process for creating the visualizations, on his blog.

Find: designing data

Art Swanson (@art_swanson) 6/13/12 7:01 PM Designing data zite.to/LSjKPb via @Zite

Tool: HCI User Advocate: Interactive D3 Experiments

http://hci-user-advocate.blogspot.com/2012/06/interactive-d3-experiments.html...

(Source: https://twitter.com/landay/statuses/213341462069383168)

Spotted: Preserving the browsing experience with visualization -- supporting serendipitous book discoveries through information visualization

The bohemian bookshelf: supporting serendipitous book discoveries through information visualization

Alice Thudt, Uta Hinrichs, Sheelagh Carpendale

Serendipity, a trigger of exciting yet unexpected discoveries, is an important but comparatively neglected factor in information seeking, research, and ideation. We suggest that serendipity can be facilitated through visualization. To explore this, we introduce the Bohemian Bookshelf, which aims to support serendipitous discoveries in the context of digital book collections. The Bohemian Bookshelf consists of five interlinked visualizations each offering a unique overview of the collection. It aims at encouraging serendipity by (1) offering multiple visual access points to the collection, (2) highlighting adjacencies between books, (3) providing flexible visual pathways for exploring the collection, (4) enticing curiosity through abstract, metaphorical, and visually distinct representations of books, and (5) enabling a playful approach to information exploration.

Find: The Google APIs Explorer has a new look

The Google APIs Explorer has a new look

Jake

Antonio

By Antonio Fuentes and Jake Moshenko,

Google Developer Team

Last March we introduced the Google APIs Explorer, an interactive tool that enables you to try out a Google API in minutes and explore its supported methods. When we launched it, the APIs Explorer supported over a half dozen APIs.

Starting today, the APIs Explorer has a brand new look to make it easier and more fun to navigate. We are also adding new features, including an indexed history of your API calls, a better editor for the body of a request, and a search box so you can search for APIs and methods easily.

Moreover, we have been busy adding support for more APIs to the Explorer. The Explorer now supports over two dozen Google APIs, and the list continues to grow! We have also added an indicator to show which methods require authenticated requests.

To get started, here are some sample requests you can try in the Explorer:

• Use the Google+ API to search for public profiles of people named "John Smith".

Use the Books API to search for a particular book.

Use the Google+ API to list your personal Google+ activiti...

Competition: viz of civic health data

Via our collaborator Carol Strohecker at CDI

http://www.civicdatachallenge.org/