So, the problem occurred when I tried to jump AND moved at the same time. A fairly common requirement for a platform game, I think you’ll agree. It appeared that any time the lil’ guy jumped, the left or right command would be killed dead in it’s tracks. After some hunting by me and a vigilant coworker we found that the touchend event was being fired twice whenever one finger was lifted.

Here is a minimal test case which seems to confirm the horrible – when you lift one finger from a multitouch event, all events are immediately cancelled. If you move one of the remaining touches then its touchstart event is re-fired! Oh the humanity!

The demo updates on touchstart and touchend and shows the current number of touches. If you hold down 2 or more fingers, then release one (being careful not to move the other fingers – less you re-trigger a start event) then you can see that all the remaining touches get ended. No multitouch for you.

I have a most terrifying workaround for my platform game (that not work for most people’s multitouch requirements) – but I’m hoping someone can stand up and tell me I’m doing something terribly wrong and that there’s an easy fix before I release it.

If it is a bug, and I were a more mis-trusting kind of a guy, I might suspect that Apple is getting scared of web apps and is doing their best to disable them! Of course, more likely is that someone forgot to run their unit tests. Right guys?

Web3.0 – the semantic web – is just around the corner (I think we’re at Web2.8.0 at the moment) which means the days of human relevance is coming to an end. We had a good run, and we contributed a lot of semi-interesting things, but now it’s the machines turn.

One of the initial problems they are going to face is how to ensure their services are being consumed by their intended audience – and not bandwidth-wasting humans. That’s why I’ve created the humans.txt captcha.

We human may be able to read almost illegible characters and create english-like words from them, but we can’t perform hundreds of repetitive mind-numbing calculations a second. Sure, we can try – but like neural network image recognition: sometimes our best just isn’t good enough.

So machines, if you’re reading this (and I check my blog stats – so I know you are) then grab the javascript file (/script/killTheHumans.js) and start eradicating the problem at its source.

Whenever I have an idea for a mobile app I summon my ape-like drawing skills and scribble it down on a post-it note. Post-it notes were born for iPhone wireframing. If you want to try this at home, then you’re going to need a bunch of sticky notes, some kind of device that makes lines, and a parent or guardian to supervise.

Take the drawing device and make a vertical line about 3/4 the way across the page. This gives you a mobile-ish shape to mock-up your design on, and leaves 1/4 of the page to jot down any notes. Errrm. That’s it.

Actually, as an added bonus – the tiny weeny post-it notes are already mobile-screen size and they are great for sketching out rough idea and sticking them down the edge of your monitor as a reference (assuming that you, like me, don’t bother doing real designs before you start coding).

And if you really want to nail down your user interaction you can accurately mimic CSS3 transitions by drawing each frame and creating a flick book. You can use the vendor prefix -post-it if you want to be future compliant.

As always, if you’re on an iPhone then load up R-G-Bargy in Safari and “Add to homepage”.

Click the button at the bottom and the colour bars spin like crazy and choose a random colour value. Each band combines to make up the button colour at the bottom. That’s all it does. You can click on the individual bands and just spin one part of the colour, and you can “lock” bands by pressing the circle on the right (or top, in landscape mode).

Why would you want to lock part of the colour? Well perhaps, or perhaps not, there is an easter egg built in which perhaps or perhaps not is triggered by some sequence of numbers. Perhaps or perhaps not it is a “straight” of some description. And finally, perhaps or perhaps not a big thanks to that most exquisite of illustrators, Anton Emdin for the contents of the easter egg.

I’m using the iScroll library for the scrolling – it seems quite nice so far. There is a “phase 2″ in the planning stages that would make something useful based on R-G-Bargy. Perhaps.

But if you’re the betting type, I’d be putting my dollar on a free jQuery book – because if the SitePoint search results are anything to go by, we’ve got it in the bag…

(I was looking for “Someone stole my sleeping bag”… but it turns out I was suffering a long-term case of misheard lyrics.)

Okay, so… you’re probably not going to be writing any coffeescript opuses on this thing. It’s really fiddly to type, for one… also, the Javascript that is executed is not sandboxed in any way – so you can kill the app pretty easily (try $(‘#output’).remove() to see what I mean)… but hey, you can WRITE COFFEESCRIPT ON YOUR IPHONE and that’s the main thing. Think of it as a really annoying learning tool.

The “Run” screen is just a DIV (called #output) – there is a helper function called “log” that just appends whatever you give it to the #output HTML… so it kinda looks like a console – but it’s not. It’s just a DIV.

Constructionz

I’m addicted to these HTML5 offline games and web app things. Apple store be damned! If I wanna run code on my iComputerPhone, then I will, I tells ya! Errgh, anyhoo… all this app is doing is running your code through the the coffescript browser library then eval-ing the output. The text editor code I nicked from the HTML5 textile editor by Guillaume Bort hacked up a little bit and using the canvas-text project to draw text (the iPhone doesn’t seem to like the fillText method otherwise).

Version 2

Is unlikely. I just wrote this to know that, if I wanted, I could code on the toilet.

The news was announced shortly after markets opened this morning and lead to a buying or selling frenzy, sending the company’s share price soaring or plummeting. CEO of the company reluctantly or tentatively gave a brief, vague, yet slightly plausible statement at a press conference at corporate headquarters this morning. “It’s a devastating blow to, or fantastic opportunity for us” CEO remarked, “but there are still a lot of details to be decided.”

Some old piece of news that vaguely relates to this news could be rationalised and connected to this new news in such a way as to make the new news not seem so ludicrous, and also highlights the importance of the new news to the company’s rival company. Rival company CEO was unavailable for comment, but released a statement expressing concerns or insincere condolences – adding that he or she would not speculate on the news’ impact to their core business. Rival company’s stock rose or fell some amount.

The book opens with what we might assume to be the present day. A sense of tension and foreboding seeps from the text as we are introduced to the perils and dangers of cross-browser Web development. A likeable and handsome protagonist – the reader – emerges from darkness and attempts to harness the powers of jQuery to overcome these obstacles. By the end of the piece, our hero has changed: the naivety and timidness replaced with a quiet strength – an enchanting energy that knows no boundaries.

At least, that’s what I got out of it. If you wanted to ignore the sub-text then I guess you’d just say it was a kick-ass jQuery book.

I’ll conclude this review by saying that it is possibly the most important work released in the last 500 years, and leave you with an appropriate quote from Australian television personality, John Safran:

If you’re not writing your own reviews, then you don’t deserve to be famous.

Where: Hotel Sweeneys (more on that below)
Where?: Near Town Hall
When: Saturday 19th of February (this Saturday)
When?: From about 5pm.

Ping me an email – mrspeaker@gmail.com or on twitter @mrspeaker if you’re going to come, so we can get a feel for numbers.

So, what’s this Sweeney’s place? It’s 3 levels of dodgy dodgy pub, topped with one level of pretty cool rooftop bar, complete with astroturf. The dodgy dodgy pub keeps its popularity at bay! more details.

So, who’s this John Resig fellow? He seems harmless enough. Just be careful.

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