MadeByPi® Blog

Microsoft’s IE6 Countdown

To the surprise of quite a few of us here in the MadeByPi office, Microsoft released a new website the other day, with the strapline "10 years ago a browser was born. Its name was Internet Explorer 6. Now that we're in 2011, in an era of modern web standards, it's time to say goodbye."

Yes, Microsoft are making the effort to try and get global usage of it's own browser IE6 down to below 1%.

Currently the global usage of IE6 is 12% worldwide - still rather high, but hopefully with this campaign which, developers can also contribute to by using their provided scripts to inform IE6 users to upgrade to the latest versions (IE8/9) we might eventually get there.

For information from the chaps at Microsoft themselves about why they are doing this, check out their blog.

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Mac OSX Lion

Apple recently announced 'Lion'; the next update for the Mac Operating system OSX. From what has been announced so far, it looks like both a beautifully designed and more friendly update from Apple aimed at bringing the feel of the iPad and it's apps interface to your desktop:

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Read more  0 Comments   apple, software

Apparat – A custom Matryoshka

A few weeks ago Joa Ebert (@joa) released an update to the Apparat Reducer, adding the option of LZMA compression to further reduce your SWF file-sizes.

It works by squeezing your original SWF with LZMA compression, and injecting that data as a ByteArray into a wrapper SWF - hence the Matryoshka moniker.

The Matryoshka handles decompressing the data with an AS3 implementation of LZMA decompression, and then loads the resulting SWF bytes with a standard Loader object.

This all works beautifully, and you can get pretty decent reductions in file-size, especially on larger SWFs.

After testing it, I took a look at the Apparat sources - in particular the LZMA decoder and Matryoshka wrapper - and noticed that because of the use of the Vector type, the code was only compatible with Flash Player 10 or greater.

With the need to create Flash Player 9 compatible content still the part of many a working day, I felt it was worth trying to build a custom version of Apparat with Flash Player 9 compatible Matryoshka and LZMA decompression...

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Read more  2 Comments   Apparat, Flash, LZMA, Matryoshka

Design Outside the Box – presentation from DICE 2010

Watched this video the other day, some pretty interesting insight into and predictions for facebook and non-traditional games.

"Carnegie Mellon University Professor, Jesse Schell, dives into a world of game development which will emerge from the popular 'Facebook Games' era"

Watch it on G4

Read more  0 Comments   facebook, game, information, website

It’s the Future!

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Camera drone piloted via iphone

I want one of these! It's controlled via your iphone over it's own wifi (so the range is a little limited), but it has a camera attached which even be used to play augmented reality games.

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Read more  1 Comments   iPhone, video, virtual reality

Google Browser Size

Google Labs has a visualization of the different browser sizes used by people accessing google.com. It can be overlaid over any site to see what percentage of people have to scroll to see elements, the drop off after 1024x768 is quite remarkable. How much of this is negated by people having a smaller browser window to search or netbooks even?

browsersize.googlelabs.com

Read more  0 Comments   google, Usability

Reducing the drudgery of embedding fonts in AS3

Using and managing embedded fonts in Flash is a lot easier than it was a few years ago, but I still find myself repeating tedious steps of set-up each time I need to create a new font-asset swf.

So, I created an Air application to do it for me

Skip to the end to download the app and source, or read on for all the juicy details...

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Read more  3 Comments   ActionScript, Air, AS3, Embed, Flash, Font, opensource, Unicode ranges, Utility