August Update: Appliness and js13kGames

There are a couple of cool things going on around the internet that I felt should be shared with all of you. First of all is Appliness, a digital, monthly web development magazine that pools some of the greatest articles from around the web and compiles them into an interactive book. Second is a JavaScript and HTML5 game competition known as js13kGames. Too many lower case letters there if you ask me.

Don’t Worry, Be Appli

Appliness is a digital magazine produced by Adobe that just started this past April. It’s gaining a lot of momentum, and for good reason. This magazine provides well over a dozen awesome articles from around the internet about HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. Then they throw it all together as an interactive book that can be read on an iPad or Android tablet. They embed working demos straight into the articles and HD videos as well. For those of us lacking a tablet (read: me and a few others) they also port it over into a gorgeous PDF, that lacks the interactive bits, but still supports video. It’s pretty huge, though, weighing in at over 100Mb each month.

There’s sort of a selfish reason that I’m promoting Appliness right now. Yes, it’s awesome and worth reading all by itself, but this month’s edition also features an article that I wrote. The hard-working men and women at Appliness chose my article comparing $script.js and RequireJS to be included in with all of the other great articles. This is humbling and exciting to be receiving attention like this. I want to thank you readers for spreading the word about this blog enough for the people at Adobe and Appliness to take enough notice that they would consider me worthy of those digital pages.

13 Kilobytes to Save the World!

Well, you don’t need to make a game about saving the world, but you could. Starting on August 13^th, an HTML5 and JavaScript game competition will be taking place through the 13^th of September called js13kGames. You’re allowed a total of 13Kb to make a game in any way possible. This competition is really drawing at me because I’ve wanted to try my hand at game development, though I’ve had few chances and even fewer good reasons to. Well, I wouldn’t doubt that there are some readers here who’ve given it a shot, so now I’m asking you to give this competition a shot. You can find the rules on their web site, which seem to be pretty lax other than the 13K limit.

If any of you do end up competing in js13kGames post a comment about it below and I might feature it in a post here. I’m hoping to see quite a few addicting little games to waste my time on, so get crackin’!

Conclusion

Not much to conclude on here. Just want to thank you all again for helping this blog grow to what it is and what it will be in the future. And don’t forget to give me a reason to waste hours of my life away. Finally, I just want to give you a little teaser about the next blog post coming up. I’ll just give you one word: Minecraft! God bless and happy coding!