Matthew David

Talk to iPhone developers and they will tell you that game development for the iPhone is not hard. OK, that’s great for them, but what about us mere mortals that quake at the thought of having to write code. For us there is now alternative: GameSalad.com GameSalad is two products. The first product is a piece of software you download to your desktop that allows you to build your games. The second is a service you upload your game too and have it converted for your iPhone. The Game Salad Creator The game creation with Game Salad Creator is easy. It’s really just point and click. On opening a new project you can rapidly add new screens, or scenes as the Creator calls them, to represent different levels or sections of your game. After setting up the scenes you populate each scene with Actors that you can interact with. An actor is essentially just a region, either a r... (more)

Creating HTML5 solutions for your iPhone using widgetpad.com

SmartPhones are taking the mobile phone industry by storm. The most popular of these phone brands includes the Apple iPhone, Palm’s Pre and an increasing number of Google Android phones. The challenge for any developer is to build solutions that will run across all of these platforms. There may, however, be an easy way to deliver solutions that work consistently across all of these platforms. That consistent technology is HTML5. The Open Source program called WebKit is now powering the most sophisticated browsers. If you are running Google’s Chrome, surfing the Web with Adobe’s ... (more)

The Coolness That is HTML 5

At the moment I am working on what I think is a very cool project: a book on HTML 5. There is so much news about HTML 5 that I thought I would use this blog to kind of pull together some of the emerging features. If you are new to HTML 5, then let me give you the nickel tour. HTML 4 and XHTML were the last official versions of the HTML language (you know, that code you view when you right click in the Web browser and choose "show code"). It has been 12 years since the last upgrade. In that time we have had AJAX (or Ajax) for Web 2.0, Flash and SilverLight for Rich Internet Appl... (more)

Apple TV Drops in Price

Sunday night Apple dropped the price of the Apple TV by $100 for the 160Gb model - this brings it down to $229. The smaller 40Gb model is now MIA - so long, little white Apple TV. The Apple TV area as a whole is an odd one for Apple. When you hear Tim Cook and Phil Schiller talk about the Apple TV you get the feeling that Apple wants to do more with this device, but are not sure how. My gut feeling is that the Apple TV is exactly what Steve Jobs has declared it to be - an experiment. It will likely be a couple more years before we find out what Apple wants to do with the Apple T... (more)

Using the New, Simpler DOCTYPE in HTML 5

HTML 5 is making some things easier to use. The first is the DOCTYPE. Located at the top of a Web page before the opening BODY tag, the DOCTYPE describes the syntax for the page. The roots for the DOCTYPE lie in SGML. Bearing this in mind, all DOCTYPES for HTML 4 and XHTML require a DTD (Document Type Definition) to describe the content. This is all gone in HTML 5. Now, all you have to do to declare that you are using HTML 5 as your DOCTYPE is add the following to the root of your Web page: That's it. Easy, huh? ... (more)