BrettHinkle » Blog

This site is now: End of Life

Brett — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 17:56:50 +0000

So the time has come for this site to become EOL (End of Life). There will be no more updates to this site, eventually everything will redirect to: http://www.eddiehinkle.com but as that site is still under construction this site will remain until that is completed.

Thank you for your patronage

What iCloud should mean for gaming

Brett — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 04:59:58 +0000

On the 6th of June the world was introduced to Apple’s newest additions to the Mac and iOS families: Lion, iOS 5 and iCloud. Now all of this on one day was almost overwhelming and there are so many different thoughts that have come from these simple announcements and what they mean for the future of desktop and mobile computing. But I would like to just take a look at one: gaming.

I’m sure I am not alone when it comes to the frustration of getting a new iOS device or having to do a restore and losing all of your game information. Tried playing Final Fantasy on an iOS device? It takes forever… not to mention if you want to play on your iPad one day and your iPhone the next. Or another example: Plants vs. Zombies is on the Mac in addition to iOS devices.

If game developers take this for what they should, gaming on Mac and iOS could radically change this fall.

What I’m proposing is that game makers start taking those “game saves” and putting them in the cloud. Yes, they can continue to charge extra for their iPad, iPhone and Mac versions, but if they are purchased, give the option to look at the users iCloud for game save data (still allowing them to start a new game if that’s what they choose) Imagine playing a game on your Mac and then later that day you’re bored and out on the town and able to pick up your iPhone and resume from where you left off on your Mac? Now THAT is a truly revolutionary gaming experience.

Well game developers? Will you make our wishes come true?

On the writing of code

Brett — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 11:47:47 +0000

For the last decade I have utterly hated WYSIWYG website editors such as Dreamweaver… they have their place for people trying to learn how to build a website, but outside of that they are so outlandish and gross.

I can see the cheap web editors but what I don’t understand is why Dreamweaver costs so much? Okay, yes it can be used as an IDE… but the type of code these things create, I’ve never fully paid attention to until today when I had to build upon a site that was previously built in a WYSIWYG editor.

Here is image one. (Click images to see full-size)

After looking at this horrid blob, I decided the only way I could make sense out of it was to format it better, thus image two:

and finally I had to write the code from scratch to re-create what had previous existed. From there, I could add onto it.

and finally, the most useless code I have ever seen: thank you Dreamweaver…

Examples of HTML5

Brett — Sat, 22 May 2010 02:03:47 +0000

So the site is still mainly under construction, but Apple has listed some awesome examples of what HTML5 can do on their website, so head over and check it out!

http://www.apple.com/html5/