2009 January | We Are Team Rubber

Archive for January, 2009

Ultimate browser showdown

Matt Wilkes - January 14th, 2009

Forget CSS. Forget JS features. Forget it all, we’ve finally got the be-all-and-end-all test to find out which browser/os combination is best! The ACID test is history, bring on the unicode snowman test!

NB: Results may vary depending on your own individual awesomeness. Terms and conditions apply. See back of pack for details.

Browser	OS	Render sample	Score
Firefox	OSX	-	10/10
Firefox	Windows		1/10
Opera Firefox	Linux		8/10
IE 5.2	OSX		0/10
IE 7	Windows		9/10
Safari Opera	OSX		6/10

Surprisingly few browsers bothered to render the snow, an integral part of snowman longevity. Clearly these browsers are not suitable for high availability applications. Firefox on windows gets a token point for marshalling a few pixels, but it’s not the kind of snowman I’d like to find in my garden. IE for Mac needs to be uninstalled immediately (we had to check 5 macs before we found a copy).

Linux could have scored signficiantly higher, all the requisite parts are there, but the body/head size ratio is a bit too far off which leaves it less than pretty, which leaves us to choose between Firefox on OSX and IE on Windows. IE doesn’t have the snow, so we’re left with Firefox on OSX being the best browser, with IE in a close second.

There you have it, it’s better to browse the net with windows and IE than Ubuntu and Firefox! Scientificly proven.

Posted in Developer, Pictures | 6 Comments »

Mini-LD #6

Tim Wintle - January 10th, 2009

(3:33 am)

I didn’t have anything planned for this weekend, so I thought I’d take part in the Mini Ludum Dare – the monthly version of the infamous Ludum Dare 48 hour game-programming challenge.

You can keep up to date on my progress over the weekend in my Ludum Dare Blog, and you can see all the entrants in the competition blog.

At the last minute I got an arrangement for Saturday, so with only 24 hours of code time (I need to sleep tonight if I’ve got things to do tomorrow…), I decided not to attempt anything too complicated. It’s roughly nine hours in, and after a few hours thought I chose the secondary theme “Infection” to go with the primary theme of “monochrome”.

Working in Python with PyGame, here’s what my attempt looks like so far (remembering I’m not a graphics type of person):

At the moment it’s fairly much like Asteroids – the player is the cell in the middle of the screen, and the nucleus points the direction you fire. The aim is to shoot all the infections with capsules of medicine.

I’ve still got a long way to go – loads of ideas for features to code, graphics to do/improve, and sound effects to make, but it’s on it’s way there.

If you want to comment, I’ll be blogging frequently on the ludum dare site whenever I’m online this weekend.

Tags: code, games, ludum dare, pygame, python
Posted in Developer, Misc | 1 Comment »

Do you like music, sing-along and microsoft?

Helen Bentley - January 9th, 2009

Glow in the dark towel song? Just what I needed.

Maybe this is just what I need?

Posted in Advertising, Bristol, How We Work | No Comments »

Happy New Year- Best and not so best New Year messages

Jenny Hardy - January 5th, 2009

My Best is Electrabel

Electrabe’s pixilation using 288,000 individual candles. Pixilation and stop motion techniques have been around since the 1900’s. The techniques seam to be growing in popularity, with all the new technology and software that has made these techniques available to any person in their bedroom. It is pushing creatives to think harder and for the final creation to prove beyond doubt that a lot of time was spent on this! This reminds me of all those domino rallies in the 80’s, there must be an universal fascination with finicky tasks that take up a lot of time. When it works it looks like Electrabel and when it tries to hard it’s “Happy New Year! (2009) in HD”

My not so best is Happy New Year! (2009)