Web and Mobile Development articles
I’ve written a few posts on remote debugging before, using edge inspect and weinre. They’re definitely very good at the problem they try to solve but today I came across a new Javascript-only remote debugging tool (mobiles, desktops, laptops, etc.) called JSConsole and am loving it! It’s pretty amazing for what it does and is trivial to setup.
Continue reading “Remote Web App JavaScript Debugging with JSConsole.com”
I am building a Node.js application where I want the users to be able to signup with their twitter credentials rather than remembering another set of username/pasword. My framework of choice is Expressjs, so I’ll quickly show you how to authenticate the user with twitter’s oauth service in it.
Continue reading “How To Use Twitter OAuth with node-oauth in your Node.js / Express Application”
I am going to share a neat little trick that was learnt while working on an HTML5 game recently. The game is pretty much like our HTML5 Doodle Jump. We had to make sure that the game scales down very well on smaller devices like mobiles, ipads, tablets, etc. and in the process learnt a neat trick to scale the entire canvas across all devices consistently.
Continue reading “Scaling Your HTML5 Canvas to Fit Different ViewPorts (or Resolutions)”
Few days ago, I wrote a post about why time based animations are better than frame based animations. However, in animations done as a function of time, some serious problems could arise. One of them is that your regular collision detection techniques might fail if the frame rate is lower than acceptable. Your object might pass through the walls or even fall through the floor!
So you got into Web Based Animations or Games (using that HTML5 thingie) and chances are high that you’re relying on setInterval, setTimeout or even better – requestAnimationFrame to reflow and repaint your frames (fancy terms for rendering each animation frame). Precisely, you’re basing your animations or game mechanics on the frame rate. There’s nothing wrong with that, but let me show you a more sophisticated approach which can actually enhance all sorts of user experience – time based animations.
Continue reading “Time Based Animations in HTML5 Games: Why and How to Implement them”
Limiting the frame rate while using requestAnimationFrame can be a common want especially when coding Games where you want your animations and mechanics to not exceed a particular mark of frames per second. Let’s go through 2 ways of doing it.
Continue reading “Controlling the Frame Rate with requestAnimationFrame”
So I coded a game this month for the github game compo called “Pappu Pakia“. This is my first HTML5 Game with beautiful graphics by Kushagra. When I was finished with the coding part, it was pretty exciting until I played it a few times when my CPU was busy, then on an old laptop and finally on a mobile device. In all the cases it was laggy, except in the last one where it was super slow. So what do we do now ? Time to Optimize!
Continue reading “Optimizing HTML5 Canvas to Improve your Game Performance”