Month: September 2010

Categories
Video Games

Metroid other M

Metroid other MBeen playing Metroid other M for a few weeks now. I know that it had gotten some mixed reviews when it was released but I thought it was a great game. The third person and first person perspectives worked pretty well to me.

The cutscenes and story are what really set it apart from previous Metroid and  really other Nintendo games in general. Samus actually spoke and had a voice, which was cool to hear. The game takes place right after Super Metroid (waaaaaaaaay back on the SNES).

Gameplay is excellent too, it was a nice change from the Prime series (which were amazing games) and their first person view. Awesome game, my only real complaint was that it weren’t longer. However there is an epilogue after finishing it, so that extends gameplay a bit.

Categories
Development

Simple Mobile Detection Redirect

Been working on a simple mobile version of a website I’d done for a client in the past recently. We can a user on most popular mobile devices to be automatically redirected to the mobile version of the site when they visit the main website.

So I went way back to some User-Agent sniffing to accomplish this. I thought I was done with the whole User-Agent redirecting different versions of site’s, but in this case it does work really well.

Just collect the User-Agent header using PHP there run it against a switch statement for each mobile device we’re checking against.

Just look for an instance of a device specific string using preg_match() in PHP.

iPod/iPhone and Android example:

case (preg_match('/ipod/i', $user_agent) || preg_match('/iphone/i', $user_agent));
        header('Location: ' . $redirect);
	exit;
break;
 
case (preg_match('/android/i', $user_agent));
        header('Location: ' . $redirect);
	exit;
break;
Categories
Books

Programming the Mobile Web

Programming the Mobile WebIt’s still tough finding good sources of information when developing for the mobile web. I’ve found amazing resources if you’re developing native applications, but when developing mobile friendly sites it’s a different story.

Been reading Programming the Mobile Web and even though I still have a few chapters to go, must say that it’s a must own if you’re a web developer who is interested in making your site mobile friendly or even developing a mobile version of your site.

The book does a great job covering all the different platforms and browsers to account for (it’s so crazy how many there are) as well as best practices to handle all the variety out there. Even if you have a good understanding of developing for the mobile, I’m sure you’ll find a few useful tips along the way.

An excellent resource that I’m sure I’ll be opening up many times again long after I’m done reading through it.

Categories
Development

Closure Compiler

I’ve been using minimizing tools on my Javascript files for quite some time now. Most notably YUI Compressor, and it does an awesome job for me. Excellent job minimizing Javascript as well as CSS files.

Recently I’ve give Closure Compiler a try at Javascript compression and have been pleased with the results so far. It not only minimizes and obfuscates files, but also compiles them as well.

The rewritten code it spits out is not suitable for human reading, so be sure you always keep an original of the source to be modified. I have typically been saving 24% off the original file size. That’s typically 2x the compression I’d get if I simply gzipped the file.

Very cool tool, try it out.