Author: Joe

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.

Categories
Video Games

Dragon Quest IX Sentinels of the Starry Skies

Dragon Quest IXPicked up Dragon Quest IX a few weeks ago at Toys R Us, they had a fine deal where you got a $15 gift card with the purchase of the game. I was very proud of the fine deal I had gotten. I always was a fan of the JRPG since I played the first Dragon Warrior (Dragon Quest series was called Dragon Warrior in the US) back in 1989 for the NES.

The mechanics and gameplay were what would be expected in such a game. It did make really cool use of multiplayer with up to 4 simultaneous players using Nintendo DS’s. This was really well done and it’s a shame I really didn’t play it on multiplayer much, as you could tell that the game was really meant to take advantage of multiplayer. If I were in 5th grade multiplayer wouldn’t been a must.

The graphics and sound were very impressive for a DS game, some of the finest I have played. Story was pretty solid too, and actually funny at times. I did get a little chuckle a few times. Between the main storyline and all the side quests there is much gameplay to be had with this title.

Categories
Development

Took care of pesky Smart Quotes with utf8_encode()

For the longest time I’ve had our writers at work who always copy from Word docs with Smart Quotes have our RSS feed balk when it encountered the Smart Quotes. I took many stabs attempting to replace them with standard quotes to no avail. It was one of those problems where I never really devoted a great deal of time at solving as it didn’t occur often enough to take me completely away from whatever issue I was then working on.

I just realized that the PHP utf8_encode() function which encodes an ISO-8859-1 string to UTF-8 does just that. Just a simple little function that’s been around a very long time was there just and I had overlooked it.

Now I just apply that function before outputting the data and so far so good. Just figured I’d share if someone else was running into this same issue.