Links and things

• Adobe to publish flash file format specs [via R/WW]
  With Microsoft pushing Silverlight, Adobe have some competition and want to get flash on as many platforms as they can.


• 45 blog designs [Smashing Magazine]
  I'm in the process of migrating to Wordpress and am looking for inspiration for my template design. Some good stuff here.

Links and things

Super Mario in 14kB Javascript
That pretty much sums it up: someone has recreated (some of) Super Mario Bros in a very small amount of JavaScript. Amazing.

Resonate

Last month, Tom Kershaw and I worked on a project for Silent Studios called Resonate. Resonate represents the studio's music services and the web site showcases it very nicely, accompanied by some beautiful illustrations.The site is written in AS3 and uses a page template structure so that any additional pages or structure changes can be done very easily. If you look closely when you load the site or resize your browser window, you should spot my favourite feature: the lines slowly redraw to the edges :-)

BBC Web API: Officially the 18th best API in the world

According to the latest issue of .Net magazine at least. That's a whole place higher than Twitter! Naturally Google Maps and Flickr take the top spots, but 18th place for our back-of-an-envelope prototype is something I'm immensely proud of.

Gravity Pods

Keith Peters has provided my first proper 'friday forward' 18 months after registering this domain. I'm in the middle of writing my own AS3 game and Keith's Gravity Pods is the perfect example of what casual, addictive flash games should be about.

A word of warning though, it really is addictive and quite a chanllenge. So much so that I have felt the need to prove my achievement of completing the game. A very productive friday afternoon :-)

Radio 1 wins Webby

In much-belated news, Radio 1 won the Webby award for radio. This is a great achievement and I'm really proud because the homepage contains a couple of flash apps written by your truly :-)

Hack Day London

Tom has just announced the first Hack Day to be held in Europe. The event is a partnership between Yahoo! and BBC Backstage and will be held at Alexandra Palace over the weekend of June 16th and 17th.

The two day event will see hundreds of creatives, designers and developers come together and attempt to build some fun, cool and interesting stuff. To get everyone in the right mood for rapid prototyping, there will be a number of speaker sessions from Yahoo! and the BBC. Tristan and I will be presenting one of the sessions so you don't need any more reason to sign up for a place! If that's not enough for you, Tom has promised that there will be beer, pizza and a band. And all for free.

This is all really exciting. I'm proud to be a part of what is sure to be a fun and rewarding weekend! Hope to see you there.

Radio 1 nominated for 2 Webbys

BBC Radio 1 has been nominated for 2 Webbys. Some might say its all down to the SMS tag cloud on the homepage... Don't know who though.

How much is your site worth?

Domain Name Scoop is a neat service which simply aggregates information about your web site. It will tell you your page rank, the number of pages which link to you and how much your domain is worth, along with some more statistics. Its not worth me bragging about FridayForward being worth USD433 but if your site has slightly more impressive stats, you can display a small report on your blog.