The Open Web & The Broken TVs

Editor's Notes

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2. * Hello, I’m Rik\n* In January, I started an agency called Lomalogue, specialising in front-end web development work\n* One of my main clients over the last year is...\n
3. * One of my main clients I’ve had whilst running Lomalogue has been Picklive. This is a video from Picklive’s live game interface\n* You only play the Picklive live game interface during a televised football match.\n* Players in the game respond to real life players in the match.\n* The user picks 3 players from either team and can sub in and out during each 7.5 min game.\n* User gets points based on what their players do. 1 pt for pass, 20 for goal, minus for actions like fouls\n* In fact, some of the users don’t even watch the football match that we play along to, they do it for the entertainment.\n* The game works in all modern browsers including the iPad.\n
4. * There’s a little movement based about “two screen”, based around games and sites where users play along to live events, e.g. sports, TV shows, mass media events.\n* People watch more TV now than they did five years ago\n* But a lot of people now use the internet alongside TV shows, especially real time streams like Twitter, Facebook and forums\n* X Factor, The Apprentice, I’m A Celeb, Question Time\n* Doesn’t have to be real time shows, Eastenders\n* Using my experience of developing Picklive to talk about the up and downs of developing web games\n
5. * There’s good and bad news about making games for the Open Web.\n* So I’m going to start with a trivial quote from Karl Pilkington.\n
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7. * By web development today, I mean how we build websites at the moment.\n* Supporting old browsers, not cutting edge technologies.\n
8. * On the left, we have the Open Web technologies\n* On the right, we have technologies that we still currently need to support our Open Web tech\n* And together, they work to make what we have today.\n* Audio and Video are still heavily reliant on Flash\n* Try telling a client that they need to upload various versions of the same video because of licensing issues.\n
9. * So should we see Flash the saviour of the open web?\n* Seeing as we have to rely on it for functionality that we want from our website.\n
10. * We have to admit that Flash will always be better at some things by its very nature.\n* It’s plug-in based so isn’t dependent on browser releases.\n* It’s cross-browser and cross-platform so no problems with compatibility\n* It’s direction is only decided by Adobe.\n* Should we use Flash to make games instead?\n\n
11. * Actionscript is a functional, prototypal programming language, perfect for event based interactions\n* AS is a dialect of ECMAScript, just like Javascript.\n
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13. * Thanks to massive pushes from all the browser vendors, even Microsoft\n* As browsers update with a faster pace now, there’s quicker deprecation of older browsers.\n* Chrome updates every six weeks now.\n* We now can easily do push notifications (websockets), 3D graphics (WebGL), geolocation, multi-threaded JS (web workers)\n* So eventually we’ll get...\n
14. * To me, HTML5 movement is a lot more exciting than the Web 2.0 movement a few years ago, a lot more technological changes\n\n
15. * The great thing about front-end development is that you can see how other coders do things.\n* Pulling things apart and seeing how they work is a lot more fun than following tutorials\n* How many people read manuals first?\n* Don’t minify your code unless you need to. It stops other people learning from you.\n
16. * Browser based coding isn’t easy.\n* We have to not only test our work in different browsers, but different versions of different browsers and different versions on operating systems.\n* Also, Making games requires a different mind set to normal web site development.\n* Being able to view source code plus tools like Firebug makes not only our lives easier but the new generation’s lives easier\n
17. * JS is getting popular and mainstream\n* We’re no long the uncool kids\n* 18% of all projects on Github have a main component of JS\n* In part due to Javascript libraries and plug-ins.\n* jQuery has played a massive part in getting front-end developers to use Javascript\n* As it uses native CSS selectors as functions\n* Also in part, thanks to SSJS, node.js, helping back-end developers.\n* It makes sense code sharing and context switching\n\n
18. * And of course, there’s a price.\n* This is obviously a big advantage for the Open Web. Anyone can do it. For free.\n* Doesn’t matter who you are, how much bandwidth or how much money you have.\n* You can code in any text editor and test in any browser.\n\n
19. * By very nature, first class code because its native\n* More promotional (however Mozilla and Chrome App Stores are coming soon)\n* Development means separate code bases. One for Apple, one for Android, etc\n* More code bases = more developers \n* Non-instant deployment, one Apple store approval took 429 days, critical updates\n\n
20. * Isn’t it amazing how surprised Thomas was when I tell him you can build a game that works on not only browsers, but iPads and mobiles too, and isn’t in Flash?\n* Thomas doesn’t really care how I build games.\n* Thomas doesn’t care about WebSockets, WebGL, CSS transitions\n* If I told him “you know that game you play at work on IE? you can play that on your phone in the pub, then on your iPad when you’re hungover” <<< A great reason to build open web games.\n* We shouldn’t build “open web games” but “games”\n\n
21. * Predictions\n* There’s no reason why an open web game couldn’t become as big as Farmville, Minecraft or Angry Birds.\n* I’m going to predict that an open web game will get big in the next year and make someone a lot of money.\n* And I really hope that it will be someone in this room.\n
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