The Sporepedia, which serves as a clearing house for the most popular creatures created by players, employs a very clever (and very user-friendly) means to upload/download creatures: they embed the data in the PNG thumbnail of the creature. Instead of having some custom data format that’s opaque to the user (and basically worthless after it hits their desktop except for importing straight into Spore), the user has a traditional PNG that they can trivially view on any modern browser/OS. Embedded in the alpha channel data of the PNG, though, is a bunch of data (about 1K according to some estimates).

Now, this is an old trick, and you can do it “officially” with PNGs in custom chunks or in JPEGs, etc. It’s possible in almost any well-structured format. But it’s a very clever, modern, web way of handling it. It allows for trivial sharing by the user through whatever means they’re accustomed to because sharing an image is an almost universal feature of any collaborative software. So, user’s can attach the thumbs to their e-mail, or post them to their Flickr account, or put them on Facebook or their MySpace page, or send them in an IM.

Consider this inspiration! I’m now officially on the look out for how I can apply this technique to Mockingbird. Embedding the game’s description in its screenshot? Encoding ActionScript into the action icons? I don’t know, but I’m going to find something. And you should, too! Incorporate this feature into your products today!

Of course, Valleywag calls it “bizarre”, “rambling” and “entertaining nonsense”, and a majority of the comments are no more flattering. I (and some of the comments) get it, though. It’s rather brilliant. Stewart reveals himself to be a well-rounded, liberally-educated guy who can actually write! Of course, I could feel that in all of the presentations I’ve seen from the Flickr founders who always come across as having a real grasp on the human nature intrinsic to a social website. I think we (designers of interactive content, whether it be the web or games) could learn a huge amount from Flickr and the views of its creators.

In fact, I wrote about this not too long ago (from the UI designer at Flickr). Read the essay. Get inspired to create something for people.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that The Usual Suspects, a movie with nearly perfect tone and pacing (IMHO), was both scored and edited by John Ottman.

UPDATE: I didn’t notice this, but there’s also a video clip. Interesting…

John Nolan gave his developers a challenge: write OO code with no getters. Whenever possible, tell another object to do something rather than ask. In the process of doing this, they noticed that their code became supple and easy to change. They also noticed that the fake objects that they were writing were highly repetitive, so they came up with the idea of a mocking framework that would allow them to set expectations on objects — mock objects.

That’s a fascinating suggestion, writing OO code with no getters. To think of it in object terms, that means that you create objects that don’t have information extracted from them, they’re only asked to do things. If you take his statement literally and to the extreme, you have the scenario where you don’t know the state of a separate object you can only tell it to do things and hope it does them (you can’t confirm it because there’s no gettable state!). Hmm… that sounds familiar.

I think event-driven programming achieves the goal of “writing OO code with no getters.” It has the added bonus of being dynamically (and anonymously) coupled at runtime. And, in fact, I’ve found event-driven code to be the least brittle. Definitely more complicated in some scenarios (usually trivial cases, while being less complicated for the non-trivial cases), but always more stable, higher quality, fewer bugs.

AS3 has a particularly beautiful event model. When an object dispatches an event the listeners for that event are called immediately (inside of the dispatch function) as opposed to being queued and processed at a later point in time. Callbacks, basically. But at the same time you have to write them as if they occur asynchronously.

I’m not sure the point I’m trying to make… other than to say that event-driven programming is less fragile?

Well, apparently I’ve just been missing it in AS3. It was staring me plainly in the face but hadn’t really thought about it in those terms. Bruce Eckel did, though. He shows how we can use the various Array methods (and add some of our own since Array is dynamic) to work functionally. There’s some very clever stuff in there, particularly the in-line functions that leverage closures to return results to the calling method… very clever use of AS3.

There is quite a bit of noise in the article related to his working with Flex Builder and writing the MXML to display the results of his tests. He also has a very — ahem — interesting code style that I wouldn’t suggest anyone follow if you plan on sharing with other AS3 coders. I’m referring to his mixing of MXML and AS3 (and I’m not talking mx:Script blocks, either). First time I’ve ever seen that…

It wasn’t that long ago that I gushed about Cake. But after doing some development with it (beta sites for Mockingbird), and after recently working on our current site (which runs on top of Pligg, kinda), I’ve started to kinda think, “hey, what are these guys actually doing for me?”

First, I am still baffled that with all of the auto-sniffing-magic that these frameworks (Rails, et al) do I still have to describe by database schema in two places. I mean, come on, Microsoft solved this problem in .NET. Sure, they do it through code-generation (XML database schema creates the actual underlying database as well as generating all of the C# classes used to interact with it in a completely typed, validated way). But with Cake (and with Rails, AFAIK) I have to go off and do DB admin creating tables and indices and such, and then I have to come and create some parallel classes in the framework. Sure, I don’t have to specify the individual fields, it’ll automatically attempt to map unknown properties for me… unless I want to build-in validation, or relationships, or serialization… you know, trivial little things that only serious webapps would need… ahem. Sure.

Second, I’m just terrified by the amount of decision-making that is made each time “through” the framework when one of my pages is served up. Sure, op-code caching alleviates some of this, but really, should I be executing 10x the necessary amount of code to save me from having to write out a dozen lines of completely self-explanatory, easy-peasy lines of code?

Maybe I’m missing something… maybe these guys are doing a lot of stuff for me I’m not realizing. But I get the itch’n feeling that they’re really just providing a different syntax (with some defaults that make building a bare bones blog in 15 minutes a snap) on bits that are already there, at a lower level.

Routing — mod_rewrite/.htaccess is the only routing tool you need. I almost guarantee you’re not doing anything in your webapp that requires some kind of routing logic that can’t be handled elegantly with mod_rewrite/.htaccess.

Controller — this is the PHP file that your mod_rewrite directs queries to. All you need to do is practice some self-control and keep all of the aesthetic bits out of this PHP file. Just do the work, the logic of the user’s request. When you done all your work, just pass the results off to the view.

View — go download Smarty. Just use it. Flickr uses it and they get more traffic than you ever will. It’s a templating engine designed with the viewpoint that the template should *only* be the view and that the designer and programmer are at least independent tasks if not entirely different individuals.

Model — I was very frustrated with Cake when I tried to combine it with Pligg. Pligg had a particular table/field naming scheme, and Cake had a similar (but different enough) scheme. There was no combination of tweaking that would get one to be compatible with the other. Writing the necessary SQL queries to bridge the gap manually was trivial. And I knew them all along – in fact, I used them when debugging the naming scheme in an attempt to work backwards. Just grab ezSQL, that’s as simplified and automatic as your database interaction should be, because the database is critical (and powerful) if you don’t discount it as just a big property list.

Helpers, Components, Behaviors &mash; these frameworks all have a bunch of additional “utility” features that basically just make life easier as a webapp developer. These could be worth it, if they’re you’re particular flavor. But I bet for each one there’s a strong, healthier open-source version that does more.

Maybe I should put my money where my mouth is? Maybe so. How cleanly could I build a webapp without a framework (and without implicitly building one myself)? In other words, have we heaped one abstraction too many on the pile?

Treat your place like your home: welcome people, fix them a drink and make them feel comfortable. Before you know it, your guests will be chatting amongst themselves, the party will be pumping, and people will be making plans together.