Hanging with Garriott

"How do game developers spend their Saturdays? They probably gather at Richard Garriott's lakeside estate, feast on BBQ, listen to live music, engage in padded sword fights, toss water balloons, and start very small bonfires."

Opinion: Why Casual Game Cloning Makes Sense

"In this editorial, Colin Anderson, MD of innovative Scottish game developer Denki (Denki Blocks, Sky/DirecTV interactive TV casual games) takes the casual game industry to task for its complaints about game 'cloning', suggesting it forces developers 'to be creative and think about the consumer'"

Beautiful Code

"Where leading programmers explain how they find
unusual and carefully designed solutions"

Great new blog about elegant and beautiful code.

Adobe AIR apps

"With the Adobe Labs AIR Showcase and samples page — and sites such as ApolloHunter, Mashable, and AIRapps.net — we quickly found some cool and creative Adobe AIR applications, most of which are in the public alpha stage."

Programmers adopt Flex and migrate to ActionScript 3.0

"The JavaScript components of an Ajax application are typically generated dynamically at runtime, making it harder to debug and requiring developers to be proficient in C#, JavaScript, and HTML. One of the touted benefits of .NET programming was that with one language (such as C#) you could program both tier 1 and tier 2. Sadly, however, Ajax throws a wrench in the works and, in my personal opinion — stemming from years of object-oriented C, C++, and C# application development — is a hack."

A history of the Amiga, part 1

"Dave had worked for Commodore at its West Chester, Pennsylvania, headquarters for eleven years as a hardware engineer. His job was to work on advanced products, like the revolutionary AAA chipset that would have again made the Amiga computer the fastest and most powerful multimedia machine available. But AAA, like most of the projects underway at Commodore, had been canceled in a series of cost-cutting measures, the most recent of which had reduced the staff of over one thousand people at the factory to less than thirty."

The History Of Activision

"When David Crane joined Atari in 1977, the company was maturing from a feisty Silicon Valley start-up to a mass-market entertainment company. “Nolan Bushnell had recently sold to Warner but he was still around offering creative guidance. Most of the drug culture was a thing of the past and the days of hot-tubbing in the office were over,” Crane recalled."