Fyrdility

I am happy to announce the release of my second Opera widget: eduMap!

This 100% SVG-based widget lets you learn the location of countries, states and capitals around the world. It currently doesn't work in Opera 9.5 for some reason (weird, since that's where I tested it on most!), but I hope to resolve that shortly.

Inspiration for this widget came from the excellent website purposegames.com, which has the same basic premise. However, all its games are Flash, and I wanted to make an SVG version. Also, I wanted to add more modes and options to the games (for example, where the country is highlighted and you select its name from a list).

Basic knowledge of the location of other countries seems to be sadly lacking in the United States, and I believe this may be a small, but great way to help change that. As an added bonus, it might help inspire other developers to use SVG over Flash.

Feel free to leave any feedback and bug reports on the widget's page, and stay tuned for updates.

Enjoy!

For comments, please post at eduMap widget on the new Fyrdility blog

A few months ago I learned about this excellent set of games created by rkm for the Nintendo DS browser.

Inspired by this, I thought I'd try my hand and at creating a game of my own for the system. Here, finally, is the result of that work. The game is fairly straightforward, move the paddle around to bounce back the ball, break all blocks to proceed to next level. Bonuses can fall and can be good or bad. Currently only four levels available, more (and further game improvements) may come later.

The bad news is that neither me nor rkm were able to find a way to get the dragging effect of the stylus to be recognized, presumably since this is caught for the window panning instead. Thus, to move the paddle you just tap the place where you want to go. A little annoying, but you get used to it. Another note, the game works best in SSR mode, so make sure you set your browser to that before you start.

It's also occured to me that this game might make a nifty widget, too, so I may release an Operanoid widget later.

Without further ado: Operanoid! For comments, please post at Operanoid! An Arkanoid/Breakout game for the DS Browser on the new Fyrdility blog