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Adobe Exports Flash Animation To HTML5

Nick Upton — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 23:05:00 +0000

[Go to 4:00 for the good stuff]

It could be a deciding moment in the Flash wars that have inflamed internet users for so long, but Flash animation has successfully been dropped into HTML5.

Adobe’s export tools deliver a snippet of code for web designers to simply drop into their design — allowing all those devices that can’t run flash to see all the annoying Flash banners they want.

This is a great step and could mean all those great little Flash puzzle games and news interactive will find their way to the iPad, and all the other mobile devices that simply don’t run Flash.

The functionality will come along with the new version of Flash, CS5, when it launches.

[Via 9to5Mac]

Flash Friday: Plants vs. Zombies

Asterios Kokkinos — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 15:00:01 +0000

We’d be remiss if we didn’t tip our hats to the juggernaut of flash gaming, the one, the only, the indispensable…As tower defense games go, few are as deceptively simple yet maddeningly complex as Plants vs. Zombies. The concept is simple – an army of the undead inexorably marches towards your home. Your only defense? A pack of killer plants who are as adorable as they are deadly.

So, in gaming terms, the mobs are zombies and the towers are plants. There are tons of zombie types, and 49 plant types – each effective against a different zombie or in a different situation. The challenge comes in that you can only bring six different plants with you, so balancing our your clorophyllic arsenal becomes a major part of the gameplay.

Screen door zombies can only be killed with poison gas emitting mushrooms, and the fast charging quarterback zombies need to be frozen before they mow down your entire garden. Tombstones create more zombies, but can only be destroyed with a single plant – a plant which becomes useless once the tombstones are gone, filling a valuable plant slot.

See what I mean about complex?

The game is also relentlessly fun, and is the fastest selling iPhone game of all time. Check it out at www.popcap.com/games/free/pvz.

Flash Friday: Gemcraft

Asterios Kokkinos — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:00:09 +0000

Welcome to Flash Fridays, another of our new ongoing weekly topics designed to show you, the reader, what we writers love about the web. Flash Friday will be a look at some of our favorite flash games – a.k.a. the only games you can play on your work computer.

Unless, of course, you’re ballsy enough to have installed Command and Conquer 3 on your work PC, in which case, well done. Today’s Flash Friday game du jour? Gemcraft: Chapter Zero.

Gemcraft is, simply put, one of the best and most involving tower defense games ever devised. Instead of building standard towers like frost or stun with gold, you purchase gems with mana that you place within empty tower slots. Each gem has a different color representing an ability, and you never know what kind of gem you’re going to get.

Different colored gems can be combined to create hybrid powers, or similar colored gems can be combined to create harder hitting powers. The placement of your gems, deployment of your towers and expenditure of experience points on sub-powers make this a richly rewarding, epic flash game. I spent day after day playing this at work, and don’t regret a thing.

To play Gemcraft: Chapter Zero, click here.

World’s Largest Commercially Available Flash Drive?

Asterios Kokkinos — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 14:00:59 +0000

One flash drive. Two hundred and fifty six gigabytes. Limitless pornography.

Gentlemen, meet the DT-310, a Kingston flash drive that holds 256 gigabytes of data in its tiny frame. It costs eleven hundred dollars, reads up to 25 megabytes per second and writes at 12 MB/s. It’s the most unneccessary thing I’ve ever seen, and as such, I want it very badly.

Hilariously, it’s the second generation of this model – the first, released in late 2009, had slower read/write speeds, which is understandable for a drive carrying around a whaleload of data.

Could Kingston’s monster of a flash drive be the world’s largest commercially available flash drive? My searches on Newegg and Amazon have failed to find a bigger one, so I’m willing to concede that the DT-310’s the biggest. Hey Technomaly readers – if you can find a bigger mass market, commercially produced and available flash drive, email me at asterios.kokkinos@gmail.com and I’ll send you something free in the mail! It won’t be expensive, but it will be free!

Hey, who wants some Windows 95 installation discs?

Source & Photo Source: New York Times

Broken Flash Drive? Meet The World’s Toughest Flash Drive

Asterios Kokkinos — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 14:00:08 +0000

Ever been royally screwed by a broken flash drive? Corsair has the solution, with their insanely overprotected flash drive, the “Corsair Survivor.”

Data retrieval will be a thing of the past with this bad boy – it’s encased in CNC-milled, aircraft grade aluminum, (I don’t know what that means), comes molded in a shock-dampening collar and EPDM seal, (I don’t know what that means either), and is water-resistant to a depth of 200 meters. (I have no idea why you’d go swimming with this).

Corsair claims that reviewers and bloggers have baked, boiled, dropped, run over and microwaved this thing without breaking it, so…holy lord, these are all conditions that would never be met in real life, yet I’m happy have been enacted!

A sixteen gigabyte model will run you fifty dollars on Amazon, which isn’t too bad – it comes with a USB extension cord, some dogtags, a 10 year warranty and bragging rights. Lots and lots of worthless bragging rights.

Source: Maximum PC