Hi, I’m Simon Madine and I make digital toys and write guides on web development.
I'm a senior web dev and evangelist for Nokia Maps in Berlin.
All too often, I have ideas which might make a cool website or iPhone app or whatever and I know I just don't have the time to build them. I'm going to post them here in the hope that someone else might find a use for them. These ideas might already be in existence, of course. I'm not claiming they are unique in any way (although some might be).
You are free to take these ideas and do whatever you like with them. Of course, if they become amazingly successful, I could do with a bigger TV...
I had an idea around Christmas for a new game design. it was basically to be a single or multi-player game where you would tie knots in a piece of ‘string’. The single-player game would focus on discovering new patterns while the multi-player one would be a time-based challenge where each would tie a knot, pass it over to their opponent and the first to untie it would win.
I built a basic prototype and had some fun inventing a few interesting knots (my favourite being ‘Yoda’) but didn't get round to doing anything with it. As I'm tidying up all my projects before immigrating to Germany, I figured I should just go ahead and put this out into the world.
The system is built using an invisible 3x3 grid and 4 quadratic curves. The curves' start, control and end points are the centre of a tile. When you move a tile, it basically swaps position with the tile nearest where you drop it. This can also be done with multiple tiles simultaneously if you're on a multi-touch device. You can see the tiles if you enable debug mode. You can also switch between the two colour schemes it has at the moment.
The only addition I've made to it since Christmas was to add on a system to allow players to save knots back into the system. I've only built in 22 patterns so if you make a nice, interesting or funny one, give it a recognisable name (nothing too rude, please) and save it, it will then be available to everybody who plays with it. You can also set whether the pattern is to count as ‘matched’ when rotated 90°, 180°, flipped vertically or flipped horizontally. Calculating the isomorphisms (when two knots look the same to the viewer but aren't necessarily the same to the computer) was probably the trickiest bit of the system.
If you're interested in taking the idea further, grab the code from GitHub and make something from it. The usual rules apply, if you make something from it that makes you a huge tonne of neverending cash, a credit would be nice and, if you felt generous, you could always buy me a larger TV.
Here are some mockups I did for a game design last year.
The general premise is a 2d physics game with multiple single-screen levels. When the level starts, you have a few seconds to rearrange whatever items/furniture/planks of wood you find lying around and place your hero somewhere on the screen. After the initial timer has run out, the pipe opens and hundreds or thousands of tiny zombies or robots (or robot zombies) pour into the level. You have to avoid being touched by them for 30 seconds, after which the level is cleared and you're on to the next level. The difficulty is in being able to quickly rearrange the furniture and choose your safe spot to prolong the time before they get you. As they are able to eat through most things, they would eventually get through.
There is the possibility for tweaks to the difficulty setting by changing the amount of available furniture, whether the protagonist can move mid-level, how many zombies there are, how small they are and so on.
At the time, I was too busy building The SMWS Spirit Cellars and when i had time again, I started building The Elementals so I never came back to it. Looks like it could be a fun game, though.
After seeing this collection of the 892 different ways you can partition a 3 x 4 grid1, I was struck by a thought. If these were generated as HTML templates, they could be combined with a couple of other useful websites and become a nice, API-driven site builder2.
Once this service has been created, I'm fairly sure me and the rest of the industry will be out of a job.
Appington is, fundamentally, a single-application VNC client with a simple interface for task switching. Where most VNC applications present the user with the entire screen, Appington only shows a single window at any one time. This simplified interface makes interaction easier and saves on client application memory and reduces data transfer allowing the viewer to be more responsive. In some applications, this data transfer saving may be used to facilitate audio capture and transmission.
This screen shows a list of all available applications grouped by first letter. In the lower-left, the user can toggle between listing all applications or only listing currently running applications. The right-hand panel shows more information about the selected application. In this example, Google Chrome is selected and running. The current memory and CPU usage are shown along with a note of how many active windows the application has. Because Chrome is currently running, the option to quit is shown. If we had selected an unlaunched application, this button would show the option to launch. In case of emergencies, there is always the option to Force Quit a running application.
This shows a standard single application window. The button in the top left would return the user to the previous screen. From the right, the remaining buttons allow the user to capture a screen shot, maximize the application window to match the current iPad viewport (if possible), refresh the current screen (in case of render errors) and access the application's menu. In OS X, menu access would be accomplished by way of the accessibility API. At the moment, I'm not sure how it would work on other OSs.
This shows a single window of an application with multiple windows. You'll notice the extra button at the top between Menu and Refresh. This menu will allow you to select which window you want to access between however many the application currently has open.
The partner application to this is a modified VNC server running on the host machine. It is responsible for window management, task-switching, menu parsing and audio capture (à la SoundFlower). If there is already a VNC server running, the partner app will leave the standard VNC functionality alone and act purely as a helper, providing the extra functionality but not using extra memory by duplicating functionality. This is a variation of noVNC using the python proxy to manage the socket connection allowing the client to be built in PhoneGap using HTML 5.
Like I said at the top, this hasn't been built yet. It'd be cool if someone did build it, though.
