Gonçalo Valério

Tag: Internet

  • Bombermine

    Have you ever played “bomberman”? Yesterday I found that some guys made the classic even better. Just go to bombermine.com and you will be able to play the game in a huge scenario against hundreds of other people in a massive multi-player game.
    But the best part is that you won’t need to install anything because it’s played in the browser. Believe-me it’s fun, give it a try and hope you don’t get caught by one of my bombs.

    Note: This note has nothing to do with the subject, i thought one of the comments in the game discussion makes a good point about this kind of games and the all the buzz around html5. So here is the extract that i wanted to share:

    Web Apps set us back 20 years in pretty much every respect except ease of deployment (1992 – people are impressed that Wolfenstein 3D gets 60FPS on a 100MHz Pentium; 2012 – people are impressed that Wolfenstein 3D (in Javascript!!!!111omg) gets 15FPS without sound on an 8-core 3GHz box).

    by Shish2k

    Source: HN

  • Almost 9 zeros

    Take a picture, add some pre-made effects and share. Now just wait for people to leave comments on your “work”. These were the steps that i made till i reach this photo:

    instagram

    The biggest tech news in the last few days was around this simple process and the application that is behind it. It’s called “Instagram” and Facebook just paid more than 900 million dollars for it (more than The New York Times current market value, according to some websites).

    I already knew the service but never had tried because it was only available for the iphone. Recently with the launch of the android version and all the buzz around the deal with facebook, i decided to try the app and see if it worth all that noise around it.

    The greatest weakness that i see on the service is that it doesn’t have a web interface, so basically all the network only functions within the mobile app, which is very limiting. People are comparing this application with Youtube, saying it is the same thing for photos, but Youtube works everywhere (almost all platforms) and Instagram doesn’t.

    Besides that and in a overall view, the app is addicting, has a nice design and you learn fast despite the icons and menus aren’t obvious at first (on the android version). I found myself watching photos and more photos that i didn’t even care about, and that is a good sign.

    In conclusion, i am from the opinion that it was a nice move from facebook to buy Instagram but it was very (very) overvalued, since there are lots of other great ways to share photos on the web.

    Time will tell if it was well spent money or not.

  • Developers and facebook

    While doing my daily news reading I stumbled on an article at the blog “GigaOm” discussing whether or not programmers like facebook to interact with each other and to discuss work. In the middle of it I followed a link that lead me to the place where the original discussion about this topic was taking place, and guess what?

    Almost all of them (>95%) prefer other tools or websites to this kind of stuff. I found it very strange since lots of discussions about technology are taking place at Goolgle+ and other similar platforms.

    This poll doesn’t prove my theory that people are losing or wasting lots of the great features and possibilities that the web has to offer, when they restrict their Internet usage to one “social network” or tool. But still is interesting to know that developers prefer other places to meet, work and discuss.