I woke up this morning, and went about my normal routine – Get Dressed, eat BreakFast, Check Twitter, Facebook, then my emails. I was initially shocked and thought it was some kind of joke. But no, I had won. @JasonBradbury started a competition last Monday where you emailed him saying you wanted his new book, Atomic Swarm, and he’d give it to a few hundred people – signed.

I should get the book by Wednesday, and it’s pretty much all I’ll talk about for a few days.

Here’s my second Chrome Extension – BlackBird. It allows you to tweet whatever page you’re on. There’s also a bookmark for those of you who don’t use Chrome. You can get the extension at http://black-bird.tk/. There’s also a video below on the Chrome Extension.

Yep, it’s finished! You can go and download it at http://jurl.tk/chrome

Feedback would be nice.

Just went and got FreeSat. Haven’t had much time to play with it, but, from what I’ve seen, it’s really nice.

Also, an update on CubeSwarm

I have all the graphics done, and I have a homescreen more or less coded.

I’ll work on it more over the weekend. A lot more (maybe to a pre-alpha stage)

I was participating in an annual Maths event at school today, which is held up and down the UK. I’d finished the questions within 10 minutes, and we had been allocated 60 minutes for the event, so I set to work designing an iPhone App on a piece of paper they’d given us to work things out. I’d been playing a game the night before called CubeField, which you can play here. CubeSwarm is based on it loosely, but the function is very much the same.

The App itself will of course be adapted for the iPhone/iPod Touch. It will include Accelerometer support, allowing you to tilt the iPhone left, right, forwards and backwards to move the ‘Plane’ left, right, make it move faster, and make it move slower. It will also include a Hi-Score system, probably provided by Agon Online.

This isn’t really new. There’s already an App in the App Store called ‘Cube Runner’, that functions more or less the same. But, during another lesson at school (most of my brainwaves happen at school),  I had an idea. Well, two ideas.

Power Ups

If you play CubeField (the link is at the top of the post), you’ll notice the game itself is actually very boring. It’s highly addictive, but it’s incredibly minimalistic. People have gone so far as to say the game is perfection, having not too many features or too few. So how do you improve on perfection? Simple. Add Power Ups to the game.

The way this will probably work is that at points throughout the game, a power up bubble will appear on the screen. You’ll have to manouver your way towards it, then tap it in the top right corner if you got it. There are loads of possiblities for Power Ups, but the ones I’m going with will probably be:

1. Speed Up – A temporary Mega Boost. Makes you go blindingly fast, meaning you get loads more points. It does, however, mean that you are more likely to crash.
2. Invincibility – This is probably the best power up. It allows you to freely run into any block and not lose a wing.
3. Rockets – This gives you two rockets to fire at blocks. Some blocks will explode instantly, others will take a couple of hits before blowing up.
4. Score Multipliers – Pick up a ‘x2′, ‘x4′ or ‘x8′ bubble and prepare for your score to go through the roof.

Lives in Lives

The traditional game kills you off as soon as you touch a cube. So CubeSwarm should surely improve on that. In CubeSwarm, you’ll need to touch cubes a total of three times to die. But, here’s the twist. Touching a cube once will cause one of your wings to drop off, reducing stability. Touching a cube again will cause the other to drop off, giving you stability again, but hindering your speed. The final touch will kill you off.

So, do you like the idea? How about some feedback in the comments. I’m not even sure if this is codable yet, but I’ll have a good try over the weekend. In the meantime, here are a few mock screen shots. (Click to Enlarge)

Google Chrome: It’s easy to fill up the tab bar in Chrome to the point where you can’t read the tab titles or easily find what you’re looking for. VerticalTab lets you view tabs in a list and search, sort, and more.

VerticalTabs places a small icon in the Chrome toolbar next to the address box. Clicking on the icon displays all your tabs in a vertical list where you can select tabs or drag and drop them via mouse input or using keyboard shortcuts. In the options menu you can change the width and size of the vertical tab display and toggle the tab-count display on and off.

VerticalTabs is free and works wherever Google Chrome does. Have a favorite extension for wrangling tabs? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

Via the Lifehacker.com Blog

Due to events that happened on both my site and George Lee’s site, and something I was thinking about, I have decided to change hosts. This doesn’t affect you at all, except for the fact the my site SHOULD now load faster. It also has some breaks and cracks in it, so if something does go wrong, please tell me.

I’ll start to finish off the iPhone Web App tonight. Meaning there MIGHT be a release tomorrow. I still have to update some of the graphics and tidy it up, but this switch of host got rid of adverts, making it 20x better for me and you.

Jamie

I’m in the process of learning how to make Google Chrome extensions. It’s not hard, just incredibly annoying at times. The first is an extension to accompany http://www.jurl.tk/, which I finished redesigning earlier today. It should be done soon, so keep your eyes peeled at http://chrome.google.com/extensions

I’ve just finished adding a new homepage to http://jurl.tk, and have also just finished creating http://wconf.tk. Both of them are URL Shortners, which work perfectly to create short urls. Both of them are churning out 17 character URL’s, making them shorter than both bit.ly and is.gd, not to mention other sites like tinyurl and cli.gs

You can try them out by going to http://jurl.tk and http://wconf.tk. All URL’s are permanent, but spam URL’s WILL be deleted.