Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Going ... going ... gone!

After months of lactivity, I have decided to put this blog on permanent hold. I won't kill it because there is some really great code and great games buried in these 100+ posts about Firefox OS gaming.

I certainly feel guilty for abandoning this blog. Not for the time when I was traveling or attending to family business, but for now when I realize that Firefox OS no longer excites me. In particular, this article about Firefox giving up on $25 phones was the last straw.

http://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-overhauls-firefox-smartphone-plan-to-focus-on-quality-not-cost/

I could get excited when Firefox OS was all about bring phones to the masses, but now I'm not sure what Firefox is about. I didn't like it when Google stopped funding them, I was very uncomfortable with the way that that Brendan Eich was bounced (the founder of JavaScript not worthy?), and the alignment with Yahoo and Bing just doesn't sit well with me.

So I've decided to transfer my energy to another HTML5 hardware container -- Chromebooks! I really like HTML5 and Cromebooks are similar to Firefox OS phones in the sense that the main programming for them is HTML5.

And Chromebooks are bringing computers to the masses. No, not $25, but you can get nice new shiny Chromebooks for $200 and the price is dropping all the time. It's just a keyboard and a screen, with Linux underneath and Chrome on the top.

So I'll be starting a new blog for Chromebooks and games.

One of the mistakes I made with this blog was to alternate posts between game reviews and game programming. For Chrome, I'll have two blogs, one for Chromebook game reviews and the other for Chromebook game programming. And yes, I know that Chrome apps and Chromebook apps are the same thing, but I'm really liking the idea of a nice, light, Chromebook. I'm typing this on a new Asus Chromebook and I'll be doing all my programming on it as well as game playing!

My game programming blog will be called "HTML5 Games on Things" in honor of the new "internet of Things" concept but for games. You can find it at http://www.html5gamesonthings.com/ but I don't have any posts yet. I called it that because I'm starting on Chromebooks first, but with PhoneGap getting better, I think that I can use HTML5 on Android and iOS.

My game review blog will be called "Games for Chromebooks" and will be at http://www.games4chromebooks.com/. No posts there but I'll be doing stuff very, very soon.

So stay tuned, but not iTuned!