Over the past few days I have been playing with Game Maker and I am very impressed with the interface and capabilities. I will have to get my hands on Game Maker Studio when it comes out, it promises some amazing features. The paid for version supports 3D games, custom DLL’s and much more; the soon to be released version will allow export to HTML5 – way cool. I have long been a game developer enthusiast starting in the eighties at the age of 11 writing my first game on the Commodore 64 in BASIC and Assembler. Over the years the business side took over and it has been nothing more than a hobby for the past twenty years. I even bought the entire series of Game Programming Gems and read them from front to back. In the mid nineties I bought a product called Click and Create from Corel and it was very cool but the games simply didn’t scale. I have often thought of creating a similar tool to Game Maker for children based on the Eclipse platform – thinking the cross platform custom IDE would work great in this use case (which is probably still a good idea given the Eclipse IDE support).

But I digress!

When I watched the video for Game Maker Studio and saw that it will be able to publish to all of the major smart-phone platforms, Mac and HTML5 I was blown away. I can’t wait to see it. This will definitely make many re-think their choice of Flash based games. However, it also looks like Adobe is going to be able to compile to HTML5 in the near future, check out Wallaby. Smells like some good competition coming…

Recent Blog Posts

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Smarter Commerce: Having trouble putting the pieces together? Wed, May 22nd 2013 1:50p Bob Balfe So you are at the Smarter Commerce Global Summit and you are seeing all kinds products and services from IBM and Business Partners. If you are asking yourself questions like this: What value do I get choosing IBM for a specific piece of my Smarter Commerce puzzle? What is the value of choosing IBM for multiple products? What value is there in having these solutions integrated versus a competitor? What business partner would you recommend for X, if any? Why should I choose IBM for our eCommerce [read] Keywords: ibm twitter

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Subscriptions now enabled! Mon, May 20th 2013 9:00p Bob Balfe So I had the pleasure of sitting next to and meeting Drew Neisser (@DrewNeisser), CEO of Renegade LLC on the plane to the IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit today. We had a lot of great exchanges and he gave me a tip I should I have known already and that was having an email subscription form on my blog. I guess I thought that was “the old” way but Drew convinced me many people use his so I figured I would give it a try. So in conference fashion you should see some pictures and p [read] Keywords: ibm email twitter

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The importance of 24×7 automation in your quality assurance process Fri, May 17th 2013 7:50a Bob Balfe I was in a discussion the other day about automation, which in itself is an extremely broad term, but we were talking around quality assurance and the importance of having some kind of automated process when the “product” was ready. Whether this be spreadsheets, reports, commercial products, applications, system builds, etc. At some level you should have automation to verify that at least at a high level the product is consumable. Test driven development and agile development have pl [read] Keywords: admin collaboration domino ibm lotus notes applications database development profile server

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The insanity of the Marketing Technology landscape! Tue, May 14th 2013 7:20a Bob Balfe A very interesting graphic from LUMA Partners (LUMAscape) was recently published. You will notice pretty much all of IBM’s recent acquisitions (in the last 3 or so years) are on this graphic. This is in my opinion a validation of the IBM’s Smarter Commerce strategy as their products become more and more integrated. Having a single company with best of breed technologies integrated and supported by one company makes this landscape a bit more consumable and less daunting. Many of IBM&# [read] Keywords: ibm

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Why transcoders simply don’t work for your mobile eCommerce solution any longer Thu, May 9th 2013 9:10a Bob Balfe A very popular approach over the last five years was to hire a company to transcode your commerce site into a mobile experience. While this niche play was warranted five years ago it is no longer viable for a serious mobile channel presence. Today, most vendors, especially IBM and its business partners are building web applications with responsive design technology; so with a single code base you can target the different channels with the appropriate content for the specific device. This is a ga [read] Keywords: ibm applications mobile server websphere

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Make sure you check out CrossViews booth at the Smarter Commerce Global Summit! Wed, May 8th 2013 7:50a Bob Balfe CrossView is a premier provider of cross-channel commerce solutions and services that enable a smarter, more personalized shopping experience. You can see their sponsor listing on the Smarter Commerce Global Summit page here. One of CrossView’s customers is Moosejaw - a fast-growing Midwestern retailer specializing in extreme outdoor equipment and apparel. Moosejaw’s site, based on IBM’s WebSphere Commerce is often considered the poster child of social commerce. They have a br [read] Keywords: ibm community mobile websphere

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Book Review: Creating an MP3 Player with HTML5 Mon, May 6th 2013 7:10p Bob Balfe Don’t let the size of this book fool you, the content is extremely well written and while providing the very basics of programming in HTML5 it also highlights many tips and tricks all throughout the book. As the title states, the book is a step by step guide for creating the MP3 player from scratch in HTML5 and JavaScript. It covers a lot of material from page to page but presents it in a very easy to read way. I actually read the book from front to back first and then I went through and a [read] Keywords: javascript

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Creating a custom build with Dojo Toolkit Web Builder Fri, May 3rd 2013 7:20a Bob Balfe Do you want to use only a small piece of Dojo? Does Dojo have a really cool feature you want but you don’t want to take the entire library? Then the Dojo Toolkit Web Builder is for you. I recently created a desktop web application where I wanted to use the Swipe function in the Gesture package of Dojo. I am not using a lot of Dojo at all in this application so I really only wanted the dojox.gesture.swipe package. The web builder allows you to select the packages you want and it builds a s [read] Keywords: ibm application desktop dojo

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My second day with the Microsoft Surface – fully loaded Fri, May 3rd 2013 5:20a Bob Balfe One thing I did not mention in yesterday’s post was when you log into Microsoft Surface and use your Microsoft Id you get all of your cloud settings for your account. So my tablet immediately got all of my pictures, documents, and social network accounts automatically configured. It was literally like I just logged into my Windows 8 Laptop. Today however, I spent time getting my favorite applications loaded on the tablet. Since this is a work tablet I had to get the IBM connection setup th [read] Keywords: ibm lotus notes applications eclipse laptop microsoft network office

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My first day with the Microsoft Surface – this is no tablet Thu, May 2nd 2013 7:00a Bob Balfe I now see the attraction of the Microsoft Surface. While it has been documented, written about, reviewed, etc by many and in a sense does not get the recognition some of the other tablets get I think it is clearly getting short changed. And the reason is… This is not a tablet, its a PC. It does pretty much everything my laptop and desktop can do and a whole lot more. The “tablet” is very thin and compares nicely against the other tablets on the market. I have the 128GB model an [read] Keywords: desktop laptop microsoft network skype wifi