{"id":3018,"date":"2012-10-02T11:28:17","date_gmt":"2012-10-02T19:28:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/webdev\/?p=3018"},"modified":"2012-10-02T11:30:03","modified_gmt":"2012-10-02T19:30:03","slug":"apps-are-boring-games-are-fun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/webdev\/2012\/10\/02\/apps-are-boring-games-are-fun\/","title":{"rendered":"Apps are Boring; Games are Fun"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few weeks ago I headed down to Porto Alegre to help out with a Mozilla hack day after BrazilJS. I was around at the BrazilJS event as well, but I only fielded the odd question as most attendees were off at the awesome talks (it was a single-track conference — my favourite kind). As a result, I didn’t exactly know what to expect from the hack day, seeing as it was to be a mix of BrazilJS attendees and folks who heard through the grapevine there’d be a day of hacking. It was also my first time in Porto Alegre (and in Brazil, for that matter) so I had nearly no idea what to expect of the coding scene there.<\/p>\n

Well hot damn I was impressed.<\/p>\n

I was sent to Brazil pretty last-minute, so speaking at BrazilJS wasn’t possible. But I did get to give a brief talk after Brendan Eich showed off BananaBread<\/a> — which was basically the perfect segue ever.<\/p>\n

Building More Exciting Apps<\/h3>\n

I spoke for what I remember to be about twenty-five minutes about building open web apps with Mozilla’s kick-ass app templates (mortar<\/a>, WebGameStub<\/a>, and sutthisan<\/a>). I focused specifically on ditching the tired idea of making your first app a grocery list or Twitter client; I argued instead that game programming in HTML5 and JavaScript — especially 2D programming — was within the grasp of many<\/em> more web developers than it was even a few years ago.<\/p>\n

Mozilla’s WebGameStub<\/a> makes this especially easy; it’s a simple game loop plus a <canvas><\/code> tag that lets a developer get their own 2D game engine started with no extra boilerplate. It even includes a demo game that you can use to bootstrap your own game (which is how yours truly got started). Another Mozilla web developer, Fred Wenzel<\/a>, was able to build a snake clone<\/a> and ship it to the Mozilla Marketplace in an afternoon. I added iOS support and touch events easily. Turns out: this stuff isn’t hard at all!<\/p>\n

So after I stood in front of a decent-sized audience and spoke in weird English for half an hour to a Portuguese audience, we got hacking.<\/p>\n

\"Photo
A shot of some of the hack day attendees at my talk.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Of Woes and Wifi<\/h3>\n

Hundreds — sometimes even dozens — of people storming your wifi just doesn’t work. We got stuck with pretty slow connections for everyone, which meant I was fielding a lot of questions and folks were having trouble getting access to GitHub and the awesome Mozilla Developer Network<\/a>. I was worried that between my very English help and the crummy wifi it wouldn’t be a very productive hack day. With about three, maybe not quite four hours of hacking behind us, we announced that it was demo time.<\/p>\n

Unexpected Turnaround<\/h3>\n

I was running around the whole day, helping people with JavaScript questions, API nonsense, and whatever else, that I barely got to really see<\/em> what they were working on. Other groups were a bit secretive of it. But what they turned out from a few hours was totally awesome. My two favourites from the hack day were:<\/p>\n