Vector Graphics
The only predictable property of life is how unpredictable it usually is.  My newly formed partnership with my old friend Luis has gone through a bit of dry period. He just got a job after a period of unemployed, which is great, but it will take him a while to find a good balance that will allow him to spend time on our hobby.  So, while our little project is on hiatus, I have been playing with a couple of things from my long list of cool technologies to try.

The idea of creating cool graphics and animations on the web for games and interactive sites has always been very appealing to me.  But the games you play on the internet are usually developed in Adobe Flash, which is a proprietary technology.  That means that, for the most part, you are forced to buy their products to develop Flash games and such.  They do offer a free, open source alternative to develop Flash applications without their fancy tools: the free flex compiler.  I have downloaded and studied it a bit, but I am frankly more interested in what is out there for the people who want to write games for the web using nothing but free standard technologies.  The situation is not that great, to be honest, but there is hope in the horizon with the upcoming HTML 5 standard.

Although not quite fit for games, there is a very cool library called Raphaël.js (Thank you Daiji for telling me about it!) that can be used to pimp your web site with interactive vector graphics. That is, graphics consisting of lines, circles and other shapes filled with solid colors, color gradients and the like.  Google maps, for example, makes use of vector graphics to display lines on their maps and make it work on most browsers.  Here is a little bouncing lines demo I just created.  Since I am currently rebuilding my home page, I will probably be spicing it up with it.  It does make your computer work hard just to display a few colored lines, so I better use it with care.

To create the vector graphics, I have been playing with Inkscape, a vector graphics creation program.  It is not high art, but I recently created a little reward chart for my little girls with it. Here is a sample image from that chart. Enjoy! :)