Conway’s Game of Life is well known in programming circles. Abstractly, it’s a set of rules applied to a grid of boolean (either on or off) cells. On each iteration, the cells in the grid evaluate their neighbors and decide whether to turn on or off.

The demo above is a WebGL and CoffeeScript implementation of a generic cellular automaton, with some slight deviations to make it extra trippy.

Recently we have had a bit of time to play around with one of Google’s newer experiences, the Google Hangout. For kicks we wanted to see what all could be done with the platform. So we devised a Testbed and AS3 Bridge to flash. This allowed us (and now you) to explore all of the nooks and crannies of the Google Hangouts System. Plus, floating green dots that follow your face are just plain fun. Click through and check out the post and source to have a play!

Facebook’s Like Button in Flash: A Tale of Broken Dreams and Tortured Souls

It all started so innocently, “Hey, can we implement The Like Button in flash?”. Seemed like a very average and reasonable request. I mean really, how hard could it be? Its all just http requests right? Shouldn’t be an issue… Turns out its like agreeing to step into a ring with Kimbo Slice, assuming that anyone with a name like “Kimbo Slice” couldn’t possibly put up much of a fight.

In the end we found a solution, but it came at a price…
Here is a working example:
http://labs.byhook.com/hookconnect/HookConnect.html

There is nothing better than a little friendly competition, right? Mike came to me with the request to make his post a little more modular and into a javascript library that could be shared for the masses. Don’t get me wrong, I pretty much hate javascript unless it is wrapped by JQuery, but any opportunity to improve and take credit for another person’s hard work sounded too fantastic to pass up. So here is my update to Mike’s post — the BETTER way to implement video that is compatible with mobile phones, difficult browsers and HTML5-lovers/Flash-haters!

Ah, the mouse scroll wheel. It used to be so simple, and so obvious. Couldn’t we have just left it alone, and come to some gentleman’s agreement on how the browsers notify your objects of what the user just did with the wheel? Sadly however, the reality is that this is not the case. Different [...]

Ever wonder what is behind your browser window? “Pixels!” you say? You’d be wrong, its clearly remote controlled ponies. I can prove it, click “Read More”. Then go ahead.. drag your browser window around.. no really.. go ahead.. its just ponies.. I promise!