For the last few days, I’ve been playing around with the canvas element, teaching myself how to draw primitive shapes on the fly. As a result of this gut-wrenchingly worthwhile endeavor, I now have a pretty swell little demo up and running.


Play Tracer

I’ll admit that it’s not a finished product; features I can’t think of are unimplemented; the resolution is that of an 8-bit gaming console; physically shaking your computer does nothing to remove the image. And, like the buttons and levers at every nuclear plant built since 1957, the controls are painted on.

Still, there are many keyboard commands that allow gameplay to be not only enjoyable, but super-enjoyable.

Arrow keys

Move cursor.

Space

Clear image.

Shift

Toggle cursor blinking.

X

Export current image.

1-9

Change size of cursor (default is 2).

Have at it! Even on the Wii — that’s right, I’ve got it working with the Wii remote’s d-pad. Don’t forget to tell me exactly what you think of it, because I base all my design decisions on misinterpretations of user feedback.

Roboshrub Press
ALBANY, NEW YORK

The sun was completely blocked out over the state capital yesterday, after thousands of trees took to the streets.

Protests began almost immediately after the random chemical spill / government experiment gone horribly awry / alien intervention / magic that brought almost 350 acres of pristine forest to life last Thursday. Among the protesters’ demands are an immediate end to logging and a proper burial for all wooden furniture and paper.

"Our saplings shouldn’t live in perpetual fear of becoming end tables."

— Anonymous Pine Tree

“We’ve long been the target of human propaganda, from books like ‘The Giving Tree’ to Monty Python’s infatuation with lumberjacks,” claims their spokes-pine, a charismatic young Douglas Fir. “We only want autonomy. My people deserve a place to put down roots.”

Counter-demonstrations have already sprung up, with angry humans waving blank signs made of plywood and chanting “I’m a lumberjack and I’m okay!”

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The Roboshrub Press is a wholly pwned subsidiary of Roboshrub News Incorporated, itself pwned by Roboshrub Inc. This article is printed on recycled human pulp.

“You can use any numbers to prove anything,” my first grade teacher told me over coffee. She gave all the first graders hot coffee every day before art. She hated the art teacher.

She also hated being woken up at three in the morning by someone in another time zone.

I can empathize with that, having recently needed to conduct several conversations with people all over the world. As an avid user of the Opera web browser (and drinker of Diet Pepsi) I immediately set out to find a widget to quickly learn the time differential between myself and my new friends (friends who are better than you because they’re NEWER).

The widget I found had more holes than the Holy See (which I assume is full of holes because of the name), so I set to work rewriting it and making it into something I wanted to use. I tried contacting the original author about my changes, but he seems to have vanished from existence over two years ago.

Behold the fruits of my labor: World+Clock!



It’s been about a week since it was approved and put up for download. I’ve taken the download numbers so far and crunched them against the average downloads for the original widget to come up with this graph (which you know is accurate because it’s a graph):



The two widgets will have equal numbers of total downloads in about six years, at the 250,000 mark — of course, it will probably happen much sooner, as the numbers of the original widget will likely plummet (due to the Diet Pepsi-like effect of a superior product) and the amount of Opera users increases.

Betting is now open on when the intersection point will occur. Remember, the house always wins and you change the outcome by participating.