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Here are some best things I’ve come across this year. Not all are new, or even new to me, but they kicked ass in 2011

1. Kids Dungeon Adventure – A floortop RPG for pre-school age kids and their geeky parent(s). What started out as a little game with my daughter grew into a full fledged eproduct and side business. This project was life changing for me.

2. Notepadd++ – I used the same text editor for Windows for at least 11 years, Editpad. I finally decided to try Notepadd++ and was blown away by how much more I liked it. Color coding for almost any language and built in FTP are enough right there. Love it. Side note: Editpad was introduced to me by a college friend, Jonathan Meyer, who passed away soon after college. I often think about how much he’d love what is going on with the Internet over the last 10 years.

3. HTML5 – Have you seen how fast modern browsers can draw on an HTML5 canvas? Mobile browsers still need work, though.

4. Garageband for the iPad – I love the iLife Garageband, but the iPad version is amazing and portable. Check out the theme song I recorded for Rock the Animals with Sasha. At this point the song is a bigger hit than the game.

5. Thingiverse – I built a Makerbot Thing-o-Matic at work and have been obsessed with finding a use for it other than making crappy bottle openers.

6. Sword and Sworcery – Best iOS game of the year. It’s King’s Quest meets Punch Out while having coffee with David Lynch. Jim Guthrie’s music on it is amazing (listen).

7. Honoro Vera Garnacha – Best new wine I tried all year. It’s Spanish and only $8.99.

Honoro Vera Garnacha - Best new wine I tried this year

8. Movies – I don’t think I saw any new releases in 2011, but here are all the movies I liked that I saw this year in no particular order: The Kids are Alright, Blue Valentine, The Social Network, Kung Fu Panda, Catfish, Toy Story 3, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, Scot Pilgrim vs. the World, Howl’s Moving Castle, and Shutter Island.

For the last few weeks I’ve been working on a new analytical dashboard tool for Highrise and it finally launches today! Read about it here.

In the launch post I talk about what makes Evidensity different from other tools and my worldview on sales dashboards:

• Some people don’t want customizable line graphs
• They want actionable intelligence about their data.
• Sales pipelines are built on faulty assumptions and overly optimistic sales people
• They should be built on historical data.
• Your eyes and brain can handle it, so fit tons of data into one screen.

I can put the AK back on the shelf now.

#1

Previously: 37 Signals Sent Me a Gift for Pwning their Leaderboard

In the last year I started hearing a lot of hype about html5. So far I’ve been impressed. They’ve clearly expanded it to become more of a platform for rich graphics. Here are some cool projects I’ve worked (or am working) on.

Sparklines in HTML5

HTML5 Ball Bouncing

HTML5 Gravity Ball

Rock the Animals (Beta)

This month’s Wired has a great article (not online yet, so no link) by Jason Fagone about the International Olympiad in Informatics where high school students from all over the world compete to solve problems through software. It’s fiercely competitive and has its own sub culture of super stars, namely Gennady Korotkevich of Belarus, who at 14 became the youngest world champion.

What should have been an inspiring and interesting look into this academic sport with open ended problems such as how to best determine the language of a given text string, went sour for me when Fagone brought up US coach, Rob Kolstad, who admits he doesn’t “know how to do most of the algorithms.” After Korotkevich won his second straight Olympiad at 15, Kolstad remarked, “the question is, will he die a virgin?”

I expect smartasses with no respect for the brilliance of these kids to say something like that, but not someone who works with them every day and helps them train. He’s not someone I want to represent the US either.

US Coach Rob Kolstad, who clearly does very well with the ladies.

Sorry, it just made me angry.

The most neglected feature of Twitter has to be favorites. It’s not used for much and none of the clients do anything interesting with them. Unlike Facebook’s “like,” categorizing a tweet as a “favorite” seems like a big commitment and the new Retweet features seem to support the concept better anyway. So what do you do with favorites? I use them as bookmarks. Most of my tweet reading is done on my phone and there are a lot of interesting links posted that I don’t have time to read. I favorite them, allowing me to look them up at a later date. It’s a simple idea that instantly improved the value I was getting from Twitter.

Check out my twitter favorites.

For many years the Internet has brought us ideas and services that we wish we had thought of first. ?Most technologists wish they could go back in time and hit big with online auctions, classifieds, blogging software, and social networking. ?Microblogging (ie. Twitter) is the latest and greatest of these facepalming ideas because it’s so damn simple.

But would Twitter have worked ten years ago?

The two components to this question are the technical feasibility and user feasibility. ?Were the computers fast enough for a worldwide application handling millions of messages per day in real time? ?Were people ready for a public, messy communication tool?

Technology:
Did we have the technology for Twitter in 1999? ?The fail whales of the past few years indicate we may not have had equipment and system software powerful enough for a monster like Twitter. ?Were there any applications of that size in 1999?

To me, the only comparable 20th century, many-to-many application was eBay. ?The web and the Internet ?itself were enormous systems handling many-to-many relationships, but its architecture was distributed world wide to share the load.

Users:
What did the Internet look like? ?Google had just arrived, Internet Explorer had achieved dominant market share, eBay seemed like the best Internet business, blogs were in their infancy, message boards and usenet were extremely popular, and mainstream communication was dominated by email and instant messaging. ?So much time and effort went into making sure messaging was private and secure, I think it would have been a big stretch to think people would have been ok with mostly public messaging. ?In fact, I think the only way public messaging could have caught on was through the emergent behavior we saw on friendster?testimonials?and myspace wall posts, which were the precursors to twitter. ? Message boards were obviously public in 1999, but we hadn’t yet grown tired of the trolls, spammers, flamers, creationists, and over-reacting moderators. ?For many of us Twitter reclaimed that energy and spirit the web had before these problems got unbearable.

This is what my site looked like in 1999. Ouch.

So in my opinion, we may or may not have been technically ready for Twitter, but the users definitely weren’t ready. ?We needed to be shown over and over again that email, chat, ?and message boards all kind of sucked once they got to a certain size. ?Twitter made it truly mass communication?usable?again and it works despite its negatives, but only because we know the alternatives are worse.

Follow me on twitter: ?http://twitter.com/bengarvey

Attention OMI players. I’m aware of an issue in the game Odd Just Don’t Believe It. Looks like someone is able to shoot twice and I’m trying to figure out why.

Update: I brought Mr Chocolate back to life. I think I know what the problem was.

I added the Twitter Tools plugin for wordpress and I set it to create a blog post every time I posted an update. (Don’t know what Twitter is? Go here).? Follow me on Twitter.

It looks a little strange on this page now with a ton of one line posts, but I’ll figure it out eventually.

Since there are no cool pictures to see right now, how about this one?

I’m gearing up for a big update on Odd Man In.? If you know of any bugs, leave them in the comments here and I’ll make sure they get added.