Linux Flower: June 2013

Thursday, 20 June 2013

My favourite (best?) puzzle games for Android.

With the multitude of games available at Play Store I've probably missed a good bunch, but those I chose several things in common.
For me a good mobile puzzle game has to be:

Hard,
Possible to break at any time and let me come back to the saved state,
Giving me a possibility to play it more leisurely,
Have nice graphics,
Do not under any circumstances contain any arcade elements!
Scale difficulty nicely

I'm giving one point for each bullet point above.

At this point my top 3 are:

Triple Town by Spry Fox
Alien Hive by APPXPLORE
Candy Crush Saga by KING.COM

All three are match 3 or more games.

Screenshots from my Samsung Galaxy S3:

Triple Town	Alien Hive	Candy Crush Saga

Each one has a set of things that makes it amazing and each has its flaws.

Triple Town

Comes with limited moves which is fair enough, because it's a good game and worth the couple of pounds the developer is charging. Also it plays well and smooth even on older devices. Can be played completely leisurely and be a good fun (even has a scenario without bears if they make you angry!)
(Points: 1+1+1+1+1 +1 = 6)

Alien Hive
Has built in more arcade (time based) version which is only slightly similar to the main game and even though I hate arcade games on mobiles this one is quite OK if you want a break from thinking, because boy oh boy AH can be quite frustrating in the way it gets harder and harder quite quickly!
There are paid for options to make it easy if you into it. I am not.
(Points: 1+1+1+1+1+0 = 5)

Candy Crush Saga
Latest London Tube hype ;) Everyone seems to be playing it, though not many have gotten very far in levels and there are hundreds of them. Some very hard some just insane. You may make them easier paying for boosts and such. Every couple of levels you have to get your friends push you further or pay for it. That's the only real flaw for me. Most of my friends don't play it anymore having been disheartened by the difficult levels (and randomness of the pieces plays a major role here, which is also a bit unnerving), so I have nobody to push me. Not that I need it just yet. I'm stuck ;) There is no easy-mode way.
(Points: 1+1+0+1+0+1 = 4)

I'd like to find out what your favorites are!

Wednesday, 19 June 2013

Google Fonts

You may already know them, but if you don't there's a whole new world opening to you with Google Fonts.

As Google themselves say about their fonts:

A web with web fonts is more beautiful, readable, accessible and open.
Google Fonts makes it quick and easy for everyone to use web fonts, including professional designers and developers. We believe that everyone should be able to bring quality typography to their web pages and applications.
Our goal is to create a directory of web fonts for the world to use. Our API service makes it easy to add Google Fonts to a website in seconds. The service runs on Google's servers which are fast, reliable and tested. Google provides this service free of charge.

And I couldn't agree more!

If you have ever designed a website and wondered if it's going to look that great in different operating systems, then you know what I mean!

There are millions of sites suggesting replacement, look-alike and similar fonts to be used in CSS so that your windows designed page renders ok on Macs and under Linux. But that doesn't really cut it, does it.

Google fonts will though.
Simply because the browser will pull the same font from Google repository for every user. With that your page will look exactly the same on all systems.

There are downsides to this unfortunately.
It's not really a viable solution for big, heavy traffic sites, because font files will create additional load.
Also on slower networks your page text might be invisible for as long as the browser takes to download font file.
And last but not least, if you're in need of using special or national characters not all fonts might have them.

The last one is quite easily amended.
With Google font preview, you may check what's your font going to look like. The "welcome screen" will show you default sentence:

But you may edit the Preview Text on the fly and see the results straight away:

As in the example above those are definitely not the fonts I'd like to use on a Polish site.

But that's where a set of very good tools comes in handy.

You can filter fonts to your liking. For example looking only for medium thickness ones, normal slant and going through the list create your collection. Then click on review you will be presented with a couple of possible views.

The one I find most useful for web developers is the Test Drive one, which will create a mock document showing off all fonts from your selection.

Of course you can edit every part of this page too to see results for your special characters or even exact text you'd like to see on your page.

Another great thing to mention about these fonts is that all of them are open source! This is how Google talks about this:

Open Source Fonts
All of the fonts are Open Source. This means that you are free to share your favorites with friends and colleagues. You can even customize them for your own use, or collaborate with the original designer to improve them. And you can use them in every way you want, privately or commercially — in print, on your computer, or in your websites.

We are working with designers around the world to publish quality typeface designs that are made for the web. If you are a type designer and would like to discuss this, please get in touch.

Many of Google's own web pages are already using Google Fonts, such as Google's About page and Google's World Wonders Project which use Open Sans.
— The Google Fonts Team

And how do you use them?

If you have access to your page CSS file, then you just chose your font, click on "Quick Use" arrow and are presented with the whole description of use, presenting three ways of importing font file:

Standard
@import
Javascript

If you wish to download the font file to your computer to be able to work on it offline or embed it into an offline application, you can:

Display the quick use page for a font,
Copy the file link, for example: http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Pathway+Gothic+One
Display it in your browser, which will give you:

@font-face {

  font-family: 'Pathway Gothic One';
  font-style: normal;
  font-weight: 400;
  src: local('Pathway Gothic One'), local('PathwayGothicOne-Regular'), url(http://themes.googleusercontent.com/static/fonts/pathwaygothicone/v1/Lqv9ztoTUV8Q0FmQZzPqaBfSZ9PF2sGs8WIylam6T2Y.woff) format('woff');
}

open the source url (http://themes.googleusercontent.com/static/fonts/pathwaygothicone/v1/Lqv9ztoTUV8Q0FmQZzPqaBfSZ9PF2sGs8WIylam6T2Y.woff) and see it download to your disk.

Tuesday, 11 June 2013

Dual screen wallpapers

Not that my Dell LX1 can display very large wallpapers, but I also have linux on my workstation, and with 2 widescreen monitors it really feels great to be able to set a real dual length HD wallpaper on both of them.

There are many websites hosting just wallpapers, but getting through them and looking for something new and different can be a real chore.

So here are the ones I use for my wallpaper changer. Nothing like a fresh image every week of the year ;)

January