"Welcome to UrfEarth!"

I finally got the game's scene background tiles to properly evict when unseen, and to scroll. In a 1024×768 window, the game is now playably fast in Opera (the FPS changed from ~4 to ~16), and Mozilla Firefox's FPS jumped from ~10 fps (after a gradual slowdown) to ~23 (with consistency). Now I just have to scroll sessile creatures with the scene (again) and deal with the small IE-now-runs-at-~40-FPS-in-that-same-window-size-instead-of-~60 and background-now-looks-slightly-waffley problems. The former, at least, stops once the background stops moving; the latter depends on client-area size and background position.

“Forward...”

I am still working on the game I mentioned last Early Afternoon Local Time Before Leap Day. The game (to quote another part of the FAQ I wrote so far)...

is an arcade-style, vertically-scrolling shoot 'em up implemented in SVG 1.1, XHTML 1.0, CSS 2.1, and ECMAScript 5 (a standardized version of JavaScript). It requires a browser (or some other agent) with support of those languages, as well as DOM Level 2 Core, HTML, and Events, to run. A pointing device (mouse, trackball, touchpad, etc.) is almost certainly needed to play, and a keyboard might be as well. It plays music and other sounds with XHTML objects, if supported by the agent, but sound is not necessary to play."

(What is perhaps my longest Blogger post ever follows. In short, the game is nowhere near complete or ready, and I haven't released any source or playable part of it.)

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"Create Your Own" OpenSearch provider.

The Windows Search Guide now has a little form to make your own IE7 search provider, using a URL and a name. That ought to allay one or two complaints.

It can add the provider and/or return an XML OpenSearch file, like this.

(On a side note, the guide also now has the Google logo next to the Google option. Said logo was not there just days ago.)

It's a series of TUBES (and PNGs).

As IEBlog notes, Microsoft's "Zentek" demo is finally online for all to see. I'm hoping that they optimize the better PNG support to match the speeds of Opera 9. Also gamma.

I'm hoping the Series of Tubes dance remix wins moheevi's remix contestThe Tubes mix got an honorable mention and a spot on the YTMND Soundtrack. Sounds good to me.

Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3.

Internet Explorer 7's third and "final beta" is here. Among other things, this version shows the URL destinations of some buttons in the status bar when they are hovered over. Toolbar buttons have more consistent looks also.

Font handling in browsers.

In Windows, try downloading Neuropol X from Typodermic. Put it in your Fonts folder. Notice the change on the top of the page?

Even if IE sucks rocks, it at least knows when new fonts are installed. Opera can't do this (when Neuropol X Free is deleted, hovering over the heading changes its font to Arial—ugh!) but at least it works on almost any OS. (I'd say something about Firefox or Bon Echo...but their shills just scare me.)

I'm trying to make a better version of Easy Notify Icon Maker (Roxio didn't warn me or anything, but the original name did sound like one of their works¹). Stay tuned. http://gamekid.notlong.com/easyicon/2/ will get you there once it's up, http://gamekid.notlong.com/easyicon/1/ will get you the original, and http://gamekid.notlong.com/easyicon/ will get you the latest.

¹interestingly, there is not a single trademark with "Easy [blah-blah-blah] Creator" listed on their site. I'd rather not test their legal prowess in any case.

I probably won't restore the Icon Maker download for a while.