Introducing Sprinkle Safari, a web adventure game

Elephant with donut icon png
The logo for Sprinkle Safari, the awesome web game finally released to the public.

I’ve got a dirty little secret. Well, not so dirty, really, more… creamy. Sugary. Frosty. Sprinkle-y.

Here it is: for the last year and more(computer searching reveals since January 29, 2011 – even before hathix.com was founded), I’ve been working nonstop on a “little” web-based adventure game. And it’s never been formally released to the public – until now.

Here’s a look at the making of the game. It’s taken 16 months and over 100 hours of development.

Can’t get enough Angry Birds? Play it online

Playing Angry Birds 1-1
A red bird crashing into a structure, killing a pig in the process

If your phone’s battery keeps dying on you because you spend all your time playing the wildly popular mobile game Angry Birds (or if you’re too cheap to buy Angry Birds), you should be pretty excited about this latest development.

You can now play Angry Birds online here. Here’s what you need:

  1. A decent browser (more on that later)
  2. Adobe Flash (sorry, iDevice users)

As the URL (chrome.angrybirds.com) might hint, Angry Birds works best in Chrome. I’ve tried it on several browsers and here’s what I’ve found:

Firefox’s new release strategy

Back in the day (and by that I mean a week ago), new versions of Firefox were released “when they were ready” – that is, when all the features they wanted to put in were in it. That’s called feature-based releases, and most developers use that strategy.

But there’s another release strategy that focuses on releasing new versions every so often. Some features might not make a version, but that’s OK; a new version is coming in x weeks so it’ll be included then. This is called fixed releases.

The quest for a decent home page

I’m not sure why home pages were even invented in the first place. I mean, sure, you need a page to open when you boot up your browser, but they just make things, well, awkward. Plus they’re not very useful: most of them just serve as a landing page; you don’t really use them except to read news about how kids can’t bring bagged lunch to school (*cough* Yahoo *cough*.) And when you do that kind of stuff, you just get distracted from what you were originally meaning to do all along.

I want to know why that is and how I can help fix it.

Firefox 4 is out

It’s been about a year in coming (it was in beta for a full year), but Firefox 4 is finally out and can be downloaded at firefox.com. The open-source web browser’s latest version is a gigantic step forward from the 3.6 version (the old stable version from a year ago, which is pitifully outdated by now.)

What’s changed

  • Firefox 4 is about 3 times faster in page loading and JavaScript performance than 3.6. This means your favorite web apps and websites are – get ready for this – 3 times faster than before.