Over 5 years after it was initially launched, I’m happy to have a new version of Montage-a-google up for people to play with and enjoy. The new version has many of the features people have been asking for over the years:

• Saving montages – It’s now easy to download a jpg of any montage you create.
• Resizing – You can now make a montage as big as you like by simply resizing your browser window.
• Bookmarkable – You can now bookmark or send a direct link to a specific montage.
• Speed increases – I’ve been able to make many speed improvements with the port of the code to ActionScript3. Resizing and changing the tile size is now over 10x faster.
• UI improvements – Montage-a-google is now easier to use than ever.

I hope you enjoy playing with the new version of Montage-a-google. I look forward to your feedback.

I’ve often thought that games are good at teaching you how to code, because they force you to identify and order game rules and rule patterns in your brain. But this fun little puzzle game called Light-bot literally gets you thinking like a programmer by requiring you to string together movements into reusable functions to complete each level. Oh and I’m stuck on the level above, can a real programmer please help me!

UPDATE: I managed to get past this level eventually, of course I was looking at it all wrong. Out of interest, this was level 10 of 12, so it’s a fairly short game and well worth putting aside half an hour or so to have a play with. I managed to get through the whole game by only using 185 moves – if you can beat that you’re bloody legend!

EcoZoo is a recent addition to an increasingly long line of impressive 3D interactives appearing online. Most of these have been made possible with performance and rendering advances in the Flash Player and 3D libraries such as PaperVision3D which have popped up to take advantage of them.

What interests me is that it wasn’t that long ago that people were scoffing at the thought of 3D interfaces and mocking them for their inherent usability issues and gimmickery. While the gimmick label is still fair, it may not be in the near future. With the barrier to entry dropping by the day, building a 3D interface is no longer the realm for the coding elite. Although we’re likely to see a large amount of experimentation at first, as thoughtful designers with a care for user experience pick up this technology, solid design and interaction patterns should emerge that will raise the bar over time – just as we’ve seen with normal 2D websites in the past 10 years. Although you could argue it’s not fully 3D, ‘coverflow‘ as seen in Apple’s iTunes and iPhone could be seen as an early 3D interface pattern that’s been picked up by the masses and can now be found on a plethora of sites, webapps and widgets.

Although 3D interfaces will only be appropriate for certain types of content, I’m excited about seeing how designers will start taking advantage of this technology in their everyday work.