Jason T Clark.net

The title alone was a mouthful! But you heard it right- announced on the ExtJS blog a couple days ago was the posting about ExtJS support for Nintendo Wii’s embedded Opera Browser. As the article discusses, when creating web apps for the Wii, you have to account for the difference in screen resolution, font size, and limited input sources. Nonetheless, a nifty idea to have ExtJS now support applications optimized for use on the Wii.

Take a look at the Wii Forum Reader. As you will see, it’s typical ExtJS functionality, but compacted to the Wii browser layout, but on the Wii is fits quite nicely.

So, if you’re an IBMer, and you’re in the know about IBM’s Hackday events, you’d know that the results were recently posted.  And the winner in the Virtual Worlds/Augmented reality category was none other than my Project WiiSpark application.  Thanks to Peter Yim, my colleague, for all of his work contributing to the project.  And, thanks to all those who voted.  Since this is an internal IBM event, there’s not much I can show about the other winners.   However, we here at IBM developerWorks are planning to to a full-on YouTube video explaining the app, and the technologies used to pull it off.

Again, thanks to everyone for participating!

The above video is a small screencast of my IBM WiiSpark application. This is the application that I created, using ActionScript3, Papervision3d, and the WiiFlash API. As you can see, it starts out as a rotating cube, but after entering in a keyword search, it goes out and retrieves thumbnail pages of the search results from IBM developerWorks. I figured since I work for them, I’d try to make this sample application relevant (*smile*).

You can’t see this on the video itself, but the movement of the cube is being controlled by a Wiimote that is connected to my PC via Bluetooth, which gives us a pretty good inidication that the Wiimote can certainly be used as an alternative input device. I’m sure you may have seen many other Wiimote device applications, and this was just my entry into the “sweepstakes”.

Maybe this is useful from a broader perspective though- should I open source this code? Leave me a comment, and let me know what you think.

Oh one last note, I ended up entering this application in as my entry for IBM’s Hackday event last month.  Haven’t heard about any results from that event, but I’ll keep you posted!

OK so, there’s this thing at IBM where a bunch of coders get to together around the world on one day and come up with something novel and new to create- it’s called IBM Hackday.

Peter Yim, my co-worker from the not-so-infamous Wii Headtracking at IBM developerworks YouTube videos, decided that we were going to participate in HackDay this year. He came over, we put on a pot of coffee, and we started Hacking away. We created a AS3 application that utilizes WiiFlash and Papervision3d. Hopefully in a few days, we will be able to showcase it here. Stay tuned.

OK, so you guys get to see me in rare form. My team and I decided to do a few “geeky” videos about our experiences with the Nintendo Wiimote, and a little program called WiiFlash.

Check it out:

We are just getting started with our foray into doing “geeky” videos for YouTube, but if you’d like to see more, head over to http://www.youtube.com/developerworks.