We’re really happy to be sponsoring BarCamp Madison which is coming up July 26th and 27th. It’s exciting to see these types of activities going on in Madison. For the techno-enthusiasts among us, we know that there is a strong tech community in and around Madison, but one that tends to be fragmented.

There are lots of exciting startups like Networked Insights, NovaShield, Ohigo, Flying Cart in addition to the local Drupal heads and game companies, but the community rarely comes together for geekery like this.

Through the hard work of people like Abraham Williams, Blake Hall, and many others I’m sure; events like BarCamp and Web608 are creating a terrific tech culture in what is already a great city to live in.

Go register today!

We’d like to welcome Derek Schindhelm to the team! Derek joined us as an intern two weeks ago and has been helping us in all kinds of ways. Not the least of which is creating terrific content. We first met Derek at Memorial High School when we presented the Sharendipity platform to his programming class.

Come check out some of his published work including Much Fest, Evader, Break Away, and Circle Blaster.

One of my favorites is Break Away where he built in a micro-transaction system that allows players to customize the game in new ways during the game play. I love to see this kind of ingenuity using the platform!

It’s also Derek’s birthday so please visit his profile page and leave him a Happy Birthday greeting before playing some of his games. Or better yet, create your own unique birthday greeting for him like this one.

In case you missed it, we had a nice write-up from Jeff Richgels in The Capital Times last week.

It was great to see how well Richgels grasped our vision for democratizing the tools for creating software, and explaining it to the readers with a simple example.

Budding game developers, for instance, could create a rocket ship by importing an image and then linking behaviors to the image, such as “when the space bar is pushed, apply a force to the rocket.” Then, another user could create an Asteroids-like game by simply dragging the rocket into a new application.

Hideous picture really. It’s missing Jeff, but I’m beginning to think that he’s the lucky one!

We’ve been asking the question, “Does anyone know what a float is?” Every time a user creates a new property for a game object, or a variable for a behavior, they are forced to ponder its definition.

We already know that some users don’t know what it is, and in an attempt to simplify an interface for the creative but non-technical Sharendipity users, we’ve tried to find the right words to describe various “number” properties inside Sharendipity.

• Whole numbers
• Fractional numbers

We posed the question to our Twitter and Facebook networks, and smiled when we received this reply from friend Adam Hupp…

It’s an integer that wishes it was a Real.

My favorite float factoid is the next representable floating point number can be found by interpreting the float as an int and incrementing it, e.g.

float nextFloat(float f) {
int asInt = *(int*)&f;
asInt += 1;
return *(float*)&asInt;
}

Neat, eh?”

Sounds like Adam knows what a float is… But a sister in law reported back, “I googled it and still don’t get it…” There’s a clear gap between the programmers and non-programmers, which also happens to be the sweet spot for Sharendipity.

The outcome? We’re going to try “Integer” for whole numbers and “Decimal” for fractional number properties, and also display explicit examples of each type when it is chosen.

It seems subtle, but when we’re serving the entire continuum from programmers to artists, we’d like to find a model that serves everyone. What do you think?

This week’s release is a pretty exciting one.  For quite a while now we’ve been discussing how exactly to implement user-defined application achievements as well as our own Sharendipity achievements.  Well we’ve settled on a plan and we’re happy to announce a new Achievements feature available to all application creators.

Achievements are a way to establish goals for playing a game or using an application.  Sometimes they’re difficult accomplishments, such as reaching a new high score, and sometimes they’re just for fun.  Either way, it gives application creators a new way to engage their users and allows your friends to see what you’ve been up to in Sharendipity .

One example of a Sharendipity achievement is the Application Creator, which you can earn by publishing your own application in Sharendipity.  As shown below, when these achievements are earned your Facebook friends will be notified through their news feeds (if you are using a Facebook account):

There are additional Sharendipity achievements for both creators and players, such as reaching a certain number of plays for one of your creations, or ranking first place in a published game.

You can create your own achievements through a new option in the Director menu under the Application heading.  The Achievements Manager dialog will display all achievements that have been defined for an application, allowing you to create new achievements and edit existing ones.

To highlight how some of the achievements might be used, I’ve also published a new game called Block Boxer.  This is the view that I see as the creator of the achievements:

The game itself is pretty challenging but a lot of the fun is in trying to unlock all of the achievements.  Here are a few more games that have new achievements :

Scramble, a sliding-puzzle game that uses the Flickr interestingness feed.

Dodge, a game where you have to avoid the enemies by moving your mouse.

For more information and discussion about the Achievements feature, check out the Wiki page.

Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there. We like to celebrate such occasions by making new toys in Sharendipity (of course)! The below app is a great example of a template that you can customize.

Just press the “personalize” button on the app page, and you can swap in your own photos and send it along to your friends and family.

You can make all kinds of custom software - not just games. All it takes is a little creativity and imagination.

We have been getting some really nice feedback on the software recently. We’ve done some things well, and some things not so well. But we can iterate on the pain points quickly. It’s really nice to be at a point where we can react to our users’ needs, rather than building features in a vacuum.

So let us know what you need! Everybody wins when we build the features and address the bottlenecks outlined by all of you.

A few of the highlights in this week’s release:

• Improvements to the behavior editor…
  • More intuitive names for object references
  • Color coding changes for unique object references
  • Configurable name definitions for looping actions and the object creation action
• User profile pages now provide access to all creations for that user
• You can now send feedback to us directly from within the application (click on the Director)
• Added Facebook invitation support
  • Please invite your friends in Facebook!
  • Users can also invite friends to use specific applications
• Simplified the application publishing workflow. There is a new “publish” option on the Director that walks you through the steps and offers you the ability to invite your friends.
• Added interface for tagging and rating assets from within the applet
• Improved the identification for search results
• Improved collision detection filters
• Images can now be set just like any other object property - using the set property action
• Lots and lots of bug fixing!

Let us know what you need, and we’ll do our best to get it to you.

There is a terrific post this morning from George Oates discussing the secret sauce in the Flickr strategy for nurturing a strong community.

Embrace the idea that people will warp and stretch your site in ways you can’t predict—they’ll surprise you with their creativity and make something wonderful with what you provide.

At the end of the day, this really is the best tool for acquiring new users. Build and foster a culture where new users want to explore, participate, and evangelize on your behalf.

Come make something wonderful today.

There is a terrific article by Marc Prensky in the March issue of Edutopia titled “Programming: The New Literacy”. Marc makes the case that literacy will soon be defined not just by reading and writing skills, but also by programming skills.

He reminds us of a level of programming everyone is already doing with our phones and remote controls. What’s most interesting is that he expects everyone to graduate from this type of menu-driven programming to a point where many of us will be using scripting languages, Flash, and/or piecing together open source software to meet a specific need.

“As the highly literate adult of today might pen a witty birthday card note for a young niece or nephew, the highly literate adult of tomorrow might program the child a game. And though today’s highly literate person may enjoy a sophisticated novel or nonfiction book on a plane or train ride, tomorrow’s highly literate person may prefer to change, by programming, whatever story or other media he or she is interacting with to suit individual preferences, and might then, with a little more programming, distribute those changes to the world.”

Marc isn’t alone. The Python community has rallied around Guido van Rossum’s beliefs that everyone should learn to program.

We share Marc’s vision in terms of the end goal. But I think we differ in how we’re going to get there. Rather than educating everyone on programming, we believe the best way to get to this form of literacy is fix the tools. If tools are available to create and distribute software without the need to program, then creativity can be harnessed more effectively. Surround that with a community capable of sharing ideas and software components, and now creativity can actually be accelerated.

Do you share Marc’s vision for literacy?

We have been rolling out new features and stability improvements nearly every week. We are especially excited about last week’s release because we have incorporated additional viral channels within Facebook.

Users can now challenge their friends to a game contest from within Sharendipity using Facebook notifications. This provides an exciting new level of social engagement for game-related applications currently published on the platform.

Furthermore, from a creators perspective, they now get this tight social integration for free with every Sharendipity application they create and deploy on our platform. No programming is required on their behalf to take advantage of this powerful element of Facebook. Simply add the high score action to your game, and the friend challenge framework will appear on your asset page. Very fun stuff!

More is on the way! Come check out some of the creations that have been published thus far, and challenge a friend today!