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Typeracer is an online typing game that pits you against other online users in a words-per-minute typing race. After the "race" it shows an ad for the book or movie that you were typing from. Brilliant.

http://play.typeracer.com/

Pirate booty that is. Continuing in the tradition of office-wide, Friday blog posts here's my latest entry:

This "mini-game" was created after lunch on Friday so it could certainly be more polished. I may post an update version with a tutorial for how to create a simple Flash game using Actionscript 3. Stay tuned.

You can check out the rest of the swashbuckler-themed entries over at the Portland Blog.

At Portland Studios we can't just leave our brilliant marketing plans up on the whiteboard without them getting... er.. stomped by fire breathing dragons.

I'm pretty sure this  paraphernalia-stomping dragon was released by Cory Godbey, one of our resident illustrators.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

There's lots of hype surrounding the recent launch of Google's new "Platform in the Cloud" called App Engine. Simply put "Google App Engine enables you to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications."

I'm one of the fortunate 10,000 developers that has access to the service (those invites went fast) and I have to say that it's an amazing service from a developers perspective. Writing a data driven, instantly scalable web app has never been easier. Now if they would only offer better file storage like Amazon's S3.

There's already lots of different perspectives on what this means and people tend to be cautiously accepting of the service so far.  Here's my 2 cents:

• This is exciting for web developers because its going to cause an "arms race" to create the next big cloud service platform (hurry up Microsoft, you're running late, again.) The competition is going to be stiff which will cause prices to stay low and services to get better
• This is exciting for web developers because it's abstracting a lot of the areas that truly creative and innovative developers shouldn't have to worry about (object relational mapping, CRUD operations and scaling primarily.)
• This is a little scary for web developers because it might require you to "sell your soul" to one platform or another. Google has a chance to "not be evil" here by creating an open platform that allows both code and data portability.
• This is a little scary for web developers because it requires a different way of thinking about web application development. For one, cloud based services don't support typical relational data models that we're all used to. That's a BIG adjustment in development methodology.

I could go on... but in summary I think that the App Engine is an exciting development that will push web development into a new era. An exciting and scary new era. I for one am going to jump in with both feet and I'll try to document the process on this blog. Stay tuned!

Today at Portland Studios we had an official cowboy-themed blog post in which all of the office was invited to prepare an entry. There we're a few guidelines, it had to be cowboy themed, it had to be done on a 4X6 card, and it should only be minimally "photoshopped." Well my entry violated almost all the guidelines but got posted anyway (thanks Zach!). My entry pulls "cowboy tagged" images from Flickr and rolls them across a western landscape. Weird, I know, but here it is:

You can view the rest of the entries over at the Portland Studios Blog