Well, finally here’s the video. Obviously you can’t see me there as I’ve left the band about a week before the production of the clip started, but the guitars you hear were actually played by me. The song will be officially released and available for purchase in most online music stores on April, 16th. I hope you enjoy listening to the song at least as much as we did playing it!

Download from iTunes | Amazon | Musicload

About 17 years ago I grabbed one of my father’s western guitars as well as a guitar book of his (written by Peter Bursch, for those who know) and taught myself how to put the fingers onto the fretboard to let ring some A major chord. I started playing a few Beatles songs in the first weeks, soon to be followed by Angus Young’s heavy AC/DC riffs, then Iron Maiden and Metallica, who where top of the pops in those days. I made a deal with my mom, getting guitar lessons if I promised continuing playing the piano, which I broke without any scruple (the deal, not the instrument). Quickly I learned a lot of scales, shredding, arpeggios, tapping, fast-picking, sweeping, all that cool stuff, that allowed me to feel like that smalltown guitar hero I wished to be at that time. It was all technique and mechanics, not music. All of this theory took the soul out of it, it was like painting by numbers.

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Recently I discovered Raphaël, the ultimate JavaScript-Graphics-Library. It can do all vector-based drawing one would expect while staying in a DOM-based context as it’s based on SVG/VML. That means eg. You cand draw a rounded rectangle, rotate it, apply fill and stroke to it and then get it’s DOM-node to bind mouse events to it. Raphael provides an easy to use animation system which perfectly matches the logic of jQuery’s animate and CSS-animations. It’ fast and small and works with all major browsers including IE6.

There’s gRaphaël, a charting extension based on the library, really neat and useful software. The only drawback I experienced was that it didn’t work perfectly on my iPhone’s Safari — at least a few weeks ago, maybe it does today. Make sure to try out all the demos!

Then there’s the Effect Game Engine, a web based 2D game engine and toolkit.

Combine all of these technologies with HTML5 for audio and video and hell, who needs Flash?

Here’s my Diploma Thesis about supporting human players in browsergames using computational/artificial intelligence. I just found the PDF, so I thought I share it with the world. It’s written in German, and unfortunately there’s no English translation of it.

Download the PDF: “Ein Konzept zur Unterstützung menschlicher Spieler in Browserspielen“