MIXmasters

The winners of Microsoft’s MIX 10K Smart Coding Challenge (for which I was honored to serve as one of the judges) have been announced, and the Grand Prize has been awarded to…

Jimmy D‘s Frog Log.

Which is an HTML5/CSS/JS entry.

That doesn’t run in Internet Explorer.

Yep.

Frog Log was my top pick, and obviously did very well with the other judges too, for a good reason: it’s a fun game.  It doesn’t play quite the same in Firefox previous to v3.5, as the drag-n-drop doesn’t work.  Instead, you click on a frog, then click where you want to place it.  I actually found that made the game a touch easier for me, but your interaction may vary.  In addition to working in Firefox, Safari, and Opera, it also runs on a number of mobile devices.

Here’s an excerpt from my judging remarks:

Just a great little game, addictive and well thought out with some interesting gameplay.  I would LOVE to see this developed further by the author…  My only ding was that drag-n-drop failed in Firefox 3.5; clicking worked fine, though.

I’m not sure why I had trouble with drag-n-drop in Firefox 3.5, since I don’t have have the same problem now.  Maybe I got confused with browser version numbers or something.  Regardless, it works fine, it’s a great game, and remember: it’s less than 10K unzipped.

I also gave high marks to the HTML5 runner-up, Chris Evans’ 100pxls, which was the source of my Dadaist tweet a couple of weeks back and lands right in my personal sweet spot for “doing odd things with popular web services”.  Here’s some of what I had to say in my remarks:

…really liked the concept here, especially the nonsensical tweets that were generated by drawing your own icon.  The icons could be made easier to see in the main display, but I suppose that’s a minor quibble.

I’d like to thank the MIX 10K crew for getting me involved as a contest judge; I really enjoyed seeing what people created and had a hard time narrowing down my votes to just a handful of winners.  More importantly, though, I offer my heartiest congratulations to all the winners, and most especially to Jimmy and Chris for doing such fun, interesting, and downright cool stuff with 10K of web standards goodness!

• MIXmasters was published on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010.
• It was assigned to the Projects and Standards categories.
• There has been one reply.