Today….All Your Wildest Dreams Come True

Today….All Your Wildest Dreams Come True:
If you fit into any one (or more) of these three categories…

1. You like tabletop RPGs


2. You build Xaml applications


3. You build Html/JS applications

1. RPGWithMe

For some time I’ve been cranking away building my company’s first real product. I’m very excited to officially announce to you today that RPGWithMe is live!  RPGWithMe is a web-based platform centered around tabletop RPGs. If you play these games…you are going to like this a lot. RPGWithMe provides four main feature areas in its initial launch:

Character Sheets

The industry’s most beautiful character sheets, fully interactive and free: Use them at the gametable on your tablet or laptop. They’re also fully integrated into our play-by-post and virtual tabletop experience. It's as simple as uploading DDI or Hero Lab ^® files. Custom character creation is coming soon…

Campaign Management

We provide gorgeous home pages for your campaigns. Use our live-previewing editor to write wiki articles and pin them to your home page. Chronicle your adventure and automatically have your content indexed for later. Plus, access our enormous, high quality art library for use in your wiki or upload your own art.

Play-by-Post

We’ve built our system from the ground up to support PbP. It fully integrates your player’s character sheets and your campaign wiki. It snapshots roll, magic, power and feat data and provides multiple views over your campaign’s activity feed with the ability to bookmark and integrate your character’s journals too.

Virtual Tabletop

Build maps, play out combat and track NPC stats. Our virtual table can be used to enhance PbP beyond anything you’ve seen. Of course, you can always use it as a realtime virtual table on it's own and feel the power of integrated character sheets, rich activity feeds and campaign management.

RPGWithMe Teaser

2. Caliburn.Micro WinRT

Thanks to the fantastic work of Nigel Sampson and Keith Patton we now have support for the full Caliburn.Micro feature set on WinRT. This is he initial port…and its not an official release yet, so there’s bound to be bugs. But if you want to use CM to build your WinRT app, please start using this code and help us iron out the kinks….and naturally start enjoying the CM way of building apps on WinRT.

3. Durandal

Durandal is the essence of Caliburn.Micro re-imagined for HTML and Javascript. A very early version of the code is now available on github. It is a very small amount of code built on top of three existing and established Javascript libraries: jQuery, Knockout and Require. Features include:

• Fully modularize your html and js the same way you would when building Caliburn.Micro applications. ie. Shell.js automatically locates Shell.html, binds and gets composed into the dom. Naturally you can change the conventions…


• Leverage promises everywhere as the API uses no callbacks, but has CommonJS promises plumbed throughout


• Experience the first html/js framework where Composition is embraced at the very core. The view/view-model composition features of Durandal are even more powerful than Caliburn.Micro.


• A simple app model provides you with an app start lifecycle, modal dialogs, message boxes and an event aggregator.

This is a pre-pre-pre-alpha version. There are no docs and just one sample at the moment. But, I wanted to get it out there so you could dig into the code, start playing with it and give me feedback. Of course I’ll add docs, more samples, tests, etc. Just in case you are wondering though, Durandal is already being used in production as the framework for RPGWithMe’s virtual tabletop. Various versions/pieces of it are being used by some of my clients…details not available right now, but I hope to share more later.
Things I would like to do with Durandal in the future:

1. Remove the Knockout dependency. I don’t like how knockout bindings work in html and I don’t like how observables invade your model code. Both are ugly, tedious and obscure the readability of the code.  I have a plan to fix both of these, but it’s non-trivial. I chose to put together this initial version based on knockout since it was already in heavy use and it was quick and easy. In the future I hope we can improve on that.


2. Remove the jQuery dependency. Durandal only uses a few features of jQuery. So, eventually, I’d like to have an alternate solution without an external dependency. You can always use jQuery if you want to, but in the long term, I don’t want to force it on developers.


3. Create a component model for building reusable controls. This should work similar to Xaml in that controls should have a distinct view written in html which can be replaced globally or on a per use basis. Controls should also support templated parts with the same characteristics.

Ok. That’s enough news for today. Enjoy. Now…I’m going to rest for a bit.

DIGITAL JUICE