Friday, December 15th, 2006
Tweebox 1.0: Browser based choose-your-own-adventures
Category: Framework
, JavaScript, Showcase
Chris Klimas has released Tweebox 1.0, which is a browser-based application used to create interactive stories.
Aside: You remember the good old Choose Your Own Adventures books. This is them for the web. I keep thinking that someone will do this for the big screen, and the audience votes at various times. Then people may pay to go to see the same movie more than once.
This is a fairly unique application in that because it reads and writes files on the user’s computer, it’s meant to be run locally. Nevertheless, it uses a lot of Ajax technology. It uses moo.fx’s old Ajax class to read files, browser-specific functions glommed from various places to write the files, and JSON saved to a cookie to encapsulate project data.
It requires IE6+ or a Mozilla-based browser, but the files it creates can be viewed in any modern browser.
Argh! I’ve been fostering this idea for a while now. First ‘they’ got my idea about the ‘foot mouse’ to market before me, now this! Well, its not like they can patent it, so I guess I can still go forward with it.
Ha Ha, I loved those old Steve Jackson books, I had a whole bunch of them! Isn’t it funny that we’ve come full circle on computer games? Does anyone else remember “Hunt the Mugwump” on 8086’s?
Don’t you mean “Hunt the Wumpus”?
I was sitting on this idea for a while too. I ultimately decided not to bother, because I figured the choose-your-own-adventure books were an attempt to create a level of interactivity that websites and video games already transcend by their very nature. In other words it would be a big step backward. Maybe I was wrong.
Haha, very nice. I made a programming language to create such stories, also in JavaScript. (www.mechanique.nl)
Wander over to http://tiddlywiki.com and get the software that Twee is based on. More open source goodness to keep you happy.
Also works great for any other kind of micro content, like contacts, recipes, blogs and GTD.