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Syntax Party 2008

Last weekend I flew down to Melbourne to attend Syntax Party 2008, one of the few Australian demoparties. It was a great day, with lots of great work presented. I was struck by amount and quality of it, considering the meagre size of the Australian scene.

On the day, my friend sh0ck and I hacked together a JavaScript demo called ‘Syntaxed’. I roped sh0ck in at the last minute to help out, and was impressed by his “coloured ball effect”, and at how quickly he picked up programming for the canvas element. Our demo ended up placing second in the newschool demo competition! This took me by surprise – I suspect the novelty value of platform itself was what attracted the votes.

You can view the “extreme party version” (ie very hacky and not cross-browser compatible) of the demo here. It will only run under Firefox 3. (This is because it uses Mozilla-specific text drawing routines. I have since written a much faster version of the mandelbrot zoomer, too.)

I’ll definitely be back next year, by which time I hope to have a better demo, and something to enter in the music and graphics compos. Big thanks to all the Syntax Party crew (especially Ript and cTrix) for their efforts.

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