UK Disconnected
At a time when internet innovation is sky rocketing, the UK government is trying to introduce something called the Digital Economy Bill. Sounds pretty harmless? It's actually a terrible nightmare in disguise and it will hamper innovation pretty sharpish.
One of those bills that tries to slip through government at the behest of media conglomerates, what does it mean for you? If anyone is even accused of file-sharing in your house, your internet can be terminated without notice and you'll be slapped with a £50,000 fine. They don't even need evidence.
ISP's would effectively be forced to spy on our internet traffic, ISP's that fail to co-operate will be smacked with a £250,000 fine. Ouch.
The tragedy is, this is just the beginning.
"Peter Mandelson, the unelected Business Secretary, would have to power to make up as many new penalties and enforcement systems as he likes. And he says he's planning to appoint private militias financed by rightsholder groups who will have the power to kick you off the internet, spy on your use of the network, demand the removal of files or the blocking of websites, and Mandelson will have the power to invent any penalty, including jail time, for any transgression he deems you are guilty of. And of course, Mandelson's successor in the next government would also have this power" — Cory, Boing Boing
And in somehow if that's not enough, under the same act the government will also introduce age ratings on all boxed video games aimed at children aged 12 or over.
There's no way that this is a forward thinking goverment, you might as well disconnect the UK from the internet altogether — as soon as what we say is spied upon, controlled and people are jailed without evidence I'll no longer feel like a citizen of the modern world.
You can help stop this bill going through by telling your MP just what you think of the Digital Economy Bill, a great website called WriteToThem is set-up to make the process as easy as possible, just enter your postcode, select your local MP, type out a succinct message and hit send.
Thanks for your help, if we stop this we've averted a digital disaster.
Flash Player 10.1 Pre-Release
All our games on this website run under the guise of Flash Player, so it's always good to have the latest and greatest to squeeze the best out of your hardware, but remember, this is pre-release software and it is likely not free of bugs (although, you can argue that flash player is never free of bugs).
If you want to submit yourself to the testing process at the possible benefit of a performance boost, go ahead and download the latest Flash Player, version 10.1 from Adobe Labs. We have.
Get Flash Player 10.1 from Adobe Labs
UPDATE: Just tested this new plugin under OSX and I'm seeing a massive performance increase, Anandtech has posted results from Windows at it looks to be over 100% performance boost in some cases.
High Speed Chase 2.2 Now Available!
Apple finally got round to agreeing that High Speed Chase 2.2 was ready for publishing, so here it is! The 2.2 update, available right now.
Expect more FREE updates to come for all existing owners of the game or buy the game now to ensure future FREE updates.
Buy High Speed Chase 2.2 now from the App Store or just hit the shiny App Store logo to find the update.
If you want to see a video of the High Speed Chase 2.2 features, it's available to watch on Youtube right now.
JTS Exclusive Games
Johnny Two Shoes is first and foremost a games developer, we actually built every game you can play on this website (and the website itself) and what's more, you won't find the majority of these games such as The Heist 2 and Attak almost anywhere else on the internet.
There are usually two types of casual gaming websites, portals and developer showcases. At Johnny Two Shoes we're more like a showcase, but, because we have a huge community that thrives on earning medals, socialising and interacting with the way we make games, we could be considered as a hybrid of those types of sites, taking the best of portals (medals, community) and showcase (personable, engaging).
Johnny Two Shoes is run entirely by two brothers Max (meridimus) and Josh (joshsslade) from London, UK. We hook-up our favourite freelance sound engineer, David Carney (thedavidcarney) for the awesome audio experience in our games.
I hoped you learned a little bit more about what Johnny Two Shoes is and if you'd like to take part in our bustling community you should head over to the forums and introduce yourself.
We're Feed Burnin'
Well, we realised our feeds were GROSSLY under powered, by that I mean I was stripping everything out just to get them working straight. Today, I did something pretty cool - I converted all our feeds to feedburner and made them so much sweeter. You can now view images, embedded video and full formatting inside RSS feeds.
It's already available through the Feedburner service, all old feeds will be automatically updated to use the new feeds so you don't need to update anything (or any cool widgets you made) to get it working with the new awesome-sauce.
Sorry I left the whole system in a bit of disrepair earlier, I've been so distracted with lots of other things going on at once but it should all be fixed now. If you spot anything funky, post it in the comments!
To summarise, you can grab the RSS feeds with all the new features right now:
The Forum Is Now Open!
So this last chapter of "The Nightmare That Stalked The Forums" is closed. Let's hope that this doesn't repeat itself again and we can keep improving the forum in the time to come.
Remember, if something doesn't work, I'm going to need a full video from Jing that shows me how it isn't working, post the link here or email us with full details on how to reproduce the problem.
I'm not saying everything is perfect yet!
The Forum Is Closed (Not Anymore)
So yesterday, someone managed to hack into a mod account and screw around in the forum.
This has lead me to believe a few things about the site, we have some moderators who are not being careful with their login details and we have some malicious players on Johnny Two Shoes who intend to damage our website.
Well, they're not too serious because we can combat that stuff. Now topics will never be deleted, they can only be locked or hidden. New "report" button means any player can flag issues anywhere on the site (be it a username/avatar/post/topic/comment).
In summary:
- Topics can be locked or hidden by mods, never deleted (can be undone by other mods)
- The entire mod process will be publicly logged so any-time mods change something it is logged to show who, when and where in the forum it affects on a new page for every registered player to view
- Mods will be able to roll back changes (like re-show hidden topics/posts)
- Topic titles can only be edited by JTS staff
- Bans can be rolled back at any time by JTS staff
- New report button will let registered players flag all kinds of events on the website (this will come later)
Update, it's back. Tomorrow the old forum data will be back!
Banana Dash World 4 is Released!
Banana Dash World 4 has finally been released, we spent our evenings and last weekend polishing and shining this into a little gem for you all to play.
We're very proud of Banana Dash World 4. Please note, the music was designed by TheDavidCarney, our super talented freelance master of all musical wrangling and friend of Johnny Two Shoes.
High Speed Chase 2: Blast and Ramp
Blast creeps into the fuel systems in surrounding cars and explodes the engines from the inside out.
Ramp is a physical shift in the underlying mechanics of the car, sheets of ramped metal adjust over the bonnet and act as a ramp that send any vehicle that hits it fast enough straight into the air.
"Blast and Ramp" — Blast is crazy, cars everywhere blocking the road. Use Blast in combination with ramp to keep moving and rack up some serious highscores.
Just 2 more of the 13 power-ups coming in High Speed Chase 2.
Look forward to playing with Blast and Ramp in the upcoming High Speed Chase 2 web game here on JohnnyTwoShoes and in the upcoming 2.5 iPhone update.
Dusting off LLLLOST
Sometimes we post what we're doing as images over at our "image blog" llllost, when we don't have time to say it with words (or can't).
Today, I added paging to the llllost archive. Some of the stuff there really was lost, ideas we had, games we never finished for one reason or another and some times when we got posted on sites we thought were interesting.
If you want to see the history of llllost and Johnny Two Shoes then you can jump back in time, one page at a time and get LLLLOST in half of our 2 year history.