Welcome
I'm Jonathan Miles and on this website you'll find my flash games, such as Fingerjig. This is also where I experiment with web technologies in my spare time.
21 November 2008 - Design update
I like to practise website styling and my own website is a great guinea pig for my ideas. I decided to open up Photoshop and Illustrator to see if I could spruce up my "Samurai Teddy" design, which I hadn't spent as much time on as I would've liked. You can see the updated design in action by choosing it from the design selector at the bottom of the page. To learn more about the changes I made, read on...
9 November 2008 - Still Alive
In general I try to update my website once a month. Well, give or take nine months. Ahem.
"Why so long since the last update?" you might ask. Well, one reason is that I don't consider myself a blogger - so I feel obliged to have something worth saying or showing each time I update (perhaps that's a little harsh on bloggers... there are many great blogs about, once you've sifted through the chaff). The kind of things I like to show on here are my projects, such as Fingerjig, and these take some time to develop. In fact I have a couple more flash games brewing, so I look forward to getting those online in the future.
My job has also been keeping me busy, which has eaten into the time I spend on my own projects. Then there's the fact sometimes you have to unwind by filling zombies with lead in Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles on the Wii.
I've also been dipping into Team Fortress 2 now and then, as Valve keep luring me back with updates every few months. Eventually I'll learn that I'm little more than walking cannon fodder for all the other players. In fact I've managed to distil my general experience of Team Fortress 2 into a comic...
If you're not familiar with Team Fortress 2 then a critical hit is a fatal attack that's dealt out by a player on a winning streak. Rest assured that if there's a wrong place and a wrong time to poke my head out, I'll be there. I'm sure you'll agree that my mad comic drawing skills above are only lagging slightly behind my brother's artwork.
Rest assured that I'll try to update this website a little more regularly going forwards.
9 February 2008 - Fingerjig joins Facebook
You can now play Fingerjig on Facebook. The Fingerjig Facebook app has some cool new features:
- Your own personal score board.
- Check out your friends' scores easily via the friends' score board.
- Extra statistics about your typing for your profile.
- A streamlined game that only takes 3 minutes.
If you're interested just add the Fingerjig Facebook app to your Facebook account - if you don't have a Facebook account you'll need to sign up first. The Facebook app only supports English at the moment.
You can still play Fingerjig without Facebook if you prefer.
5 January 2008 - Fingerjig 1.10
Fingerjig 1.10 is now available to play.
Happy New Year! I hope you had a great festive season. I spent a little time over the holiday working on Fingerjig but also managed to squeeze in some Guitar Hero 3 practise (in between falling into black holes in Super Mario Galaxy).
The latest version of Fingerjig has an interesting new feature. After each typing test you can now review a list of the words you have typed, allowing you to see exactly how many mistakes you made for each word. Furthermore, clicking a word in this list will open its dictionary definition in your web browser (only for the English game I'm afraid). Fingerjig is chock full of bizarre, obscure and esoteric words so you're bound to find something to add to your vocabulary.
8 December 2007 - Fingerjig 1.9
Fingerjig 1.9 is now available to play.
Just when you think Fingerjig is complete, a new update comes along with one exciting new feature and a couple of small tweaks. Think of it as an early Christmas present:
- Fingerjig can now serve up words in Italian and Polish. Each language has its own set of score boards. From my experience Polish seems to provide the most difficult typing challenge; on my first attempt I scored 750,376. A respectable score but far lower than when I type English.
- The undulation of the words is now smoother and easier on the eye.
- The preloading has been improved. Previously the preloader may have been slow to start in some cases.
11 November 2007 - Fingerjig 1.8
Fingerjig 1.8 is now available to play.
- Going forwards, your best score will be saved to your computer and displayed on the title screen.
- The game options you choose, such as text colour, will be remembered between sessions.
- After each test you now have the option to quit and start again from the beginning (useful if you don't get off to a good start).
4 November 2007 - New York, New York
Just over a week ago I was on holiday in New York. It was my first trip to America and I had a lot of fun. Below you can see a panoramic photo I took from the top of the Empire State Building (click the picture to see the large version). It's a spectacular view, though you definitely need to get there early to avoid the queues. I went up before 9am on a Monday morning and it was relatively empty.
If you're ever on holiday in New York it's worth picking up a City Pass. Even if you skip a couple of the museums, like I did, it's still good value. I particularly liked the Circle Line Sightseeing cruise, which offers great views of the Lower Manhattan skyline. I went on the cruise back in October, so it was a bit cold at times when the wind swept across. I definitely should have taken a hat and scarf with me!
During my holiday I stayed in Hotel Pennsylvania. Its best feature is undoubtedly its location opposite Madison Square Garden and just a couple of blocks from the Empire State Building. The room I stayed in was nice, though I didn't spend a great deal of time there - it wasn't an especially long holiday so I had to try and do as much with each day as possible.
Now that I'm back in England work will resume on some small improvements to Fingerjig. I dare say that Fingerjig is almost at a point where I'll be prepared to call it finished.
8 October 2007 - Fingerjig 1.7
Fingerjig 1.7 is now available to play. This version allows you to see the best scores that have been submitted for the current day. The game uses Eastern Standard Time (EST) to determine when each day begins. For reference, EST is 5 hours behind GMT.
Another, less exciting, improvement is the addition of caching "behind the scenes". The caching simply means that the web server is able to dish up words slightly quicker, by accessing the database less often. See, I told you that improvement wasn't as exciting.
6 September 2007 - Fingerjig 1.6
Fingerjig 1.6 is now available to play. The colour of the typable text can now be changed to one of several colour schemes - if you're looking for high contrast and improved legibility, look no further than the black colour scheme. I've also taken this opportunity to move all the options onto one convenient screen. Enjoy!
27 August 2007 - Fingerjig 1.5.1
Fingerjig 1.5.1 is now available to play. As you can probably tell from the version number, it's just a small change. The only difference is that you can now choose which text size you would like to use - great news if you preferred the old, smaller text size.
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