Browsery TX801.G55 2018

Browsery PQ2625.I2 A2 2018

Browsery TX833.5.K55 2018

Browsery P279.B64 2018

Browsery RD593.C592 2019

Browsery TX833.5.O88 2018

Browsery TX715.2.A47 J64 2018

Browsery TX724.5.A1 M38 2018

Browsery HQ1163.W66 2019

Browsery E185.97.B337 A3 2019

Browsery GV749.S64 S58 2018

Browsery GF75.W36 2019

Browsery BD431.C74 2019

Browsery QH438.7.P64 2019

Browsery P95.8.Z267 2019

Browsery PN3448.D4 H47 2018

Browsery GV939.U78 A3 2019

Browsery HQ1237.5.U6 H57 2019

Browsery BD215.G67 2019

Browsery PS3610.E46 A6 2018

Browsery PN1995.9.W6 S639 2018

Browsery QH528.5.S56 2019

Browsery GN755.M295 2019

Browsery PS3602.E779 P47 2019

Browsery PZ7.1.R5 Pat 2019

Browsery RA1138.M55 2019

Browsery E184.M5 C395 2018

Browsery TX951.H75 2018

Browsery GN666.G76 2018

Browsery TX723.5.B36 B83 2018

Browsery Q175.A26829 2019

Browsery TX725.I7 D47 2018

Browsery SF487.B185 2018

Browsery PN6071.A45 S437 2018

Browsery HQ799.2.M352 H36 2019

Browsery QE523.T285 B4413 2019

Browsery RC606.55.B38 A3 2018

Browsery PS3527.A15 Z46 2018

Browsery RC349.D52 P65 2018

Browsery HQ1237.C745 2019

Back from hiatus. I’m starting up serious planning and writing of “CSS for JavaScripters” so this is a CSS-heavy linkbait, mostly filled with reminders to myself.

• Every-layout.dev is easily the most important CSS resource to be unveiled in recent months. (In fact, it was unveiled at CSS Day, which was a nice touch.) Serious, in-depth, algorithmic discussion of several popular CSS layouts and how to construct them with care.
• The 2019 State of CSS survey results. Contains several interesting gems. The figure that really surprised me is that 85% of the respondents is male. I thought CSS had a slightly higher ratio of women. Then again, maybe it’s the marketing of the survey that caused the disparity. (I never heard of it until I saw the results.) Or my gender guesstimate is just wrong.
• The CSS mindset:

  [...] the declarative nature of CSS makes it particularly difficult to grasp, especially if you think about it in terms of a “traditional” programming language.

  Other programming languages often work in controlled environments, like servers. They expect certain conditions to be true at all times [...]

  CSS on the other hand works in a place that can never be fully controlled, so it has to be flexible by default. It’s less about “programming the appearance” and more about translating a design into a set of rules that communicate the intent behind it. Leave enough room, and the browser will do the heavy lifting for you.

  Interesting turn of phrase that echoes my own thoughts on the subject. Expect to find this in The Book.
• Excellent overview of render blocking in CSS and how to avoid it. It’s simple, really, but there will be countless CSS programmers who need this sort of tutorials. Will also go in The Book.
• An older article, but Harry Roberts’s Cyclomatic Complexity: Logic in CSS remains one cornerstone of CSS understanding, and teaching. This one is mostly meant to remind myself of its existence; you probably already read it.
• Facebook lost 20% of its usage (likes, shares, and such) since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke.
  This sounds great in theory, but what if the people who are harder to dupe are the ones who stop using Facebook, while the more gullible people remain? The average Facebook user would become more stupid, and Facebook would become even better at influencing its users.
• Also, Facebook should be regulated. Not as a media company, but as a drug.
• We all know third-party scripts are among the worst offenders when it comes to website performance. But how bad is it actually, and who are the worst culprits? Third-party Web provides useful answers and treeviews.
• Excellent overview of WebViews, their purpose, their tricky bits, and their diversity. Required reading for all five people who care about the browser market.
• [In Dutch] List of websites closed on Sundays. In an ultimate meta-move this list is only available on Sundays.
  (And why are these websites closed? Because their proprietors subscribe to the strict Dutch Reformed view that Sundays are not for media enjoyment. See this article about the SGP political party for more background information.)
• You shouldn’t do thing with tool, you should do other thing
• Have a tip for the next Linkbait? Or a comment on this one? Let me know (or here or here).

I am going to write a “CSS for JavaScripters” book, and therefore I need to figure out how to explain CSS to JavaScripters. This series of article snippets are a sort of try-out — pre-drafts I’d like to get feedback on in order to figure out if I’m on the right track.

Today I present the first draft of the short overflow article. Feedback would be greatly appreciated.

*** START EXCERPT ***

"Web design is a constant battle against overflow."

- Rachel Andrew

Not knowing how tall something is is fundamental to web design. For instance, you cannot know in advance how long the texts will be that will be shown in your site. What happens if if the final text is much longer than the fake text you used during production? Or what if there's a wide image you hadn't counted on?

In both cases the content of your blocks will become larger than you expected, and if you've given them a fixed width or height that might lead to overflow: content escaping from the block — or at least, attempting to escape.

The easiest way to avoid overflow is not giving your blocks a fixed height in the first place. If you allow them to grow as tall and wide as they need to be you avoid quite a few problems.

This short chapter discusses how to deal with overflow.

CSS Is Awesome

The most famous example of overflow is the "CSS is Awesome" meme that's been around ever since 2009.

Born out of one web developer's frustration with CSS's overflow behavior, this meme took on a life of its own and became an example of what was wrong with CSS. Why would the 'Awesome' flow out of the box? Why should CSS be so complicated? Couldn't the box simply grow to contain the 'Awesome'?

Sure it could! And it would, except that you specifically instructed the box not to by giving it a fixed width. You could have used min-width or flexbox — both are good in dealing with unexpectedly large content — but you didn't. No doubt you had good reasons, but since it was your decision, the onus of solving any resulting issues is on you.

In these cases, the overflow declaration is your friend.

The overflow declaration

The overflow declaration allows you to define what to do with content that overflows its box. It has four values, visible, hidden, scroll, and auto. The default value is visible, and that's the one that causes the 'CSS is Awesome' effect.

overflow: visible means that you allow the content to spill out of its block. Although that keeps the content readable, it also means the content might overlap with the block below or to the right of the affected block, which can be very ugly.

When calculating the position of other blocks, the browsers' layout algorithm uses the width and height of the box you defined, and disregards the fact that content may be spilling out of the block. In fact, at that point in the algorithm the browsers have no way of knowing that the content overflows. [FACT-CHECK THIS]

Thus, when calculating the position of the next block the browsers place the block exactly where it should be given the height of the previous block and the margins of both. They do not pay the overflow any mind, wbich may cause the overflowing content to overlap the content of the next block.

Sometimes this is what you want — or rather, what you’re forced to live with. More often, though, you want to either generate scrollbars or hide the overflowing content entirely.

overflow: hidden hides the overflowing content. This creates a pleasing visual effect, but now there's no way for the user to get to the content. Therefore, hidden is something of a nuclear option: necessary in a few cases, but to be avoided whenever there's a better way of handling the situation.

overflow: scroll and overflow: auto generate scrollbars. The auto value generates scrollbars when they're necessary, while scroll scroll value always does so, even when no scrollbars are needed.

If scroll always generates those ungainly scrollbars, even when they're not needed, and auto only generates them when necessary, why would you ever use scroll? The reason is that a content change that generates or removes a scrollbar can be quite ugly.

Suppose you have a block with overflow: auto that initially does not need scrollbars. Then a script adds a lot of content to the block, causing overflow, and thus the generation of a scrollbar. Not only is this quite ugly in itself, but on some systems [BE MORE SPECIFIC] the scrollbar itself takes up about 16px of width and thus narrows the content area, which may lead to the reflowing of the text and even more overflow. And when the content is removed, all of that happens in reverse.

All this can give a quite jarring effect. For instance, see the position of the word "serves" in the two screenshots below. The creation of a scrollbar forces it to the next line, and that might be something you want to avoid.

The easiest way of preventing that effect is by giving the block overflow: scroll from the outset. Sure, the scrollbars may not be needed, but if they are there's no moving around of the content.

Block Formatting Context

[This is a practical tip that readers need to know about.]

An overflow value of anything but visible will create a new block formatting context. In old-fashioned float-based layouts it is sometimes necessary to create a block formatting context in order to contain a bunch of floats. (Just nod wisely for the moment; we'll get back to this.)

The easiest way of doing this is to add overflow: auto to the block, even though the block has no set height and the content will never actually overflow.

So if you're working in an old codebase and encounter a bunch of unexplained overflow: auto (or hidden) declarations on blocks that have height: auto, remember that they're meant to keep a float-based layout working properly. Only remove those overflows once you switched from floats to a modern layout system like grid or flex. If you do not intend to switch, leave the overflows in place as well.

Related declarations

In addition to the overflow declaration, there are also overflow-x and overflow-y declarations. They do what you'd expect them to do: they set the overflow on only the horizontal x-axis, or only the vertical y-axis. Otherwise they work exactly like overflow.

Also, iOS supports overflow-scrolling: touch, which enables momentum-based scrolling for overflowing elements. Without this declaration (or, more precisely, with the default overflow-scrolling: auto in place), overflowing elements scroll normally, i.e. they stop scrolling as soon as your finger leaves the screen. Android devices always use momentum-based scrolling, so they do not need this declaration. It doesn't hurt them, either, so it's perfectly safe to use. [TEST]

*** END EXCERPT ***

The ending is a bit abrupt, but I'm not entirely sure what to say next. Also, I'm not yet sure which chapter will come next, so I can't write a segue.

Anyway, please let me know what you think. I'm especially looking for feedback from JavaScript developers who are not all that good at CSS.

2020 is only three weeks old, but there has been a lot of browser news that decreases rendering engine diversity. It’s time for some good news on that front: a new rendering engine, Flow. Below I conduct an interview with Piers Wombwell, Flow’s lead developer.

This year alone, on the negative side Mozilla announced it’s laying off 70 people, most of whom appear to come from the browser side of things, while it turns out that Opera’s main cash cow is now providing loans in Kenya, India, and Nigeria, and it is looking to use 'improved credit scoring' (from browsing data?) for its business practices.

On the positive side, the Chromium-based Edge is here, and it looks good. Still, rendering engine diversity took a hit, as we knew it would ever since the announcement.

So let’s up the diversity a notch by welcoming a new rendering engine to the desktop space. British company Ekioh is working on a the Flow browser, which sports a completely new multi-threaded rendering engine that does not have any relation to WebKit, Gecko, or Blink.

The last new rendering engine to come to the desktop was KHTML back in 2000 in the form of the Konqueror browser. Later Apple adapted KHTML into WebKit. And then Google forked WebKit to become Blink. And ... well, almost everyone browses with a KHTML descendant now. Let’s not forget how it all began.

It is far too early to tell if Flow will have a similar impact, but the news was reason enough for me to conduct an interview with lead developer Piers Wombwell.

PPK: Hi Piers, could you please introduce yourself?

PW: I’m Piers Wombwell, the co-founder of Ekioh, the company behind the Flow browser. I’m also the architect of the project and one of the software engineers on it.

Why did Ekioh decide to create a new browser?

In 2006 we started developing an SVG engine for user interfaces in the set-top box market. No existing browser was full-featured, or was fast enough on the low-powered set-top box chips available at the time. User interface developers wanted HTML, but couldn’t get the performance they needed, especially in animations. SVG seemed better suited to user interfaces as there was no time spent in complex box model layout.

A user interface running on our SVG engine was much faster than any of the HTML browsers at the time and was very popular in this niche market with millions of STBs running it across most continents.

Over the next six or so years, STB chips started to move to multi-core GPUs, at the same as TV resolutions were moving to 4K. HTML was becoming fast enough on set-top boxes. On the other hand, a 4K TV has four times as many pixels as an HD TV, and a multi-core GPU doesn't make each individual core any faster. Thus, a single threaded browser won’t really see any significant speed improvements. That's why we decided to make Flow multi-threaded.

Dabbling with HTML/CSS layout seemed equally fun technically as building an SVG browser, so that’s been the main focus since. It started off being an XHTML/CSS layout engine on top of SVG, but we got carried away and over time moved to full HTML.

But, really, I suppose we did it because it would be fun to do it.

How far along is Flow? Can people download it and use it right now?

Well, it can render and interact with Gmail quite well. It’s pretty much perfect on a few sites we’ve targeted as focuses during development, but it struggles with many others. We only started implementing HTML forms in the last few months in order to log into Gmail.

It’s not yet available for download as I think we need to address the usability of it first. It currently needs a configuration file tailored to your computer, and has no toolbar. You don't want a toolbar for TV interfaces, so we never implemented one.

For which platforms is Flow currently available?

For Mac, Linux, and Android. Plus, of course, for the set-top boxes that are our main market, most of which run Linux. As to Windows, none of us run Windows so its development is untested and lags behind a bit, but I’ve just compiled a version and it seems to work.

Is Flow open source?

It’s not. There’s no current plan for that as we don’t have a large corporation backing our development.

Which JavaScript engine do you use?

We chose Spidermonkey in 2006, and as far as I recall it was because of both licensing and a documented embedding API. It was around the time that TiVo were having arguments over the GPL. The paranoia over that also ruled out use of LGPL licensed libraries for a few years.

The core browser code is abstracted away from any Spidermonkey APIs, largely so we could handle upgrades over the years - we can still handle its legacy garbage collection model quite happily.

What are your long-term goals with Flow?

The primary goal is stability, followed by getting more websites rendering perfectly in Flow. They generally fail because of either layout bugs or missing JavaScript APIs in Flow, so we have to solve those. Even for the embedded market, getting as many websites working as possible improves our confidence that a new HTML user interface will function correctly, first time.

Our roadmap is very flexible, usually because of commercial needs, but also we prioritise what’s interesting to a developer at that given time.

You said Flow is multi-threaded. Which tasks exactly are divided among the multiple threads?

HTML and CSS parsing is single-threaded, as is JavaScript (if you ignore WebWorkers). It’s the layout, primarily word wrap of text, that is done in parallel. Several caveats apply, but in general, two paragraphs can be laid out in parallel since they don’t impact each other apart from their vertical position.

We wrote some technical papers on this process.

Is the word wrap of paragraphs the computationally most expensive part of laying out an HTML page?

Yes. Each letter is a separate rectangle, plus you have word wrap rules for groups of letters. It’s also probably the hardest to achieve, so it's a good place to start. Desktop browsers haven’t touched layout, and have instead concentrated on making whole components run in separate threads.

Is Flexbox one of the caveats you mentioned?

There are multiple passes across the tree, all in parallel. We first calculate, in parallel, essentially the min-content and max-content widths of each paragraph, flexbox or table cell. Once we have those constraints, a relatively quick pass (not in parallel for that one flex box) works out the final widths of each box.

But we can handle multiple flexboxes in parallel, or one flex box and a paragraph outside the flexbox, and so on.

How integral is multi-threading to Flow and its architecture? Could you remove it? Would other browsers be able to copy Flow's multi-threading?

Multithreading can be turned off with a config setting. I suspect it’s always going to be easier to rewrite the layout code with multithreading in mind than rework existing layout algorithms - Mozilla took that approach that with Servo, rather than rework Gecko. The new layout engine could then, in theory, be combined with the rest of an existing browser.

Can you give an example of tricky problems you encountered while creating this browser?

Many sites, Gmail being a good example, were very frustrating as the JavaScript can be so large and obfuscated. It’s almost impossible to tell what they are doing, and much of the debugging was educated guesses as to what it was trying to do. Thankfully, the web platform tests help us make sure we are compatible with other browsers once we figured out the blocking bug or missing feature.

We can’t realistically pass these tests 100% as they test such a huge set of APIs - it would take us years to catch up with other browsers so we can only focus on what is used by priority websites.

And something that was much easier to implement than you thought?

The HTML parser. I first wrote an HTML parser back in 2002, and back then there was no detailed specification of how to handle badly-nested elements. We spent so much time writing test cases to figure out what desktop browsers did in each situation, and trying to behave the same. Ten years later, the detail in the WHAT-WG specification was amazing, and it was perfectly possible to write an HTML parser that is completely compatible with all other browsers.

And a feature you decided not to implement for now?

HTML forms. A TV user interface doesn’t use most, if any, of the features of HTML forms so it was a very low priority. We started adding them because they are needed for general web browsing, but they are not complete.

We haven’t yet implemented WebGL or IndexedDB because they are not used on most of the websites we’ve tried. Obviously Google Maps uses WebGL and Google Docs uses IndexedDB but both have fallbacks. Implementing more features to allow a larger number of websites to work is a priority.

What is Flow's UA string?

For the Mac version, it's the following:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_0) EkiohFlow/5.7.4.30559 
Flow/5.7.4 (like Gecko Firefox/53.0 rv:53.0)

The strings vary depending on the device, but the "EkiohFlow" and "Flow" strings should always occur.

Why do you emulate Firefox? I assumed it'd be Chrome.

We’ve spent ages on that UA string… I could probably write a blog post about it. Essentially, I copied Chrome. Things mostly worked. Then I hit the Instagram site, which decided to use ES6 features based on the UA string. I changed it to FireFox’s, using the version of SpiderMonkey that we were using (53 in the build you have), and the site worked. Then I added more afterwards (the rc:53) to get us to the more modern Google login box.

The UA string isn’t final at all but its choice is full of compromises.

Ekioh creates browsers for set-top boxes. What is Flow’s main purpose on set-top boxes?

It is used to render the UIs created by the box’s vendors, and not for actually surfing the web. But we don’t always get to see the UIs the vendors create, so being able to render all HTML flawlessly is the goal. That way, UI developers can do as they please.

Does the average set-top box have a browser meant for surfing the web?

Sort-of, but not really. I have a 2012 Sony TV with that functionality, but it was useless then and is useless now. IR has a significant lag, and that makes TV remotes far too painful to control a TV browser with. I don’t recall any modern TV/STBs that let you have open internet, but they probably exist. I can’t imagine anyone seriously using them.

Flow also runs on TVs and embedded devices. Could you give a few examples of embedded browsers? And TV browsers?

Back before we started our SVG engine, there were many HTML 4 browser engines for the TV market, such as ANT Fresco and Galio (which I also worked on), Access’s NetFront, Oregan, Espial and Opera. For the non-TV market, we have replaced Internet Explorer Mobile on a line of Windows CE devices. These days, almost all embedded browsers are based on Blink or WebKit.

What are your main competitors in the TV and embedded browser markets?

The main competitors to Flow are Blink and WebKit. Most STB providers often do their own port of one of these browsers. WebKit can be optimised for these low-powered devices, but Flow is usually able to out perform other browsers, and in the areas it’s not as fast, we can usually optimise it.

In a strange way, we also compete with ourselves - we offer our own embedded WebKit-based browser that is more feature-complete than Flow. The same developers work on maintaining and improving that.

Thanks for this interview!

You’re welcome.

Links in times of chaos.

• Laura Schenck, whose thoughts on programming CSS are very interesting anyway, discusses a project where she had to battle specificity. Key thought:

  Specificity breeds, much like conditionals breed in imperative languages [...]. Adding specificity is adding conditional logic. Once you start adding that logic, the code-base snowballs and it becomes difficult to understand, and thus difficult to maintain.

  She also asks if anyone who writes CSS should understand specificity to this degree. My answer is a firm Yes, just like you're expected to understand if- and for-loops when programming in any other language.
• Rachel Andrew ponders the pros and cons of CSS4. She is afraid that people will get confused by “CSS4” because several articles said there will never be a CSS4, and the version number 4 does not align with the version numbers of existing modules. Although both are true, I seriously doubt whether the people that “CSS4” is aimed at (those I call the torso and long tail of the CSS world) are aware or care. To me, this argument is overly legalistic, in the sense that it doesn’t matter in the real world.
  A much more important argument is that the announcement of “CSS4” will make people expect a list of new features that work in all browsers. In itself that’s great, and I think it would be really helpful, but the problem is that someone will have to decide what goes on the list and what does not — and the CSS WG is already stretched thin and cannot spare the time to do this. Maybe we need a community effort to help them? Worth thinking about.
• Interesting Twitter thread on why CSS is perceived as simultaneously very simple and very complicated.

  Because we think it's a simple language, we don't dive deep into it like we do with "real" programming languages. background: blue; makes the background turn blue, why should we bother diving in?

  But then it's time to build a layout and suddenly the combination of user agent styles and a lack of understanding in the fundamentals of CSS makes things break, or not behave how we expect them to.

  Yup.
• Mostly for myself: the difference between defer and async on script tags. Or, as Nicholas Zakas puts it:
  • Do it now: <script src>
  • Do it later: <script defer src>
  • I don’t care when you do it, just not now: <script async src>
• Coil, the web monetization company, offers some interesting but too-much-under-the-radar thoughts on probabilistc revenue sharing. The idea is simple: if A, B, and C cooperate on a to-be-monetized article, and A is allotted 60% of the revenue, B 25% and C 15%, you simply add those probabilities to your payment pointers. Eventually a tool will draw a random and assign a specific payment to a specific author, but for now you can use a script to emulate that behaviour.
• Google proposes to sunset the User Agent string by freezing its version number and removing device information. The purpose here is to make fingerprinting (combining UA string, IP address, TCP/IP settings, device information and a host of other bits and pieces to accuratenly identify a web user) more difficult.
  The UA string will be replaced by client hints that give web developers some information about the browser, device, and platform. These hints will likely be more generic than the UA string, and thus hamper fingerprinting.
  The second problem with UA strings is the eternal arms race between clueless web developers and browser vendors, where web devs start using a certain badly-written browser detect, which forces browsers who want to end up on the good side of it to adjust their UA string, so that it gathers more and more cruft. (This is the reason every single browser string out there still starts with Mozilla.) I do not see this arms race go away. For instance, if the new Flow browser wants to defeat new browser detects written with client hints by clueless web developers, it will most likely be forced to announce itself as Chrome. Worse: we lose the ability to accurately identify it as Flow. As a result, new browser stats will make it appear as if Chrome is even more dominant than it actually is.
  Maybe we need another field Sec-CH-RealUA or something, where the browser can use its true name. On the other hand, that will be more fodder for clueless web developers and will perpetuate the arms race.
  In any case, to me it seems that more-or-less-accurate browser statistics will be the most important casualty of this switch.
  
  Related links (mostly for myself): client hints as currently implemented; discussion on a previous Safari attempt to do something similar; Blink intent to ship
• Mozilla and KaiOS Technologies are going to cooperate on future versions of KaiOS, the operating system for “smart feature phones” (read: cheap phones) that’s based on Firefox OS. Included in the article is a whole list of features Mozilla will work on, but they essentially boil down to keeping KaiOS updated for the ever-evolving web.

  Broadly speaking, these updates will mean many first-time internet users gain access to more of the web’s advanced digital services on devices that are affordable, reliable, and secure.

  Remember: KaiOS is aimed at not-so-rich people from emerging markets. As of May 2019 there were about 100 million devices out there. That’s piss poor compared to iOS and especially Android, but let’s see if their use explodes or not.
• Have a tip for the next Linkbait? Or a comment on this one? Let me know (or here or here).

One of the things that keeps me fairly upbeat these days is playing board games and D&D with my friends online. Since others might want to do the same, I thought I’d jot down some notes on how I do it.

I briefly tried Tabletopia but didn"t like it. I understand why they built the interface as they did, but I found it very hard and very confusing to use, and it took us about 45 minutes to even start understanding the system. Granted, we picked Teotihuacan for our test game, which may not have been the best of choices.

So I continued using my homebrew system, and it works great so far.

Technical set-up

I use Whereby (the former appear.in), a WebRTC service that works absolutely GREAT. I totally recommend it to everyone for your online communication needs. The greatest thing about it is that you just go to a URL, ask the people you want to communicate with to go to the same URL, give permissions, enter the room, and start talking. No sign-ups or logins or whatever.

I have a pro account (or whatever it’s called) that allows 12 simultaneous connections to my room. You can also just grab a room name, go there, and start communicating, but these free rooms have a maximum of four simultaneous connections. So I advise you to take a paid account; you will most likely need more than four connections for playing board games online.

Besides, fuck free. The free Internet is slowly coming to an end and you should pay for services you like and use, or they won’t survive (or sell your data; see also Zoom).

Whereby works on modern Chromium-based browsers, and also in Firefox (though I haven’t tried Firefox on Android yet). It does not work in Safari iOS, but an app is available that works as simply as the web client.

Then figure out how many devices you own that you can use. On the whole, I send out three streams: my 'social' stream (my face, basically) from my laptop, the main board stream from my iPad, and a secondary board stream from a Samsung S6 I happened to have lying around. I occasionally use my real Samsung phone (an S7) as a third cam, for instance to make sure that everyone has the same bits and pieces on mirrored player boards.

Plug in all devices you use, and make sure any phones are on at least 25% charge or so before starting. My Samsung phones, especially, tend to spend a lot of juice on keeping the streams running, and even though plugged in all the time they might end up with less battery charge after a gaming session.

Mute Whereby on all devices except for your social stream. One very annoying thing I noticed is that, both on the iPad and on the Samsungs, it is impossible to turn off the sound completely. Therefore you need to do two things:

1. Disable sound input by clicking on the microphone icon in the bottom bar.
2. Disable sound output of all connections by clicking the Mute option in the menu you get after clicking on the three bullets icon in the upper right corner. You must repeat this for every connection.

You can only mute the output once everyone else has joined the stream. If someone drops out and re-joins you must mute them again. This is annoying; but it’s caused by idiotic device vendors not allowing you to mute the sound completely by using the provided hardware buttons — don’t ask me why they took this stupid step.

Now ask the others to join you. If possible and necessary they can also add their own cameras, for instance to show their player boards.

Picking the game

With the technical set-up out of the way, you should pick your game. I found that there are two absolute necessities here:

1. All players must own the game, so that they can copy the moves of the other players.
2. The game should have little to no hidden information.

So you might need to buy the same game as your friends. If you are in the Amsterdam area, please support your friendly local game store Friends & Foes instead of the big online retailers. Friends & Foes deliver in Amsterdam (I just ordered Tzolkin from them).

The two games I played most often so far are Azul and Alchemists. I am currently gearing up to try Madeira, Istanbul and Tzolkin; they should work as well.

Azul, Madeira, and Tzolkin have no hidden information at all. They have a variable set-up (and in case of Azul this is repeated each round), but that should be no problem.

Appoint one player or group of players as the Master; the other ones have Copies. The Master players draw all the randoms and show them to the other players, who copy them on to their Copy boards. Having the Master set provide all random draws is very important, since usually quite a bit of design thought went in to deciding exactly how many of one type of card or tile are available. These distributions should not be disturbed!

Azul

With Azul it is very important that all players set up copies of all other players’ personal boards. Part of the game is figuring out which tiles other players are likely to want, and for that all players need an overview of who has which tiles in which position.

Wnen I stream Azul, the main camera is on the central part with the available tiles. Other players can copy that if they like, but it’s not really necessary if the stream is clear enough. My secondary camera is on my own player board, so that everyone can see what I’m doing.

During the game all players clearly state their moves; for instance “I take the two blues with the star, and I put them on my three row.” I take the tiles from the central part, and the other players see me doing that, so they can correct me. They don’t see my copy of their playing baords, but that has never been a problem yet, as long as everyone gives clear instructions.

Alchemists

Alchemists does have a little bit of hidden information: random ingredients drawn, and random helper cards we always call Friendly Friends. (I forget their official name.) The Master player draws these cards for me and shows them on their camera without looking. I take the corresponding cards from my own copy of the game. This works fine, and the distribution of ingredients and Friendly Friends remains intact.

Alchemists really only needs a Master main board stream and social streams; there is no reason to add more cameras.

Although Alchemists’ board is pretty big, it doesn’t contain all that much information, which is good for online gaming. I just need to see which artifacts and ingredients are drawn (and copy them to my own board), and where players place their action cubes (and copy them as well). If I can’t see it clearly I just ask, and that works fine.

Part of Alchemists becomes much easier. In real life every player needs a beautifully-designed but sometimes cumbersone player contraption to both visualise their research and hide it from the other players.

Credit: Karel_danek

Online, it’s not necessary, and I find that my research and thinking flows much easier. Other players cannot see my board, and that gives me a lot more space to work with.

Madeira, Istanbul and Tzolkin

I haven’t played Madeira, Istanbul and Tzolkin yet, but they do not contain hidden information; just start-of-game randoms, plus the random buildings that occasionally appear in Tzolkin and the bonus cards in Istanbul. I do not think these will cause a problem.

The bigger problem might be that their boards are much more involved, and there’s a lot of game state to track. I might need to use two cameras to stream them accurately; I’m not sure yet. We’ll figure that out once we do the first session.

Location Circulation Collection

Call No. QL444.B83 K67 2016

Publisher Amsterdam : North-Holland, 1975-1988.

Location World Wide Web

Call No. QC1

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