Bullshit Bingo
This Flash applet allows you to easily create a fun Bingo game to play
with your friends at meetings, debates, TV shows, movies, etc.
Pay attention to the show, and mark the boxes that match what is said,
or what happens. The first
one to get a row, column or diagonal 'wins'. Make up whatever
rules you like.
The only real features this has over any other web-based B.S. Bingo is
that you can print out as many uniquely shuffled cards as you need, and
make your own Bingo games trivially, for a party, for a meeting, for
whatever.
A quick web search will yield up many more examples than I could
elaborate here.
http://www.google.com/images?q=buzzword+bingo
http://www.google.com/images?q=bullshit+bingo
Be sure to use words likely to be spoken. You can have many more
bingo phrases than can be displayed on one card, so large crowds can
play without the game being too easy. TOO much variety,
especially with too few people, or too short a presentation, and
nobody may win. If you are preparing a speech for an audience,
you can prepare the bingo game at the same time to guarantee it works.
Caution: There are probably situations where shouting out 'BINGO!!!' is
not appropriate, no matter how excited you feel.
If the noises may be disturbing to other people in a meeting, be sure
to turn your device's volume all the way down, since OTHER kinds of
noises made when someone IMs you, or email arrives, etc. would be
similarly annoying.
You can play a canned Bingo activity on the site, or you can edit
your own and use that to print Bingo cards for your friends and
coworkers to play with.
Any web device that supports
Flash, such as an Android phone, notebook, netbook, tablet, PC clone,
Mac, etc.
Steve Jobs hates Flash and Open Source, so you can't play it on an
iPhone/iPad/iPod/iMaxiPad/etc. device, though someone is sure to clone
this
and charge you money to download it as an i* app, even though everyone
else can play it for free. Naturally they'd remove this statement
and the copyleft statements, then insist what a good deal you're
getting, paying for stuff freely
available on the web to anyone with a device that doesn't suck so much
it can't even have a Flash plugin.
The icons at the bottom of the screen are the UI. You may have to
scroll a browser to see them. The layout is for filling a US
'letter' format document (8.5"x11"). It will scale to fit any
page.
When you print, fill in the text field next to the printing press to
set how many copies you want. Each page will be randomized and
different, so only one
player will 'win' at a time when you play. That makes it more
exciting. The big OS-dependent dialog box that says 'number of
copies' will make that many copies, per version of the page. So
if for some reason, you wanted ten copies, all the same, enter '1' in
the text field, and then when your printer dialog pops up and asks how
many, set the number there. Otherwise, just set the number next
to the printer icon, and 'OK' the dialogs, and out will pop the game
sheets, just the way you need them.
Some printer drivers have 'multiple pages' on a page settings, and this
will allow you to print many smaller bingo sheets, if used correctly
and followed up with a pair of scissors.
Most operating systems that don't suck have a 'Save as PDF' option, so
you can preview what the forms will look like without killing a
tree. Or pre-print to the PDF and have them printed 'for real' on
someone else's printer.
The Camera icon will take a snapshot of your screen, so you can post
the picture on a web site, such as after viewing a Youtube video, or
reading a forum debate and getting 'Bingo' on it.
The Thunder-Cloud icon will reset all of the stamps and randomize the
page for a fresh game.
Click on the Paper+Pencil to access the the editor.
The editor is about as simple as I could make it. If you don't
have enough items to fill the bingo sheet, a red box is revealed.
When that is covered, you have enough items to cover a card. You
can have many more.
Give your Bingo a title. Click the '*' icon to add items.
Edit the text in the little box, provided. Click the check icon
to save that change, or the 'x' icon to cancel it. Click the 'x'
icon on an item to remove it. Click 'Done' when you are done
making changes.
The folders are for 'saving' and 'loading' the bingo
items. They don't actually go to a server. They go to/from
an XML file on your hard drive, and the locally running Flash applet in
your browser.
Don't forget to save.
The XML format is dirt simple, and if you
choose to get fancy, you can add links and embed images and all manner
of things in the html text, in that xml file by MANUALLY editing
it.
If you do make 'fancy' text, be sure to wrap it in <![CDATA[]]>,
to keep the XML parser happy, and not have to escape all kinds of
things. Be sure also to keep your html use within the scope of
what the Flash HTML parser can handle.
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV3/flash/text/TextField.html#htmlText
To put a bingo game on a web server, copy the contents of the 'deploy'
folder, customising it as you see fit (but leave the open source
comments in this file) to a publicly available folder,
according to whatever hoops your ISP makes you jump through.
Substitute the
'bingo.xml' file with your
own bingo.xml, and you're in business.
If you want to accumulate bingo.xml content, you can solicit that and
receive it through email or whatever other ways are available to you to
send/receive the XML file, then post different 'bingo' games in
different server folders, and make yourself an index.html to get at
them.
Open Source And Copyleft/Copyright
Statements
Bullshit Bingo
Copyright (C) 2011, David Mace
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
The full source code, and copies of the other resources are available
at https://sourceforge.net/projects/bsbingo/
Also uses <swfobjec>
http://code.google.com/p/swfobject/
Which uses the MIT License.
Icons from the Crystal Clear icon set by Everaldo Coelho. – The icons
are licensed under the GNU
Lesser
General Public License
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Clear
The camera snapshot feature uses the Mike Chambers as3corelib
PNGEncoder class.
Copyright (c) 2008, Adobe Systems Incorporated
All rights reserved.
https://github.com/mikechambers/as3corelib
