I was on a panel at OSBC with Dave Mcallister of Adobe and Brian Goldfarb of Microsoft. I wanted to talk to Brian about canvas in IE9 but held off until later where I even offered the community up to write the IE code ;)
Someone off the record told me last week “it is coming… [...]
Michael Hanson and a team at Mozilla Labs have been doing some really interesting work with Identity in the browser (and taking ownership back from services).
They just released an alpha add-on for Firefox that begins to integrate contacts from services (right now: “Gmail, Twitter, and, on MacOS-based machines, the local Address Book” but growing).
Imagine getting [...]
The Jetpack project over at Mozilla Labs has been rethinking what it is to extend the browser (as has Chrome Extensions). They both move us to using Web technologies and skills rather than having to digg into XUL or C++. The project has gone through a reboot, and shed the original experiment as Jetpack Prototype.
We [...]
It was St. Patricks Day last night, and I have a funny feeling that some green beer and Guiness lead to Brian LeRoux and Rob Ellis creating Crockford Facts. It isn’t Friday yet…. well it is in Australia right?
Silliness. Oh, and John Resig has some competition for Doug too. We demand a dance off?
A certain someone was talking to me about how they find it interesting that node.js, the JavaScript server framework du jour which loves all things async, starts life with a bunch of synchronous require() calls. Now, this is actually quite fine since the startup of the server is not the issue at hand.
However, if you [...]
David Desandro has developed a newtypeface family named Curtis and done so in an interesting way.... using CSS:
Each character is wrapped in a <span> and then depending on the complexity of that character, more empty <span> elements are added to the markup to render each shape. Here's the markup for R:
PLAIN TEXT
HTML:
<span class="css_char r">
[...]
Disclaimer: Ben and I work for Palm and created this program. I wanted to make sure that you were aware of it over here, since Web developers have a great chance of getting some $ :)
At Palm we wanted to reward the mobile Web developers who build great applications that our users can enjoy. We [...]
Update: Here is a full set of release notes on the platform preview (called that as it is more of a shell than a browser.
Rey Bango (Ajaxian and now Microsoft employee) will do a post that rounds up the news from MIX today where the IE9 team shared a first preview release of IE9 that [...]
The Chromium folk have posted about JavaScript conformance as they release a test runner for Sputnik, that allows you to easily run the complete test suite from within your browser:
Sputnik touches all aspects of the JavaScript language defined in the 3rd edition of the ECMA-262 spec. In many ways it can be seen as a [...]
Cedric Dugas feels so passionate about fixed positioning in WebKit that he created A Better Mobile Web to talk about it:
The Problem
It is impossible to have an element fixed in CSS on the page in the mobile Webkit browser. When you are surfing the web on your phone, webkit opens the page completely and acts [...]
Ben Cherry has a really nice detailed analysis of the module pattern.
He starts with the simple pattern that Crock-y documented back in the day..... and then goes on to discuss augmentation (loose and strict) and then deeper into some cool patterns:
Cloning and Inheritance
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:
var MODULE_TWO = (function (old) {
var my = {}, [...]
Sergey Chikuyonok gets his Philips Ambilight foo on as he created a HTML5 video + canvas sample that mimics the TV effect.
As the video runs, a snapshot is sent over to JavaScript land where colors are worked out:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:
function getMidColors(side) {
var w = buffer.width,
[...]
I just finished doing some talks on geo hacking (slides are available here) and how to use some of the Geo technologies Yahoo and Google provide as part of a University gig in Atlanta.
As a lot of the students liked the idea of APIs like GeoPlanet and Placemaker but had a hard time getting [...]
Erik Dahlström and Vincent Hardy have put together a cool website, called SVG Wow!, that showcases SVG doing things you didn't expect SVG can do:
There are alot of unique demos on there.
One of my favorites uses SVG, HTML5 Audio, Web Fonts, and YUI to play music accompanied by flying animated lyrics (Chrome and Safari only):
There [...]
The Ext JS team have announced the 3.2 beta which includes new components and goodness.
Take the animated DataView transitions for example:
On top of that, the release includes:
Multiple sorting and filtering on Ext.data.Store
Composite Fields
Slider improvements
Toolbar plugins: ToolbarReorderer and ToolbarDroppable
New Accessibility Theme: compliant with Section 508 of the Disabilities Act.
Quality Assurance: Unit Testing: over 180 bug [...]
Paul Irish and Jonathan Neal have created a fun example of various CSS tweaks that you can make, and see the results instantly.
CSS3, Please! lets you play with fancy new rules such as:
border-radius
box shadow
gradients
rgba support in backgrounds
transforms
font-face
Really nice way to make tweaks inline in the page..... nicely done. Hope to see some other examples out [...]
Good old Kangax has been playing with HTML minification and has shared his new tool in an early stage.
What does it do?
Kangax has forked John Resig's HTML parser which parses the HTML and sends that into the Minifier. This has rules that do things like whitespace optimization, comment removal, and collapsing boolean attributes (e.g. disabled="true" [...]
Harmony is a new drawing tool, a HTML5/Canvas experiment with great potential. It provides some unique brush styles, and can produce some great-looking charcoal pencil style sketches, among other things. Better to try it out than explain it in words.
Creator Mr. Doob (Richard Cabello) explains how he used Canvas to make it darker the [...]
The HTML5 specification introduces the and media elements, and with them the opportunity to dramatically change the way we integrate media on the web. The current HTML5 media API provides ways to play and get limited information about audio and video, but gives no way to programatically access or create such media. We [...]
modulr is a CommonJS module implementation in Ruby for client-side JavaScript
Ruby? what does that have anything to do with it? Ah, its from one of those Prototype guys isn't it.... Yup, Tobie is at it again, this time with modulr:
modulr accepts a singular file as input (the program) on which is does static analysis to [...]