I’ve created my first jQuery plugin this week – it’s an image overlay plugin (the static pic above doesn’t do the plugin justice, so click through to see it in action). Creating a jQuery plugin isn’t that big a stretch for a competent JavaScript developer. There are quite a few tutorials out there where you [...]
I created a new version of my particle demo using the HTML5 <canvas>. This version is full screen, inspired by this amazing canvas demo at Iteration Six. I’d seen their demo prior to my starting to tinker with the canvas tag, but I never really tore it apart and looked inside. From what it appears, [...]
Here’s a cool particle demonstration of the HTML5 <canvas> tag. It’s a tremendously small amount of JavaScript code that is responsible for pushing some radial gradient particles around a canvas. You can check out the source code to see how things are done – it uses jQuery a bit and the demo itself uses a [...]
Jaxer is a somewhat new technology that I’ve recently started to delve into. Jaxer is billed as the first AJAX server – basically, it’s a combination of a ‘web server’ and a set of APIs that can be used to develop web applications that transparently utilize asynchronous XMLHTTPRequests instead of postbacks as the standard way [...]
Firefox 3.5, the recent release of the latest version of the Firefox web browser, now supports CSS transforms. CSS transforms are effects, such as scale, rotate and skew. This is a step forward for the Gecko rendering engine, but in plain terms, it still clearly lags behind webkit, which supports 2D and 3D CSS animations. [...]
I recently downloaded the latest version of Opera in order to try out the Opera Unite service. If you haven’t heard, Unite is a web server that is hosted from within Opera (as a widget). The idea is that you can load Opera up on your PC, turn on the Unite service, and then be [...]
I’ve been focusing a lot lately on demonstrating some CSS animation techniques. That’s all fine and well, but there is definitely a need for some instructional material on the web. To that end, check out this CSS animation tutorial that I just finished. It will teach you some techniques that are useful today in a [...]
ASP.NET Ajax is a good technology in theory, but the implementation in practice is anything but smooth. There are many little ‘quirks’ that ASP.NET Ajax does to your page; these quirks almost entirely revolve around the handling of viewstate during ajax calls. ASP.NET Ajax passes the viewstate to the server and back during things like [...]
I hadn’t realized until very recently that the not-yet-released Palm Pre is wholly implemented using not much more than Webkit and HTML technologies. The entire platform is called WebOS, but it’s little more than a shell that is designed to run Webkit. This is an ingenious move in creating a smartphone, for a few reasons. [...]
This video on software quality was released by Douglas Crockford quite some time ago, but I just recently found it. Douglas is one of the Javascript architects at Yahoo, and he speaks compellingly about building quality into software projects. I found his ideas on why projects fail to be particularly interesting. It’s a longer video, [...]
