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 [...]

SVG Wow!

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 [...]

Ext JS 3.2 beta: stores, components, transitions, and themes

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 [...]

CSS3 Please! Instant results? Thank You

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 [...]

HTML Minification

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: Canvas Drawing Tool

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 [...]

Spectrum Visualization with the HTML5 Audio Data API

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: a CommonJS module implementation in Ruby for client-side JavaScript

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 [...]

Friday fun: Let?s translate YUI3 to jQuery

I just came across this wonderful Gist on gitHub: PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT:   var $; YUI().use('*', function(Y){   $ = Y.get;   for(var p in Y) {       $[p] = Y[p];   } });   // test $('body').append("boo!");   In case you want to use YUI3 but really really like jQuery syntax :) OK, it breaks the whole sandboxing idea of YUI3, but that's a small price to [...]

Firefox gets hardware acceleration in early stage

Bass Schouten is a cool name, and the Mozillan has presented Direct2D hardware acceleration. You have to grab Firefox nightly, do the about:config / gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.enabled game, but then you get to see it in action. IE9 showed off how they will support hardware rendering, and I am sure we will see more at MIX, but it is [...]

Color Picker: Works even in IE6

Works even in IE6 Love that quote from the color picker over at RaphaelJS land. This plugin by Dmitry Baranovskiy gives you an easy color picker in short order: PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT:   var icon = Raphael("picker", 23, 23).colorPickerIcon(11, 11, 10);   icon.attr({cursor: "pointer"}).node.onclick = function () {     document.getElementById("benefits").style.visibility = "visible";     var out = document.getElementById("output");     out.style.visibility = "visible";     [...]

Touching Cloth; Canvas Fu

Andrew Hoyer shows his canvas Fu with Cloth, a great experiment using nice physics. What makes this simulation special is the speed at which everything is computed. Javascript (the language this is written in) is not exactly the most efficient language for this type of computation. This being said, much time was spent squeezing out every [...]

Fin: self updating template language

Marcus Westin has created a new templating language called fin. It is an interesting beast, and he gave us a run down: Since this past November I've been working on a realtime templating system I call "fin". I'd love to get some eyes on it, and hope that you'll find it exciting. There is no demo, [...]

New performance case studies? starting with the Digg widget

Would we all like Steve to sit down with us on our project and do a performance case study? Well, we may not get that, but we are getting to at least sit in on others. Steve has kicked off his long awaited series that runs performance case studies on third party content. I have been [...]

Mozilla JägerMonkey: Method based JIT + Trace based JIT = speed

David Anderson: "TraceMonkey has rocket boosters, so it runs really fast when the boosters are on, but the boosters can?t always be turned on." Opera's new JIT compiler Carakan is doing well as we just posted. What is Mozilla doing with TraceMonkey? A lot. Mozilla JägerMonkey adds method based JIT (of V8 and Nitro fame) to keep [...]

Opera 10.50 out for Mac, impressive performance and more

The Opera team has released 10.50 for Mac and along with it some impressive performance numbers: Stabilization Improvements: You will find that this build is much more stable than the pre-alpha build. More polished user interface: The whole UI is more polished now. We're still not done yet, and expect more polishes and improvements in [...]

ZooTool by MooTool(s)

Bastian Allgeier has developed a beautiful, native looking web application called ZooTool. Zootool is a visual bookmark tool for images, videos, documents and links. It is completely based on Mootools, even though it looks more like a Cappuccino app! Play with it. Enjoy it.

EnhanceJS: A library to progressively enhance

EnhanceJS is a new library from the Filament Group, who are serious about progressive enhancement and accessibility. What is EnhanceJS? EnhanceJS is a new JavaScript framework (a single 2.5kb JavaScript file once minified/gzipped) that that automates a series of browser tests to ensure that advanced CSS and JavaScript features will render properly before they?re loaded to the [...]

Are you feeling touchy?

Reposted from my personal blog where I tinker with the Web. I tweet about this stuff here. As you move to a new platform, it is interesting to watch your brain morph over time. I remember switching from Windows to Mac. At first the fonts looked blurry and weird. The mouse pointer didn't weight right. The [...]

Custom checkbox and radio buttons using CSS

In my never ending quest to find weird and wonderful ways to abuse CSS and all its little intricacies, I have come up with a pretty good way of using CSS to create custom radio and checkbox inputs without JavaScript, that are accessible, keyboard controlled, don?t use any hacks and degrade nicely in non supporting [...]