Spritely: jQuery Plugin for Sprite and Background Animations
The movement is extremely smooth, the syntax is simple, color me impressed. This wouldn’t been helpful for my Megaman II Intro in HTML5 project. May have to revisit that.
Amazon.com’s 1-Click Patent Confirmed Following Re-Exam
This is just plain terrible news. It’s the software equivalent of someone having a patent on “cash-only.” It’s a technology (and I hesitate to even call it a technology) so completely obvious that it makes the entire patent system look ridiculous by it’s inclusion.
This re-exam sticks us with another 4 years of the legal strong-arming of companies and people who try to make internet shopping experiences better.
Golden Ratio Calculator
A simple web-based golden ratio calculator. Used it this morning. (Via Ryan Taylor)
Some People Can’t Read URLs
Serving as a follow-up to the “Facebook login Quandry“. Also by the same author: A tutorial level for the internet. He uses Metroid as an example, so I am bound by law to link to it. (Via Shawn Medero)
Introducing FRMT.me
FRMT.me is an online CSS formatter using the Extra Future house style rules, which I’ve yet to codify here but will soon. It is one of my 6-hour projects, and as such is considered a sibling to Megaman II’s Intro in HTML, CSS, and jQuery.
House style on the name is to print the domain all caps and the TLD in lowercase, like so: FRMT.me.
Vector Social Media Icons
Vector versions of every major social media site. Useful and free.
Megaman II’s Intro Animation In HTML
Created by yours truly. No Flash, just CSS, HTML5, and jQuery. The animation is very not smooth in Firefox, but works great in Safari and Chrome.
Using the scrollbar to bring the view upward was a stylistic choice, it could’ve just as (if not more) easily done in a single “screen”, but what’s the fun in that? The demo uses the jQuery backgroundPosition-Effect plugin to achieve the parallax scrolling effect, and the new Javascript audio capabilities introduced by the HTML5 group. The timing may not work very well on older machines.
MPEGLA Announces H.264 To Remain Royalty-Free (For Free Content) Until 2016
This is a good thing, for now, but licensing-wise H.264 is actually probably worse than Flash. It works great with a hardware decoder, but why should I trust the MPEGLA to not pull the rug out from under the internet in 6 years? Of note: The 2016 deadline only applies to “Internet Video that is Free to End Users.” Who gets to define “free?”
The press release should’ve been subtitled “Your Move, Adobe.”
HipHop for PHP
What appears to be a PHP/C++ cross-compiler. This could be some serious mojo for PHP. That name is awful, though.
Jeffrey Zeldman on Flash, the iPad, and Standards
You can always count on Zeldman to say things like
As the percentage of web users on non-Flash-capable platforms grows, developers who currently create Flash experiences with no fallbacks will have to rethink their strategy and start with the basics before adding a Flash layer. They will need to ensure that content and experience are delivered with or without Flash.
But it’s still good to have him say them.
Ed Bott: It’s time to stop using IE6
The idea that anyone doesn’t know what this guy is saying makes me wonder why the US financial system doesn’t collapse more often due to the fucking insane IT systems in place at it’s major corporations.
In other words: I hear next week he’s going to say it’s time to stop using floppy disks.
The Details Are Everything
A new tumblr created by Me, available from now: The Details Are Everything, sifting the user interfaces and experiences I come into contact with in daily life. It is A) An excuse to write more about semi-work-involved things and B) something I’ve been threatening to do for long enough that I needed to either start it, or shut up.
Gordon, A Flash Runtime Written in JavaScript
The demos are pretty impressive, for what it is. Works on iPhone.
“Quit trying to make pigs out of sausage.”
This way of thinking about writing jibes with a lot of how I think about web development. Especially:
When you’re ready, dive into a blank page and start making a big mess in order to find out what you really think
A Form of Madness
The latest addition to Mark Pilgrim’s quickly-becoming-essential “Dive Into HTML5” series is about forms, and it is (as one might expect) the most cogent description of HTML5’s new form attributes and types that I’ve seen so far.
Tumblr Joins Wordpress.com In Implementing Twitter API Features
The new features allow users to post and read friends posts via Twitter clients such as Tweetie and Twitteriffic. This is very clever.