Archive for February, 2010

Canvas drawing methods

February 21st, 2010 by JorisO | 1 Comment | Filed in Canvas, Front-end development

What follows is a quick reference of the canvas element’s 2d context drawing methods. For more extensive specifications and discussions of the canvas element visit the WHATWG canvas specifications or the canvas tutorial on Mozilla.org.

To start using the canvas element’s drawing API we first create a reference to a context to draw in inside a DOM-ready listener or window onload event: 

var canvas1 = document.getElementById('canvas1');
if (canvas1.getContext){
  var cntxt = canvas.getContext('2d');
}else{
  //fallback code
}

Read on

The Canvas element

February 17th, 2010 by JorisO | 1 Comment | Filed in Canvas, Front-end development

The canvas element is a HTML element that allows you to draw and animate bitmap graphics using a scripting interface. It is nowadays part of the HTML5 specifications as propounded by the W3C and the WHATWG.
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CSS 3 drop shadow

February 13th, 2010 by JorisO | No Comments | Filed in CSS3, Front-end development

CSS 3 allows us to add drop shadows using the box-shadow directive. The box shadow directive is for creating drop shadows on box-model elements, eliminating the need for background images or JavaScript solutions to achieve this effect. The box shadow directive is not for adding shadows to text. To add drop shadow to text nodes you should use the the text-shadow directive.

Box-shadow takes 3 lengths and a color as it’s attributes, the lengths are:

  1. the horizontal offset of the shadow, positive means the shadow will be on the right of the box, a negative offset will put the shadow on the left of the box;
  2. the vertical offset, a negative one means the box-shadow will be on top of the box, a positive one means the shadow will be below the box;
  3. the blur radius, if set to 0 the shadow will be sharp, the higher the number, the more blurred it will be.

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Creating a simple Gadget for iGoogle

February 11th, 2010 by JorisO | No Comments | Filed in Social media

Google Gadgets are mini-applications built using XML, HTML, using JavaScript or other front-end technologies for dynamic interactions. They can be used in a growing number of Google applications such as your iGoogle homepage, Google Apps start pages, Google Toolbar, Orkut, Blogger, Google Calendar, GMail, Google Sites. Google Gadgets have been extensively documented by Google themselves. For more detailed information – do visit their online documentation.gadget inspector

For the impatient here’s a short summary of the very basic steps in getting your Google Gadget up and online quickly on iGoogle. Basically all you’ll need to get going is a text editor and preferably access to a public webserver.
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Google Closure Compiler

February 9th, 2010 by JorisO | No Comments | Filed in Faster websites

This is Google’sJavaScript ‘compiler’ the JQuery team has started using to crunch their 1.4 jQuery versions. Not really a compiler off course but more of a JavaScript compressor in the tradition of Dean Edwards’ packer.

Closure Compiler is presented as part of Google’s Closure Tools Suite which also offers a JavaScript templating system and code library.
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