Archive for the ‘Front-end development’ Category

Newer Entries »

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.
(more…)

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.

(more…)

Tags: , , ,

JQuery 1.4 features

January 25th, 2010 by JorisO | No Comments | Filed in Front-end development

JQuery 1.4 appeared almost a year after it’s predecessor -  jQuery 1.3.2. Reason enough to assume some new features have been extensively developed in this version. Let’s have  a look at a few of the newly introduced functionalities that struck me as particularly useful:

The focus has been both on the reduction of internal complexity in the jQuery codebase and improving the development processes behind it with regards to code consistency, testing and optimization.

The cleanup of jQuery internals has made it possible to apply certain new and excisting functionalities more consistently throughout the jQuery 1.4 codebase, and bring major improvements in performance.
The full release notes for the 1.4 version can be read here:
(more…)

Newer Entries »