April 3rd, 2010 by JorisO | 1 Comment | Filed in CSS3, Front-end development
CSS 3 finally delivers specifications for the rounding of corners. CSS 3 allows you to specify a radius for the corners of an element. This offers the promise of no longer having to use awkward rounded corner / border hacks based on images or CSS / JavaScript for such a simple graphic effect.
At the time of writing Internet Explorer’s latest version (8) still doesn’t support this feature in any way. Also CSS vendor prefixes are still necessary for Mozilla (FireFox) and WebKit (Safari/Chrome) based browsers. Surely the vendor-specific prefixes and syntactical quirks will also disappear once the application of this CSS3 feature becomes more commonplace.
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Tags: css, CSS3, design
March 28th, 2010 by JorisO | No Comments | Filed in Canvas, Front-end development
Once the contents of a canvas element have been drawn using the 2d context drawing methods or image loading methods you can start using transformation methods to manipulate the drawing state.
To keep track of drawing states you use the canvas 2d context’s save() and restore() methods.
The save() method pushes a copy of the current drawing state onto the drawing state stack. This stack is simply a storage pile of canvas drawing states that can be returned to by successively calling the restore() method.
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Tags: Canvas, html5, image, transform
March 22nd, 2010 by JorisO | 1 Comment | Filed in Canvas, Front-end development
The html5 canvas element 2d context allows you to display and manipulate image files through it’s drawImage method. The drawImage method is overloaded to provide three sets of arguments for dealing with images.
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Tags: Canvas, html5, image
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
}
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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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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:
- 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;
- 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;
- 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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Tags: background, css, CSS3, drop shadow
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.
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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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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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:
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