05.26.10
Posted in Culture, Good Stuff, Photography at 8:50 pm by thomas
My photo “Dancing across Broadway” has long been a favorite of mine and so I was delighted when I got a request from Amanda Spencer if she could use it as inspiration for one of her watercolors…
…and here it is!
Amanda did a great job with this picture – I really love the way she captured the dark & wet atmosphere of that evening, with the glittery lights of broadway reflected in the rain-splattered street.
The textures in this painting are amazing – it’s certainly something I haven’t seen done in watercolors before.
Great job, Amanda!
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04.12.10
Posted in Programming at 11:37 pm by thomas
It’s probably some sort of sign of a new phase in the JavaScript life cycle – dealing with binary data.
For the longest time there wasn’t much of a reason to worry about binary files – JavaScript was near exclusively used for text operations and simple number crunching. A multidimensional array maybe. Some objects and of course the DOM.
But binary? A while ago I’ve started work on a still-unfinished 68000 emulator in JavaScript (almost there!), and it was actually surprisingly hard to find good information about the bit operators in JavaScript.
And then there is the problem of how to get binary data into the script engine to begin with. It’s not exactly easy. And after re-inventing the wheel several times in the last few months, I’ve finally posted my current favorite solution for this specific problem to the Stories In Flight site here as a reminder for myself. And if you’ve read this far, you may be interested in that binary loader, too. 
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04.03.10
Posted in Good Stuff, Programming at 12:16 am by thomas
My Spectrum Visualizer has made quite some waves across the blogosphere and it’s been a lot of fun to check out the considerable traffic to the Stories In Flight server.
Of all the writeups I’ve found, here is the one I’ll use for my resume:
OK this must be the bleedingest-edge project I’ve seen in a while. To actually see it I had to download a pre-patched version of Firefox 3.7 alpha pre1 and it uses a draft recommendation of a Mozilla extension to the HTML5 draft specification.
This is from the Awesome But Useless blog, which certainly has one of the most entertaining blog titles I’ve seen in a while. And I am honored to be featured there – it’s great company. Thanks!
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03.28.10
Posted in Good Stuff, Navel Gazing at 1:52 pm by thomas
On March 18 at 1:13am Luke Akira arrived, changing our lives forever. And while he is not always as peaceful as in the picture above, he has already enriched our existence beyond words.
Welcome, Luke. We’ll have an amazing time together…
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03.06.10
Posted in Programming at 2:25 pm by thomas
The HTML Working Group at the W3C has published a full set of Working Drafts for the specification of HTML5.
This is another important step to move HTML5 and its associated technologies closer to become an “official” standard and will certainly speed up the implementation of many of these features in modern browsers.
Here are the links to the various documents that have been published:
And just as a reminder, here are my examples for some of the new features of HTML5.
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02.28.10
Posted in Good Stuff at 9:33 pm by thomas
This is very cool: I’ve just done a lazy flight around San Francisco Bay with FlightGear – an open source project that has been going on for about fifteen years now. Not sure how I managed to not hear of this before, since I’ve been having bad withdrawal symptoms since I’d ditched Windows and Flight Simulator a few years ago.
FlightGear is very far advanced at this point and much about the architecture of the platform is very attractive. All the scenery files, plane models and the AI traffic definitions are done in XML – there is a lot of stuff to poke around in… not that I really need another time sink at this point…
Flying in FlightGear was very nice. Similar to Microsoft’s FlightSim, but maybe a little bit more of a realistic aircraft handing (which is not always good for the casual pilot!). The scenery around the Bay was gorgeous and the clouds and sky (which is what a pilot will see the most) are near perfect, at least as good as FS9.
With versions for Mac and PC and as a free download, what is there not to like?
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02.24.10
Posted in Good Stuff, Modern Life at 12:33 am by thomas
Here’s another one of those things that is quite amazing in that special Internet kind of way: The German Alfred Wegener Institute maintains a station on the ice shelf in Antarctica and some enterprising scientists have lowered a microphone through the ice into the water under the ice shelf and the resulting audio stream – after bouncing via satellite to Germany – can be listened to live by anybody who has an Internet connection.
Now what would you be hearing there? From my casual listening, there is a constant low roar in the line, almost like white noise, which is actually kind of relaxing, and then suddenly there are loud cracks, booms and whiplashing metallic noises whenever the ice shifts.
From what the institute website states, there is a good chance of catching the songs of various kinds of seals and whales, but today I’ve only heard faint, low noises that may have come from whales. I’m looking forward to hear them close up.
But even just the echoing booms of the ice are fascinating and the stereo effect of the microphone is quite startling. Not sure if that makes me sound weird, but I could listen to this audio stream all day!
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02.21.10
Posted in Programming at 12:17 am by thomas
Over at Roughly Drafted is a very interesting article about the UI issues of having Flash on a touch screen device.
I pretty much slapped my forehead when I read this, since it is actually very obvious once you think about it, but most of us haven’t had a chance yet to experience Flash on a touch screen, so the issue hasn’t been in our face enough… and the issue is that many Flash experiences on the Web use mouse hover all over the place. Now imagine trying to use that on a touchscreen. Exactly.
Now to be fair, this is not just a Flash problem, the same is true for many websites where we use hover states for additional information and easy option selectors. We will have to come to terms with the fact that there are more and more touchscreen devices with excellent web capabilities, and we will have to start designing sites accordingly.
The article implies that this is one of the main reasons that there is no Flash on the iPhone or the new iPad and I’m not so sure that’s the case, but the absence of Flash on the iPhone has definitely prolonged the detrimental behavior of all web designers and developers to assume that there is always a mouse cursor.
We will have to let go of the mouse cursor. It’s an interesting experiment – look at your most recent web project (if that’s what you do) and see if it can be used without a mouse. And if not, can you fix it?
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02.19.10
Posted in Good Stuff, Modern Life, Programming at 1:01 am by thomas
A full month without a post! Time is truly flying right now. On the personal side, I’ve been busy with helping to prepare for our little family as the arrival of the Little One(tm) is getting closer and closer…
And work-wise I’ve spent as much time as possible reading up on the new HTML5 and CSS3 features – and there are many.
On my more experimental site – Stories In Flight – I’ve started to create a whole section with small cheatsheets and tutorials around things in HTML5 that have caught my eyes:
- There is the master cheatsheet for HTML5 and CSS3, which gives you a good overview of some of the highlights like box shadows, rounded corners, SVG and Canvas tags.
- I’ve created a little tutorial around the basics of Ruby Annotations and there’s also a suggestion of a practical use in language training.
- An exploration of CSS3 multiple background images and – rather a surprise – how this can be used quite efficiently for JavaScript animations. I will revisit this feature in the near future with several interesting new ideas…
- A quick look at the basic HTML5 audio tag, including a script solution that allows to easily create whole soundscapes with multiple channels of sound that will come in handy for JavaScript games.
The more I research all the new HTML5 features, the more excited I get for the future of interface engineering – after years of very little progress, where almost all interesting new interface developments came from the Flash side, we are now seeing a renaissance of HTML.
Yes, there will be browser incompatibilities, and yes, Flash will not go away, but I think we will be able to define a much better model where Flash will really only be used where it is necessary. No more reason to kill accessibility and SEO with Flash navigation elements.
We will see exciting new HTML websites exploding onto the scene, lightweight, accessible and kicking all kinds of visual butt.
I can’t wait.
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