HTML5 Video and Audio Experiment

HTML5 & Ajax // August 6, 2009

Gizmodo had a post on an HTML5 experimental page from 9Elements design studio. If you have Firefox 3.5, Safari 4 or latest Chrome build you can check it out yourself here.

It’s really an amazing piece of work — beautiful animations coupled with sound and neat interactivity (clicking the lights displays tweets about the page). All this is done with no Flash, or Silverlight or anything like that, though of course the code that runs all that isn’t exactly trivial, it’s all HTML5, JavaScript and Canvas.

I hope that we see more and more people taking advantage of HTML5. Internet Explorer currently supports only a small subset of HTML5 spec and none of it is for something like this. But if there’s enough push for HTML5, hopefully either the other browsers will leave IE completely in the dust and people will just stop using it (one can always dream), or Microsoft will wiseup and implement proper standards and HTML5 support into IE.

[Gizmodo Post]

Echo — even more “social” comments

Blogging & WordPress // August 3, 2009

TechCrunch is testing a new comments system, called Echo. Very interesting idea — there are two parts to it. For one, when you post a comment on an article, any accounts that you tie to it (facebook, twitter, google profile, etc.) get that comment as well. The more interesting part, is that comments from around the web (from systems supported by Echo) that refer to the original article, will get posted to the article’s comments. That, among other things, of course includes twitter, which means this will need some sort of filtering system since a lot of tweets will just have a link to the article, and a word or two. All this is by the way seen in more or less real time in the comments, i.e. they get periodically updated, creating sort of a live feed of comments.

Here is the original TC article.

The web seems to be having an explosion of social services lately — everywhere you turn someone’s offering a new way to share your experience, with even more people, and it’s always more and more “current”, “live” and “real time”. And with iPhone and other smartphones becoming more and more common, accessing internet on the go is becoming a trivial thing, and everyone can pretty much post their lives on the web as they happen. I don’t know if it’s such a good thing in the long run, but right now I’m finding the whole thing pretty exciting.

Reflections and Accordion using CSS only, in Safari and Firefox

CSS // July 28, 2009

Using combination of CSS transforms, transitions, gradients and :target it’s possible to create things that usually require JavaScript — such as accordion and reflections (in Firefox). Unfortunately, this only works 100% in Safari and Chrome (and I guess any other webkit using browser). In Firefox these elements behave properly, they just don’t have animations or gradients. As for IE, I didn’t bother with it at all.

Here is the page I’m going to go over. Feel free to dig into the code and if you’ve got any ideas on how to make it even sleeker let me know. Read more »

Weekend Highlights — Google Wave, HTC Hero, King’s Quest and Screengrab!

Technology // July 25, 2009

So this has been a pretty busy week. Of course the biggest news is me launching this site… <crickets>… or maybe not. I guess it all depends on your perspective. As for the other interesting stuff — Google is sending out 100,000 beta invites to Google Wave in September; HTC Hero has been reviewed by everyone except me; Steam is having a sale on King’s Quest and Space Quests collections, and you know I got it as soon as I saw it; and finally a small Firefox add-on that is going to change my life (not really, but it’s an attention grabber, ain’t it). Read more »

Mindblowing Photography — RAZOOMA.net

Art & Design // July 22, 2009

Andrey Razoomovsky is a Russian photographer who does some amazing work. I stumbled upon his work on DeviantArt and was blown away.

Art by Andrey Razoomovsky

Art by Andrey Razoomovsky

He’s done some of the most unique photographs I’ve ever seen — they’re very imaginative, have great composition, extremely detailed and perfectly executed. If you do nothing else, you have to check out a collection of photographs entitled “Milk” — beautiful women dressed in milk — if that doesn’t spark your curiosity I don’t know what will. A word of warning though, most of the photographs in this collection are NSFW… then again that also depends on where you work.

Andrey has a DeviantArt profile, but his main work can be found on RAZOOMA.net. The site is in Russian but if you want to simply see his work then just click the first link in the main menu (at the top) and go nuts — from there you can’t go wrong whatever gallery you choose.

Using CSS3 @font-face to “fake” multiple font weights

CSS // July 21, 2009

CSS2 specifies additional font weights, beyond Normal and Bold. In particularly there are 9 font weights in total — 100, 200, 300, 400 (normal), 500, 600 (bold), 700, 800 and 900. Unfortunately browsers still somewhat lack support for this feature, but more importantly fonts lack support for this. Many fonts however, still come with only normal and bold weights. Moreover, based on a few tests, even professional fonts that come with multiple weights (such as thin, light, regular, bold, heavy, etc.) don’t actually support these weights in the same way as the CSS2 specification dictates, in other words they can’t be used out of the box like that.

For example, I have the Arno Pro font (a nice serif font from Adobe). It comes in 4 weights — regular, bold, light and semibold. Each is encapsulated in its own file with a distinct name, e.g. ArnoPro-Bold, ArnoPro-Smdb, ArnoPro-Light, etc. I don’t know much about how fonts work but based on a bit of reading I’ve done, for a font like that I should be able to declare a style that uses “ArnoPro” font-family and based on the weight I assign to a particular element it would use a different version. For example, ArnoPro-Light for 200, ArnoPro-Regular for 400 or normal, and so on. However, based on a few tests I’ve done that doesn’t seem to be the case. In fact “ArnoPro” font isn’t recognized at all, only if I specify explicitly “ArnoPro-Smbd” does it recognize the font. And of course when it’s done like that all but the regular version are stuck with one weight, i.e. font-family:ArnoPro-Smbd; font-weight:normal looks exactly the same as font-family:ArnoPro-Smbd; font-weight:bold.

In short, the situation is less than ideal. However, there may be a at least a partial fix. Read more »

Good Ol’ Games

Gaming // July 19, 2009

As my inaugural post I decided that I’m not going to blab about myself, that’s what the “About Me” blurb in the footer is about. Instead I’m going to talk a bit about my favorite discovery of the past few months — GOG.com.

GOG.com

GOG.com

GOG.com (Good Old Games) is a site dedicated to the great PC games of yore. It’s a community site for people who remember the days when an entire game could be fitted on a single 5.25″ disk, and who still love to play the classics once in a while. They (gog.com) also sell many of these classics for download. Their catalog is always growing and much like Steam they always have one sale or another going on, which is frankly putting a load on my credit card so I’m always torn between loving them and hating them. One other thing worth mentioning about GOG.com is that all the games they sell are made compatible with modern Windows OS — XP, Vista, 7, so there’s no need to worry about installing DOSBox or other such software. So far from my experience they all work fine.

And as a web designer I also appreciate their site design — it’s very well done, light, slick and fast, if a bit too grey for my taste.

Anyway, if you miss such classics as Fallout, Earth 2150 or Under A Killing Moon (any Tex Murphy fans in the house?) you should checkout GOG.com.

P.S. And no I’m not affiliated with gog.com, just a big fan, that’s all.

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