Category: Web development
As a one time evangelist of Flash it’s interesting to see new tools floating to the surface over the course of the past few months. As browsers become more capable of delivering animation and effects without the need for plug-ins like the Adobe Flash Player I think this market will become increasingly competitive.
I’ve not had a chance to sit down and look at any of these tools in earnest, indeed some of them are not even available to download yet but I thought it would be worth creating a brief list and adding to it as time goes by. For now at least here’s the current crop of HTML5/CSS3 animation tools which I’ve stumbled across:
It will be interesting to see how these applications develop over the coming months and whether any on them particular gain traction with the community as the ‘go to’ tool for online animation, just as Flash did back in it’s glory days. Let me know if you’ve seen a tool that I’ve missed and I’ll add it to the list! :)
I struck upon a wonderful little idea which I’ve implemented in a simple plug-in I’m writing for a project I’m currently working on.., add a ‘variable_prefix’ parameter to your plug-in or module… allow devs using your add on to opt to have variables prefixed with any value.
This is really useful if your add on might have variables which conflict with another add on or native ExpressionEngine variables. This could also allows a dev to nest once instance of your plug-in in another without having to resort to embeds, they simply specify a tag prefix for the outer tag pair.
While writing a simple search plug-in for ExpressionEngine I went looking for a nicely formatted array or CSV file of ‘stop words’ which I could diff my search string against. Didn’t find anything which was an easy copy/paste so I thought I’d post the content that I adapted from the MySQL docs here for others to use. :)
Download: search_stop_words.csv
Have fun! :)
dConstruct is a 1 day conference run by Clearleft in Brighton. I’ve never had the chance to go before and hadn’t intended to this year. I’ve never really been convinced of the value of attending the numerous industry conferences and events but when my good friend Drew offered me a free ticket it seemed like a bit of a no brainer.
I had always (perhaps incorrectly) figured that dConstruct was mainly focused on web design/development (echoed by the attendee demographic; guys in their 30’s, wearing geek t-shirts, carrying iPhones and/or MacBooks) but the breadth of topics covered by the speakers was much wider. On reflection I think this was a good thing as it encourages us to think a little more outside the box, looking at the world and the technology that inhabits it from a slightly different perspective can lead to some interesting ideas.
Highlights for me were the ‘Learning from SciFi Interfaces’ by Nathan Shedroff and Chris Noessel and the excellent presentation delivered by Russell Davies on ‘Dematerialising a Web of Data’. The presentation slide that I will remember forever is his message to the newspaper industry – “We have broken your business, now we want your machines†(haha!).
Aside from the talks dConstruct was clearly a great opportunity to actually meet the people I converse with online, finally put faces to names and make some new contacts. If you’ve never been and have the opportunity to do so next year I’d thoroughly recommend it.
We have a small statement on the Nine Four website which advises new clients as to our current availability.
In general we need between 3 and 4 weeks notice to fit any significant new work in, so rather than continually update the availability statement or explain that we need 3 or 4 weeks lead time, I just used the PHP date function.
<p class="availability">We're available to work on new projects from the <?php echo date('jS of F Y', strtotime(date("d-m-Y").'+21 days' ) ); ?>.</p>
Simple really but I just thought I’d share.
