Category: Releases

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Original Releases

Introducing dabblet: An interactive CSS playground

Reading Time: 4 minutes

I loved JSFiddle ever since I first used it. Being able to test something almost instantly and without littering my hard drive opened new possibilities for me. I use it daily for experiments, browser bug testcases, code snippet storage, code sharing and many other things. However, there were always a few things that bugged me:

  • JSFiddle is very JS oriented, as you can tell even from the name itself
  • JSFiddle is heavily server-side so there’s always at least the lag of an HTTP request every time you make an action. It makes sense not to run JS on every keystroke (JSBin does it and it’s super annoying, even caused me to fall in an infinite loop once) but CSS and HTML could be updated without any such problems.
  • I’m a huge tabs fan, I hate spaces for indenting with a passion.
  • Every time I want to test a considerable amount of CSS3, I need to include -prefix-free as a resource and I can’t save that preference or any other (like “No library”).
Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE JSFiddle. It was a pioneer and it paved the way for all similar apps. It’s great for JavaScript experiments. But for pure CSS/HTML experiments, we can do better.
The thought of making some interactive playground for CSS experiments was lingering in my mind for quite a while, but never attempted to start it as I knew it would be a lot of fascinating work and I wouldn’t be able to focus on anything else throughout. While I was writing my 24ways article, I wanted to include lots of CSS demos and I wanted the code to be editable and in some cases on top of the result to save space. JSFiddle’s embedding didn’t do that, so I decided to make something simple, just for that article. It quickly evolved to something much bigger, and yes I was right, it was lots of fascinating work and I wasn’t able to focus on anything else throughout. I even delayed my 24ways article for the whole time I was developing it, and I’m grateful that Drew was so patient. After 3 weeks of working on it, I present dabblet.
Continue reading “Introducing dabblet: An interactive CSS playground”
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Original Releases

Animatable: A CSS transitions gallery

Reading Time: < 1 minute

What kind of transitions can you create with only one property? This is what my new experiment, animatable aims to explore.

It’s essentially a gallery of basic transitions. It aims to show how different animatable properties look when they transition and to broaden our horizons about which properties can be animated. Hover over the demos to see the animation in action, or click “Animate All” to see all of them (warning: might induce nausea, headache and seizures 😛 ). You can also click on it to see more details and get a permalink. Instead of clicking, you can also navigate with the arrow keys and press Esc to return to the main listing.

Fork it on Github and add your own ideas. Be sure to add your twitter username to them as a data-author attribute!

I’ve only tested in Firefox and Chrome for OSX so far. Not sure which other browsers are supported. However, since it uses CSS animations, we know for sure that it won’t work in browsers that don’t support CSS animations.

Hope you enjoy it 🙂

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Original Releases

PrefixFree: Break free from CSS prefix hell!

Reading Time: < 1 minute

I wrote this script while at the airport travelling to Oslo and during the Frontend 2011 conference. I think it’s amazing, and it makes authoring CSS3 a pleasure.

Read my announcement about it on Smashing Magazine.

Hope you like it!

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Original Releases

Major update to Chainvas: modularity, a client side build script & more

Reading Time: 2 minutes

A week ago, I released Chainvas. It was a spin-off script I wrote while developing my cubic-bezier tool, to make using the Canvas API a bit less painful. However, unlike similar attempts to make the Canvas API chainable, most of my code was written in a very generic manner, and was actually able to make every API chainable. However, when I released it, even though I mentioned that it can be used for other APIs and provided some examples, practically everyone that shared the link on twitter or other means (thank you .net magazine for the newsletter mention btw!) focused on what Chainvas did for Canvas.

Actually, while using Chainvas myself, I found it immensely more useful for chaining DOM methods and setting multiple element properties at once. Chainvas had a lot of potential, that most people were missing. And then it dawned on me: I should modularize the library! A generic chaining library at its core and additional modules for making the different APIs chainable. And I did it.

On the way to that, I added IE8 compatibility, and tested in many other browsers, thanks to Browserstack. I actually found that Chainvas’ core even works in IE6! I also wrote unit tests, a much more extensive documentation, added a script generated table of contents and designed a logo and a Chainvas pride banner.

Also, since it was now modular, it needed a build script. I badly wanted to make this client side, so I followed this architecture:

  • Every module is included in chainvas.js and chainvas.min.js, along with a header comment that follows a specific syntax.
  • The user selects a compression level and then, the relevant script is downloaded through XHR and split into parts according to the module headers. Then a module list is generated with checkboxes for the user to select the ones they want to include.
  • When the user checks and unchecks those checkboxes, the URL of the download link changes to a data URI that contains the script.
This approach has the disadvantage that there is no default filename, and the “Save page as…” link is deactivated in Chrome (why Chrome??). However, I like the idea so much, I don’t mind these shortcomings.
That’s about it. Enjoy and let me know about any bugs.
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Original Releases

A better tool for cubic-bezier() easing

Reading Time: 3 minutes

A few days ago, I had a talk at a conference in Zurich (I’m going to write more about it in another post). The talk was about “10 things you might not know about CSS3”. The first of those things was how you can do bouncing transitions with cubic-bezier() instead of an easing keyword. As usual, my slides included a few live demos of the functionality, in which I edited the cubic-bezier() parameters and the audience could see the transition produced.

However, in the case of cubic-bezier() that’s not enough. No matter how much you see someone changing the parameters, if you don’t picture it in a 2D plane, it’s very hard to understand how it works. So, the night before, I searched for a tool I could use to show them how bezier curves are formed. I found plenty, but all of them restricted the the coordinates to the 0-1 range. I’m not sure if the cause is ignorance about the spec changes or that Webkit hasn’t caught up with those changes yet (but it will, soon). The only one that supported values out of range was this one from the Opera Dragonfly developers, but I found it kinda impossible to adapt.

For my talk, I tried to adapt one of them but it was late so I gave up after a while and ended up just showing them a screenshot. And the day after the talk, I started adapting this to my needs (ever tried coding at a conference? It’s awesome, you get to ask questions from very knowledgeable people and ger replies straight away). And then I started cleaning up the code, changing how it worked, adding features. At this point, I think the only thing that’s left from that tool is …the HTML5 doctype. After 3-4 days, I finished it, and got it its own domain, cubic-bezier.com (I was surprised it was still free).

So, in a nutshell, what makes this better?

Lots of things:

  • It supports y values out of range, as per the latest version of the spec (and shows a warning for Webkit)
  • It’s fully accessible from the keyboard
  • You can move the handles not only by dragging but also by clicking on the plane or using the keyboard arrow keys
  • You can mouse over the plane and see the progression and time percentages that correspond to every point
  • You can save curves you like in your “Library” (uses localStorage to persist them)
  • You can import and export curves to/from your library to share them with others
  • You can share a permalink to every curve. For example, here’s a bouncing transition (FF & Opera only)
  • You can compare the current curve with any in your library, setting the duration yourself
  • Custom favicon that reflects the current curve

Cool stuff used

Given that this tool is not only for developers, but for badass developers that care about stuff like cubic-bezier(), I think I can safely assume they’re using a top notch browser. So, I went crazy with using cool modern stuff:

  • HTML5: Canvas, localStorage, History API, range inputs, oninput event, output, classList, data- attributes
  • ES5: Accessors, Array#map, Array#forEach
  • Selectors API
  • JSON
  • CSS3: Transitions, gradients, media queries, border-radius, shadows, :in-range pseudoclass, box-sizing, transforms, text-overflow
I also used my tiny chaining framework, Chainvas throughout this project.

Browser support

So far, I’ve tested it in modern versions of Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari and it seems to work. I haven’t tested it in IE10 (too lazy to open vm), although I want it to work there too, so if it doesn’t let me know. 🙂

Enjoy! cubic-bezier.com

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Original Releases

CSS.coloratum: Convert and share CSS colors

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Whenever I wanted to convert a CSS named color to RGB, I used to open the CSS3 colors spec in a new tab, search in the page and copied the values. Every time it felt even more tedious. I didn’t want to search in long tables, I wanted to type the color somewhere and get the values back, in an easy to copy format. So, after yet another color lookup earlier today, I decided to scratch my own itch and do it myself.

Of course, I didn’t plan to include a whole database of CSS colors in the website. My idea was much simpler: Use the named color to draw a rectangle in a <canvas> and then read the R,G,B values through ctx.getImageData().

I got the core functionality done in under 10 minutes, so I started adding stuff. I added a hex and HSL representation, I used canvas.toDataURL() to get a data URI of the rectangle and use it as a dynamic favicon*, I made the colors sharable and bookmarkable by using an old-fashioned hash. Also, I realized it actually supports any CSS supported color represenation by design, not just named colors.

Regarding the color conversions themselves, I took extra care to avoid redundancy. So values < 1 don’t have leading zeroes (.5 instead of 0.5) and when the hex color is in the format #xxyyzz it gets converted to #xyz. When it’s an RGBA color, it still converts it to hex, since those values will be supported in CSS4.

Since it’s for developers, I didn’t bother at all with fallbacks.

Cool stuff used:

  • HTML5: canvas, autofocus, output, oninput event, hashchange event
  • CSS3: gradients, media queries, box-sizing, background-clip, border-radius, shadows, RGBA
  • ES5: Array#map()
  • Selectors API

The reason the input’s border appears weird on Webkit is this long standing Webkit bug. Also, for some reason my nice dynamic favicons don’t display on Firefox, although they display fine in Webkit and Opera.

Enjoy: CSS.coloratum
Happy color sharing! Let me know of any problems or suggestions you may have.
PS: In case you’re wondering about the domain, I’ve had it for ages for another project and I thought it was quite fitting.

*Thanks to @milo for giving me the idea of using a dynamic favicon

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Original Personal Releases

twee+: Longer tweets, no strings attached

Reading Time: 4 minutes

As some people that have been following me for a while know, the 140 character limit on twitter bugs me a lot sometimes, and I’ve tried to find a way to overcome it previously as well. The most common ways these days seems to be either cutting down the long tweet into multiple pieces (yuck) or using a service to host the longer tweet and post a summary with a link to it.

The latter isn’t an entirely horrible option. However, I see 3 big downsides:

  1. I’m not very comfortable with the idea of some external service hosting my content which could close down any time due to failure to monetize their website. In that case, I’d be left with some dead links that are of no value and my content would be lost forever. Yes, they usually warn you in advance in such cases, but such news could be missed for a number of reasons.
  2. People (including yours truly) don’t plan those things in advance. They just seek services like that at the exact moment when they want to post a long tweet. Being greeted with a prompt to use Twitter Connect is NOT nice. For starters, it slows me down. Also, I don’t want to give permission to every website on the effing interwebs to post on my twitter timeline. I owe it to my followers to be responsible and not risk filling their timelines with crap.
  3. Most of these websites look like someone puked and what came out happened to be HTML and CSS. The only exception I’ve found is twtmore, but it still suffers from #1 and #2.
So, like every developer with a healthy amount of NIH syndrome, I decided to write my own 😀
My goals were:
  1. It had to be entirely client-side (except initially getting downloaded from the server of course). This way, whoever is concerned can download the full website and decode their tweets with it if it ever goes down. Also, being entirely client side allows it to scale very easily, as serving files is not a very resource intensive job (compared to databases and the like).
  2. No Twitter Connect, the tweets would get posted through Twitter Web Intents.
  3. It had to look good. I’m not primarily a designer, so I can’t make something that looks jaw-droppingly amazing, but I can at least make it look very decent.
  4. If I was gonna go through all the hassle of making this, I may as well try to keep it under 10K, so that I could take part in the 10K apart contest. (I haven’t submitted it yet, I’ll submit a few days before the deadline, as it seems you can’t make changes to your submission and I want to polish the code a bit, especially the JS — I’m not too proud about it)
I managed to succeed in all my goals and I really liked the result. I ended up using it for stuff I never imagined, like checking if a twitter username corresponds to the account I think (as it shows the avatars). So I went ahead and came up with a name, bought a domain for it, and tweeplus.com was born 🙂

twee+? Seriously?

Yes, I like it. The plus means “more”, which is fitting and + kinda looks like a t, so it could be read as “tweet” as well. Yes, I know that the word “twee” has some negative connotations, but oh well, I still like the name. Whoever doesn’t can just not use it, I won’t get depressed, I promise. 😛

Geeky stuff

How it works

  • A relatively new feature, Twitter automatically wraps URLs in t.co links, making them only 20 characters long.
  • All the text of the tweet is stored in the URL hash (query string will also work, although the output uses a hash). Some research revealed that actually browsers can handle surprisingly long URLs. Essentially, the only limit (2083 characters) is enforced by Internet Explorer. I decided to limit tweets to 2000 characters (encoded length), not only because of the IE limit, but also because I wouldn’t like people to post whole books in t.co links. We don’t want Twitter to start taking measures against this, do we? 🙂
  • A hard part was deciding which encoding to use (twitter is quite limited in the characters it parses as part of a URL).
    • My first thought was base64, but I quickly realized this was not a very good idea:
      • The encoding & decoding functions (btoa() and atob() respectively) are relatively new and therefore not supported by older browsers. I’m fine with the app hardly working in old browsers, but existing links must as a minimum be readable.
      • It uses approximately 1.34 characters per ASCII character. Unicode characters need to be URL-encoded first, otherwise an Exception is thrown. URL-encoding them uses 6 characters, which would result in 8 characters when they’re base64 encoded.
    • Then I thought of using URL-encoding for the whole thing. The good thing with it is that for latin alphanumeric characters (which are the most) it doesn’t increase the string length at all. For non-alphanumeric characters it takes up 3 characters and 6 characters for Unicode ones. Also, it’s much more readable.
    • Still, implementing it was tricky. It doesn’t encode some characters (like the dot), even though twitter doesn’t accept them as part of a URL. Also, escape() and encodeURI() behave differently and the Unicode encoding returned by the former isn’t accepted by Twitter. So I had to combine the two and do some substitutions manually.
  • When the textarea changes, the hash does too. The whole thing is a form with action=”http://twitter.com/intent/tweet”, so submitting it does the right thing naturally. I keep a hidden input with the tweet and the textarea has no name, so it doesn’t get submitted.
  • Usernames, hashtags and URLs get extracted and linkified. Usernames also get an avatar (it’s dead easy: Just use twitter.com/api/users/profile_image?screen_name={username} where {username} is the user’s username)
  • Internal “pages” (like “About” or “Browser support”) are essentially long “tweets” too.
  • A little easter egg is that if the browser supports radial gradients, the gradient follows the mouse, creating a spotlight effect. This looks nice on Chrome and Firefox, and really shitty on IE10, probably due to bugs in the gradient implementation (which I have to reduce & report sometime).

Buzzword compliance

This little app demonstrates quite a lot new open web technologies (HTML5, CSS3 etc), such as:

  • textarea maxlength
  • placeholder
  • autofocus (edit: I had to remove it cause it triggered a Webkit bug in Safari)
  • required inputs
  • New input types (url)
  • History API
  • oninput event (with keyup fallback)
  • hashchange event
  • SVG
  • Common CSS3 (border-radius, shadows, transitions, rgba, media queries)
  • CSS3 gradients
  • CSS3 animations
  • CSS3 resize
  • :empty
Let me know if I forgot something.
Oh yeah, I did forget something. There it is: twee+
Categories
Original Releases

A polyfill for HTML5 progress element, the obsessive perfectionist way

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Yesterday, for some reason I don’t remember, I was looking once more at Paul Irish’s excellent list of polyfills on Github. I was really surprised to see that there are none for the <progress> element. It seemed really simple: Easy to fake with CSS and only 4 IDL attributes (value, max, position and labels). “Hey, it sounds fun and easy, I’ll do it!”, I thought. I have no idea how in only 1 day this turned into “OMG, my brain is going to explode”. I’ve documented below all the pitfalls I faced. And don’t worry, it has a happy ending: I did finish it. And published it. So, if you’re not interested in long geeky stories, just jump straight to its page.

Continue reading “A polyfill for HTML5 progress element, the obsessive perfectionist way”
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Original Releases

StronglyTyped: A library for strongly typed properties & constants in JavaScript

Reading Time: 3 minutes

StronglyTypedI’ll start by saying I love the loosely typed nature of JavaScript. When I had to work with strongly typed languages like Java, it always seemed like an unnecessary hassle. On the contrary, my boyfriend even though very proficient with HTML, CSS and SVG, comes from a strong Java background and hates loosely typed scripting languages. So, to tempt him into JS and keep him away from heavy abstractions like Objective-J, I wrote a little library that allows you to specify strongly typed properties (and since global variables are also properties of the window object, those as well) of various types (real JS types like Boolean, Number, String etc or even made up ones like Integer) and constants (final properties in Java). It uses ES5 getters and setters to do that and falls back to regular, loosely typed properties in non-supporting browsers.

Continue reading “StronglyTyped: A library for strongly typed properties & constants in JavaScript”
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Original Releases

CSS3 patterns gallery and a new pattern

Reading Time: < 1 minute

I finally got around to doing what I wanted to do for quite a few months: Create a gallery with all the basic patterns I was able to create with CSS3 gradients. Here it is: 
CSS3 Pattern Gallery

Also, it includes a brand new pattern, which is the hardest one I have ever made so far: Japanese cubes. Thanks to David Storey for challenging me about it.

Supported browsers:

  • Firefox 4 (the patterns themselves work on 3.6 too but the gallery doesn’t due to a JS limitation)
  • Opera 11.10
  • IE10
  • Google Chrome
  • Webkit nightlies

However bear in mind that every implementation has its limitations so a few of them won’t work in all the aforementioned browsers (for example Opera doesn’t support radial gradients and Firefox doesn’t support explicitly sized ones).