Data, Maps, Usability, and Performance
A while ago, I played around with a cool Perspective Transformation using SVG and matrix3d CSS transform. It made sense to turn it into a mockup generator like Magic Mockups or PLaceIt. But, I ran into some issues when overlaying an SVG with matrix3d transforms on HTML5 canvas. I found an JSfiddle example of just using HTML5 CANVAS and transformed it into a full mockup generator.
Read more
CanvasEdit – the HTML5 Photo Editor and Collage Creator
Recently, a few image editors have been created with HTML5 and Canvas. Today, I decided to build by own Photo Editor by using UI Kit for layout, FabricJS for Canvas manipulation, Color Thief for retrieving a color palette from an image, Spectrum for a color picker and other libraries like Say Cheese for integrating pictures from a webcam and noUiSlider for a nice range slider. Since I have previously covered building Instagram photo filters with HTML5, these are also included in the image editor.
Read more
I have been a big fan of Google App Scripts. This service allows you to build powerful scripts that can be scheduled and integrated with Google (email, Google Docs, Excel) and external APIs. You write in JavaScript, within a browser based code editor right in Google Drive and the script can even be published as a web app. The quotas or limits are pretty good so you can quickly build something powerful for free.
Today, I will show how to create an Image Proxy with Google App Scripts which would allow you to grab images from other domains or go around the browser’s same-origin policy. Basically, the Google App Script is a server side proxy for your client side request. So, if you are exporting SVG as an image with images hosted on another domain or saving HTML5 Canvas with toDataURL() method, this could help you avoid tainted canvas and browser security errors. But, really, it’s just a simple example of a Google App Script published as a web app.
Read more
I was recently playing around with dat.gui and the cool FizzyText animation made me consider the concept of exporting HTML5 Canvas to video. I have previously covered canvas to video conversion but it was specific to making a photo slideshow. Today, I want to create a simple script in JavaScript that will grab any CANVAS element, on any website, retrieve the image frames, and compile them into a video file.
Read more
It’s 2015 and I wanted to follow up to an older post on HTML5 games with a new listing of some amazing, simple, and addictive games written in JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. I have been a fan of 10K Apart and the contest has a lot of great games that have been developed in very little code. This often includes all kinds of compression, minification, and even using JavaScript code inside of images to reduce the total size of the project. Its amazing how much you can create in just 10k of code. Here are my favorite 35 HTML5 games from this contest:
Read more
A while ago, I got into mobile app development using HTML5 and PhoneGap. It was a great solution to create apps for iOS and Android while coding in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Today, we have a lot more options in this space. There are many frameworks for building mobile applications and there are also multiple platforms that package that code into a deployable apps and even provide things like monetization, analytics, and testing. Today, I will analyze the mobile development space and go over the best mobile frameworks and cross-device platforms to build and deploy hybrid mobile applications.
Read more
Online Image Browser for Local Files
I was browsing old photo albums yesterday and it made me want to build an image viewer with HTML5. I want it to work with directories that have many files and this raises a question on browser performance. A gallery of pictures can easily consist of hundreds if not thousands of images. Loading all of them at once would probably crash the page or make it terribly slow and unresponsive. The DOM is not built to support so many elements with good speed. Plus, loading everything is wasteful as the screen size can only show a limited amount of images at one time.
Read more
A lot of blogs and sites have a weekly roundup, a collection of articles and links that you might have missed over the week. I have been a big fan of HTML5 Weekly which is an awesome email newsletters with interesting links on web development. Aggregating content in our times of information overload can be helpful and many websites are now built for the purpose of gathering and organizing bookmarks around a topic. Today, I want to aggregate the aggregators, the weekly roundups, and other useful and free resources on web development that you should be following for staying up to date.
Read more
Preset photo filters are nothing new but Instagram has certainly made them very popular in recent times. While Instagram and it’s many clones are manipulating pixels with native technologies, the web has HTML5 CANVAS which enables all kinds of image editing with JavaScript. There are many image processing libraries today that could be used to recreate Instagram photo effects in the browser. Today, I am going to explore some of these scripts, evaluate how they can be used to recreate the actual Instagram filters, and create a demo that combines HTML5 drag and drop, webcam photo capture, and lots of various preset photo effects.
Read more
I am on a mission to create an amazing HTML5 image editor and want to write a little about zoom, crop, and drag or pan. These are 3 features with a lot of overlap, depending on the design choice and implementation, so I would like to first consider the user experience. Panning or dragging the image, or a selection of the image, is going to be a clear need that is shared by both zoom and crop. If I click on an image and drag, am I moving the image or selecting an area to crop? One way to fix this dilemma is to only allow one of these operations at a time, but that requires extra user clicks. An alternative is to drop a special “crop selection area” on the image at all times and allow resize or drag of that element while dragging outside of that area moves the image. What is the best user experience?
Zoom could be implemented with plus or minus buttons that change the scale of an image or a canvas object. I have also seen dropdowns that let you set a zoom level in percentages but both of these implementation require extra unnecessary clicks. They also require shifting the mouse between clicking and dragging of the image, so the act of zooming in and out seems to have a better user experience with a mousewheel implementation. Cropping an image, in my opinion, should also work using a mouse selection and personally, I would vote for enable/disable action instead of keeping a persistent selection area on the image at all times. So, you can use zoom at all times but cropping an image requires selecting the crop tool. Finally, how do you zoom to a mouse cursor and does the zoom actually change image data via html5 CANVAS or should it just manipulate the CSS transform property and if so, how would the CSS change affect cropping?
Read more