My Name In Print
I hope you’ll forgive a little self-promotion, as I’d just like to play a few quick notes on my own trumpet. The latest issue of Net magazine is now on sale, and features a tutorial article, Create A Dynamic Content Panel, written by me.
In the article I explain how to build a dynamic Contact area, as we did on our recent redesign of Preloaded.com, using the Web Storage API and the BBC’s Glow Javascript library.
I’m not sure what the rights situation is with this article, but I hope that at some point in the future I’ll be able to post it here on my blog. But in the meantime, you can buy a copy of Net magazine in the UK at all good newsagents, as the saying goes (I don’t know if it will be in overseas editions also).
On the subject of print, I’m also currently writing a book about CSS3 which should be published later this year. I’ll have more information on that nearer the time.
Building a better HTML5 video player with Glow
Last year I wrote a post (Building HTML5 video controls with JavaScript) introducing the HTML5 Media Elements API and demonstrating a simple set of controls for playing video.
In this (somewhat belated) follow-up I’m going to explore building a more interactive set of controls using a JavaScript UI library; I’m going to use Glow, but it could easily be adapted to jQuery UI or similar.
Building Preloaded.com: The Front-end
This subject of this post is the redesign of my employer’s website, Preloaded.com, and is cross-posted from the Preloaded blog with permission.
At the beginning of the redesign project we agreed some design tenets: the new site should be a best-practice showcase and an opportunity to learn and use some of the latest web technologies; and it should employ existing services where practical.
Mozilla release Bespin Embedded preview
Mozilla’s Bespin is a code editor built using web technologies. It’s still in its infancy, but shows promise. A new release, Bespin Embedded, lets you use the basic editor functionality on your own websites, using just a couple of lines of Javascript. If you don’t want to download it yourself, I’ve got a working demo. The editor doesn’t really do much at the moment, so this is really only a proof of concept.
Using the GeoLocation API
With the rapid growth of the mobile web, location-aware services are very much in-demand; the GeoLocation API was proposed to cater to this need.
Implementation is spotty at the moment; Firefox 3.5 supports it, as does Safari for iPhone (although not on the desktop, AFAICS). But it’s so simple to use, I’ve no doubt it will be adopted rapidly.
Building HTML5 video controls with JavaScript
The HTML5 video element is now included in Firefox, Safari & Chrome, and on its way in Opera. By using JavaScript to access the media elements API it’s easy to build your own custom controls for it; in this article I’m going to show how I built a (very) basic control interface.
Aside
Usually when I attend @media (that is, on two previous occasions) I write a follow-up blog post on what I saw there. Well I attended this year, and I’ve written the post, but it’s on the blog of my employer, Preloaded: HTML5, Mobile, and UCD: what we saw at @media.
[#] 0 Comments