Demos & Downloads
JavaScript Canvas Image Conversion
At last week's Mozilla WebDev Offsite, we all spent half of the last day hacking on our future Mozilla Marketplace app. One mobile app that recently got a lot of attention was Instagram, which sold to Facebook for the bat shit crazy price of one billion dollars. Since I wouldn't mind having a bill in my back account, I decided to create an Instagram-style app (which I'll share with you in the future). This post details how you can convert an image to canvas and convert a canvas back to an image.
Detect DOM Node Insertions with JavaScript and CSS Animations
I work with an awesome cast of developers at Mozilla, and one of them in Daniel Buchner. Daniel's shared with me an awesome strategy for detecting when nodes have been injected into a parent node without using the deprecated DOM Events API. This hack uses JavaScript, as you would expect, but another technology you wouldn't expect: CSS animations. Let me prove to you that it works!
CSS Animations Between Media Queries
CSS animations are right up there with sliced bread. CSS animations are efficient because they can be hardware accelerated, they require no JavaScript overhead, and they are composed of very CSS little code. Quite often we add CSS transforms to elements via CSS during :hover, and we also create keyframe-based animations by adding a className, but did you know you can animate elements using media queries as the trigger? Let's have a look!
Multiple Backgrounds with CSS
Anyone that's been in the web development industry for 5+ years knows that there are certain features that we should have had several years ago. One of those features is the HTML5 placeholder; we used JavaScript shims for a decade before placeholder came along. Another one of those simple features is multiple background images with CSS. Instead we'd need to nest another element for every additional background image. Now we a syntax for supporting multiple background images on one element, and here's what it looks like.
Google Extension Effect with CSS or jQuery or MooTools JavaScript
Both of the two great browser vendors, Google and Mozilla, have Extensions pages that utilize simple but classy animation effects to enhance the page. One of the extensions used by Google is a basic margin-top animation to switch between two panes: a graphic pane and a detail pane. I've taken a few moments to duplicate that effect with just CSS, and another enhanced version with jQuery and MooTools.
HTML5 Context Menus
Update: These context menus display even when JavaScript is disabled; so best practice will be to create these menu structures via JavaScript. Mass innerHTML injection can be used or basic DOM node injection.
Use Elements as Background Images with -moz-element
We all know that each browser vendor takes the liberty of implementing their own CSS and JavaScript features, and I'm thankful for that. Mozilla and WebKit have come out with some interesting proprietary CSS properties, and since we all know that cementing standards takes ages more than it should, we should all be thankful. One interesting CSS property you probably haven't heard of is -moz-element, a Mozilla-implemented CSS property that allows developers to use HTML elements as an element background!
Upload Photos to Flickr with PHP
I have a bit of an obsession with uploading photos to different services thanks to Instagram. Instagram's iPhone app allows me to take photos and quickly filter them; once photo tinkering is complete, I can upload the photo to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. This process made me wonder what it would take to upload photos to Flickr using PHP. This post details how you can authenticate and upload photos to Flickr using PHP with phpFlickr.