Modifying visual media via code has always been a fascination of mine. Probably because I'm not a designer and I tend to stick to what I'm good at. One visual effect I love is seeing video reversed -- it provides a sometimes hilarious perspective on a given event.
Take this reversed water effect for example:
To reverse an animated GIF or video, you can use the ImageMagick library:
If you're interested in media engineering, check out my previous ImageMagick tutorials. These awesome media libraries are as close to an artist I will ever get!
CSS and JavaScript: the lines seemingly get blurred by each browser release. They have always done a very different job but in the end they are both front-end technologies so they need do need to work closely. We have our .js files and our .css, but...
One event that's always been lacking within the document is a signal for when the user is looking at a given tab, or another tab. When does the user switch off our site to look at something else? When do they come back?
CSS is becoming more and more powerful these days, almost to the point where the order of HTML elements output to the page no longer matters from a display standpoint -- CSS lets you do so much that almost any layout, large or small, is possible. Semantics...
In case you weren't aware, CSS animations are awesome. They're smooth, less taxing than JavaScript, and are the future of node animation within browsers. Dojo's mobile solution, dojox.mobile, uses CSS animations instead of JavaScript to lighten the application's JavaScript footprint. One of my favorite effects...