Programming

Visualization of our solar system in CSS3

May 31, 2010 · 
Post a comment ·
Programming · 
By Vu Nguyen

Click on image to view the page. You may need a more up-to-date browser to view this.

Alex Girón of nclud cre­ated this visu­al­iza­tion of our solar sys­tem by using only HTML and CSS3. In his words:

These past few months I’ve been explor­ing CSS3, try­ing to learn some of it’s new fea­tures and get­ting a feel for which browsers sup­port it. A few weeks back I put out my first exper­i­ment explor­ing @font-face and trans­forms. This time, I set out to exper­i­ment with border-radius, and what I thought was going to be a bor­ing lit­tle project turned out to be quite interesting.

via Veerle Pieters

Google celebrates Pacman’s 30th birthday with playable logo

May 21, 2010 · 
Post a comment ·
Programming · 
By Vu Nguyen

Click image to play the game

Adobe Flash to eliminate bandwidth costs with P2P

May 19, 2010 · 
Post a comment ·
Programming · 
By Vu Nguyen

From TorrentFreak:

Adobe is get­ting seri­ous about their imple­men­ta­tion of peer-to-peer tech­nol­ogy to assist Flash-based video stream­ing and appli­ca­tions. The upcom­ing release of Adobe’s Flash Player 10.1 will enable pub­lish­ers to dra­mat­i­cally reduce band­width costs by out­sourc­ing media dis­tri­b­u­tion to users.

The sys­tem Adobe is offer­ing to sup­port P2P Flash is called Stratus. It is offered to devel­op­ers free of charge and can sup­port both live and on-demand video stream­ing. Besides video, Stratus can also be used for Flash based multi-player games and other forms of real time communication.

For broad­cast­ers and video ser­vices, Stratus has the capac­ity to elim­i­nate a sig­nif­i­cant amount of band­width costs. Instead of serv­ing the media from a cen­tral server, users will pro­vide the nec­es­sary band­width. Adobe’s Stratus sys­tem serves as an inter­me­di­ary in this process, man­ag­ing the com­mu­ni­ca­tions between Flash play­ers much like a BitTorrent tracker does for BitTorrent transfers.

Via Jim Ray

Cooking an MVC framework for data visualization: Models

May 19, 2010 · 
Post a comment ·
Programming, Tutorials · 
By Vu Nguyen

Last time we learned how to cre­ate a dynamic bar chart with data that we had to type in man­u­ally. That data entry part was tedious and unnec­es­sary. Today we will solve that prob­lem by cre­at­ing a model that can load and parse data from an exter­nal file. Although in this exam­ple we only use the model to parse comma delim­ited file (CSV), we will build it in a way that allow us to parse tab delim­ited file as well. CSV is a very pop­u­lar and com­pact for­mat for stor­ing data. It is also very easy to parse.

If you didn’t fol­low the pre­vi­ous tuto­r­ial, you can down­load the project from here.

Continue read­ing »

Eddy is the new Twitter aggregation platform from Stamen

May 14, 2010 · 
Post a comment ·
Programming, Social networks · 
By Vu Nguyen

Eddy from Stamen design

From the prod­uct page:

Eddy is a media aggre­ga­tion plat­form built for the pub­lic dis­play of up-to-the-minute activ­ity on real­time ser­vices like Twitter. It offers three pri­mary fea­tures: rapid col­lec­tion and cura­tion of what peo­ple are say­ing about an event, mod­er­a­tion of accept­able mate­r­ial, and speedy, reli­able repub­lish­ing of these con­ver­sa­tional streams. Setup of the appli­ca­tion is fast and easy, and made specif­i­cally for use by inter­ac­tive media design­ers. Eddy makes data avail­able in for­mats specif­i­cally designed for pub­lish­ing on the web, allow­ing devel­op­ers to quickly iter­ate design con­cepts with real world data and to launch with­out fuss.

Visualization of HTML5 & CSS3 readiness on different browsers

May 14, 2010 · 
Post a comment ·
Programming · 
By Vu Nguyen

html5 readiness chart

Click on image to view the site

This visu­al­iza­tion is com­pact and pretty. I like the idea behind it, but it is not nec­es­sar­ily the best way to present this kind of infor­ma­tion. You can’t quickly scan the infor­ma­tion since you have to mouse over each bar to see what fea­ture it rep­re­sents. The color coded bars are stack­ing toward the cen­ter instead of remain­ing in their own cir­cle, which makes it harder to fol­low. I think a reg­u­lar matrix table would be nicer.

via infos­thet­ics

Why Flash is still relevant in the HTML5 world

May 10, 2010 · 
Post a comment ·
Programming · 
By Vu Nguyen

Gonzalo Rubio gives a few very good rea­sons about why we shouldn’t ditch Flash quite yet. Being a Flash devel­oper, I admit to hav­ing my own biases, but I am also impressed by what HTML5 can do. I have been dig­ging around the web for the last few days try­ing to fig­ure out if at its cur­rent stage, HTML5 is capa­ble enough to do heavy inter­ac­tive data visu­al­iza­tion work. The short answer is no. There are, of course, a lot of Javascript chart­ing engines out there, but for performance-heavy things like maps, Flash is still bet­ter. As to the Flash vs HTML5 argu­ment, I think a few of us only see black and white. Gonzalo seems to think that each tool has its own place in the future of web devel­op­ment. I agree. Below is the sum­mary of the points he talks about in his arti­cle. Head over to his blog to read the com­plete post.

  1. The HTML5 spec won’t be ready for con­sump­tion for at least another 2 years.
  2. Flash is a mature plat­form, HTML5 is just in its ini­tial imple­men­ta­tion phase.
  3. Flash is made by a sin­gle ven­dor, HTML5 sees dupli­cate efforts by at least 5 dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies on at least 4 dif­fer­ent platforms.
  4. Flash is built as a mul­ti­me­dia and ani­ma­tion plat­form, HTML5 is a pro­gres­sive enhance­ment over a con­tent cen­tric and descrip­tive language
  5. Flash is good at what Flash does, HTML5 is good at what HTML does
  6. The Flash vs. HTML5 argu­ment will implode after every Flash fea­ture is ported into an HTML5/Canvas equivalent
Page 1 of 512345
View more projects »