Lately I’ve been pretty busy enjoying some real time data visualization examples and demo. To have some data to work with I decided to use Twitter API, in particular I rely on jQuery LiveTwitter plugin by elektronaut; next I built a stack chart like visualization in which every new tweet of a chosen topic is dropped over its language column.
I’ve been recently playing with some of the newest CSS3 features, such as pseudoclasses selectors, transition and transform properties and attr(). In order to have something concrete on which test these features I created a coverflow effect that works only out of CSS instructions without the use of javascript.
I recently created a small website called ‘La piccola biblioteca della natura’ to showcase some of my girlfriend watercolors. I decided to go for a responsive design and set up some nice media-query statements. If you try to resize the browser window you surely notice how the structure of the fruits change in response to this operation.
I spent a few hours trying to figure out how to deal with the brand new deviceorientation API in order to obtain a nice Augmented Reality effect. First I searched on how to convert Euler Angles to Cartesian Coordinates and I found a nice article about that, then I downloaded the very nice Sylvester library which lets you compute matrix operations in Javascript.
Following a suggestion by a VJ friend of mine I worked on creating a real time HTML5 video mosaic that can be used to aggregate videos from your hard disk in a custom-size grid.
What I did the last two months? I was preparing the html.it HTML5 guide which will be released starting from the next week. Right by now a preview chapter is already available and, if you are interested, you might also want to follow the presentation event, taking place the 28th of february in Rome.
Talking about events, the last saturday there was UGIALT.net and I had the pleasure to share a talk with Simone Chiaretta: in just 20 minutes each of us live coded a simple application using his preferred language: Ruby on Rails for me and ASP.NET MVC for Simone. It was a really enlightening experience.
The idea behind this project was in my head since a while. Then thanks to Gregory Brown and his Ruby Mendicant University, I had the opportunity and the incentive to start developing it. Ruby Spell Doctor bind some of the most useful Hunspell functions making them available to Ruby developers. For who don’t know, Hunspell is a widely used open source syntax checker library that is implemented in a lot of softwares, such as OpenOffice, Google Chrome and Mac OSX.
I’ve just committed the 0.3 version of WiPad, this new release introduce a new mechanism which helps handle permalinks. Having to deal with a single-file Sencha-based application made me pretty hard to figure out how to re-introduce permalink and give the opportunity to reach a single post using its url.
I’m recently enjoying KillZone 2 so much; during one of my gaming sessions I noticed that the loading screen is designed as a bas-relief that you can partially rotate using the joypad oscilloscope, this technique, although easy to implement in a PS3 game, produce a very interesting effect and so I decided to try to transpose it to a web gallery.
