The
Palm
Civet

i have been a heavy user of less, the dynamic css processor, for sometime now. it has been an invaluable time-saving and creatively-inspiring tool in my front-end workflow. with less.js, it is easier than ever to get rolling. since less has now been ported to javascript, it can be rendered in the browser - no need to install the gem and watch/render the css file. just include the script and point at your .less file and you are all set =>

<link rel="stylesheet/less" href="/css/main.less" type="text/css">
<script src="/js/less.js" type="text/javascript">

and so continues the track of making it faster and more convenient to use the fonts you want to use. with this javascript from typekit, you can use any of the fonts in google’s free and extensive font api very easily =>

<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/webfont/1/webfont.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
  WebFont.load({
    google: {
      families: ['Droid Sans', 'Droid Serif']
    }
  });
</script>

and, of course, you can use it load fonts from your typekit account.

a flash player written in javascript. hopefully this will silence all the whiners that want flash on their iphones.

cloud zoom is a snazzy image zoom jquery plugin. a bunch of options are available and the animations are very smooth. works all the way down to ie6 and minified its only 6kb.

{via}

appendix a of mark pilgrim’s dive into html5. no hanky-panky here, just quick javascript bits to test if the browser you’re working in can handle a certain html5 element or attribute.

i’m pleased to announce the launch of hifiving.com, a web application for making lists of things. those things can be videos, audio, links, images, or just plain words. it has been my pet project for quite some time, so i’m glad to get it up and running. please try it out and help spread the word!

in terms of development, the back-end is made with ruby on rails and a handful of other rubygems. i also did the design and front-end development. sprockets and less were heroes here. this is also my first experience using heroku for hosting, which has been great so far.

yesterday i updated swoosh, my jquery plugin for lightweight css-based color animations.

the three big new additions are:
* now you can bind the color animations to events other than just hovering!
* better support for animating rgba colors! 
* animation of css3’s text-shadow property, including x/y coordinates and size of the shadow!

check out the github page for more info.

very slick jquery plugin for reordering and filtering a list of items with a nice shuffle animation. 

“coffeescript is a little language that compiles into javascript. think of it as javascript’s less ostentatious kid brother — the same genes, roughly the same height, but a different sense of style.”

in my flirtation with learning a server-side javascript framework like node.js, the syntactical heaviness of javascript has been a big deterrent. i’m usually not a fan of writing something that gets run through a compiler (like haml), but in the case of javascript, i might just be willing to try it out. a few quick examples =>

# Assignment:
number: 42
opposite_day: true
# Conditions:
number: -42 if opposite_day
# Functions:
square: (x) -> x * x

turn into =>

var number, opposite_day, square;
// Assignment:
number = 42;
opposite_day = true;
// Conditions:
if (opposite_day) {
  number = -42;
}
// Functions:
square = function square(x) {
  return x * x;
};

like a responsible kid brother, coffeescript does not interfere with javascript frameworks and will pass through jslint duty-free.