9-bits (Posts tagged javascript)

Jack Doyle, author of the GreenSock Animation Platform (GSAP), has written a fantastic guest post on CSS-Tricks comparing and contrasting CSS and JavaScript-based animations. I agree wholeheartedly—as a former Flash developer, the current animation API available in CSS is insufficient when dealing with complex timelines, advanced easing, and state control.

Back when Flash was all the rage, one would find experimental sites like this all the time. It seems less common in the HTML5 world, which really makes this a gem.

If you write JavaScript on a daily basis, and haven’t checked out CoffeeScript yet, this is a great summary of some of the benefits you can expect to find. Sure, most of it is syntactical sugar, but anything that can make your code smaller and more readable is a good thing, in my opinion.

A few months ago, as an experiment to learn some new frameworks, I created a quick blackjack game in Spine and CoffeeScript. The game is not pretty, nor is it bug free: Notably, there are some issues with splitting and doubling down. Nevertheless, I’m open sourcing the app today, just in case it’s of any use to anyone getting started with these technologies.

Bugs and horrific UI aside, Black Coffee does know basic strategy, so it can actually tell you which play is “correct,” depending on the current hand. I hope to find some time to finish it out over the next few months, but hopefully there’s some value in open sourcing it in the meantime. Also: If you see a clear problem or way to improve, you know the drill: Fork and pull request!

Check out Black Coffee on GitHub!

Note: Most importantly, BC does not have semicolons at the end of lines. Amazing!

MIT-licensed, imageless, loading spinner which uses CSS3 where possible and falls back to VML for our buddy, IE6. Great little JavaScript project.

For anyone interested, I’ll be speaking at the Mobile JS Summit (an online conference) at the end of this month, August 30. Speaking from experience, these summits are fantastic ways to dive into a specific topic. Get in with a 20% discount by using the checkout code: 20KANEDA.