thingsinjars

  • 16 Sep 2023

    My Books

    Not Geek, Ideas

  • 3 May 2012

    Web Page Screensavers

    I don't find myself using screensavers that much these days. Sure, they made sense when you needed to avoid burning a ghost of the windows start bar into your CRT monitor but with TFTs, LEDs, projectors, OLEDs and whatever else, it's rare you'll find hardware that actually needs protecting like that any more. On top of that, in my case, I'm either at my desk coding or at the coffee machine refilling. There aren't that many opportunities for me to appreciate a warp-speed starfield or some infinite pipes.

    What I'm saying is: I miss screensavers.

    Since I started writing for CreativeJS, I've seen a lot more examples of clever, cool, pretty and downright creative demos and toys written in JS than I ever had before. You can probably figure out where I'm heading with this: these would make cool screensavers.

    A quick bit of googling later and I found a couple of applications that let you set a web-page fullscreen as your screensaver. Of course, you can't just set any old demo as your screensaver, many of them rely on user interaction which kinda defeats the purpose.

    Downloads

    OS X

    WebSaver

    Unfortunately, this uses plain-old standard WebKit so no WebGL demos. Maybe someone can fork Chromium to make it do this.

    Windows

    web-page-screensaver

    This one seems to be based on IE so it probably won't work with the canvas-based demos below. If you can point me to a WebKit-based one, I'll include that instead.

    Old-school screensavers

    Flying Windows

    http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16145652/flying/flying.html

    Starfield by Chiptune

    http://www.chiptune.com/starfield/starfield.html

    Non-canvas

    Insta-Art by me

    http://thelab.thingsinjars.com/insta-art.html

    Newsola by Nick Nicholaou

    http://www.newsola.com/#/uk

    Canvas

    Falling blocks by Lionel Tardy

    http://experiments.lionel.me/blocs

    MMOSteroids by Seb Lee-Delisle

    http://seb.ly/demos/MMOsteroids.html

    Origami by Hakim El Hattab

    http://hakim.se/experiments/html5/origami/

    The Single Lane Superhighway by Aaron Koblin and Mr.doob

    http://www.thesinglelanesuperhighway.com/

    Ablaze by Patrick Gunderson

    http://theorigin.net/ablazejs/

    Visual Random by Dimitrii Pokrovskii

    http://voxelrain.appspot.com/

    Circle Worm by Ilari

    http://style.purkki.ilric.org/projects/js_wave/

    Boids by Jason Sundram

    http://viz.runningwithdata.com/boids/

    3D Globe by Peter Nederlof

    http://peterned.home.xs4all.nl/demooo/

    Moonlander by Seb Lee-Delisle

    http://moonlander.seb.ly/viewer/

    WebGL Needed

    Just in case someone in the comments finds a WebGL-capable screensaver, here are the demos I liked that require WebGL.

    Clouds by Mr.doob

    http://mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/webgl/clouds/

    WaterStretch by Edouard Coulon

    http://waterstretch.ecoulon.com/

    Further Development

    The ideal screensaver would allow you to enter several different URLs to allow you to easily save them. There should also be a checkbox to mark demos as 'works offline'. That way, when the screensaver starts, it checks for connectivity then displays a screensaver that doesn't require a connection.

    Add your suggestions below.

    Ideas, Geek

  • 26 Mar 2012

    Nokia Web Dev Blog

    Exciting news! The Nokia Web Dev Blog is finally live!

    You might remember it was one of my 2012 ToDos and I can now move the To-Do to Done.

    So far, I've put two posts up, one on using background-size: cover and one on quick prototyping using python SimpleHTTPServer.

    I'm not convinced a URL with '.../Blogs/blog/...' is necessarily the most memorable so maybe the next task would be to get something catchier. Any suggestions?

  • 5 Mar 2012

    Superhero Libraries

    I'm currently writing an introduction course to JS libraries and have decided jQuery is like Batman – Objects are wrapped in a utility belt that does everything but are essentially unchanged underneath – while Prototype is more like Wolverine – Objects are injected with stuff to make them better, stronger, more deadly.

    Anyone got any ideas about MooTools?

    Javascript, Javascript

  • 4 Mar 2012

    Writing, writing and writing

    In case anybody's wondering where I've been for the last few weeks (and I know you all have), I've recently joined the CreativeJS team writing about the coolest, shiniest things on the world-wide interwebs. My first post went up last week.

    I'm also about to launch the Nokia Web Dev blog (link to come soon) where I get to write tutorials about the coolest, shiniest things we do in Nokia Maps

    Don't worry, there won't be fewer articles going up here than before, I just had to spend a couple of weeks figuring out which articles were best suited to where. To make up for a quiet few weeks, here's a picture of some Kohlrabi, a really tasty vegetable barely known outside Germany.

    • Writing, writing and writing

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Simon Madine (thingsinjars)

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Hi, I’m Simon Madine and I make music, write books and code.

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