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Uncooked Composition 4
Listening again to these tracks makes me think I must have spent a lot of my time in the 80s watching heartwarming, uplifting, made-for-tv movies.
This should be thought of as a companion piece to the waltzy one from before as there was 23 seconds between finishing that one and starting to record this one.
As described here, this is one of a series of random, unprocessed piano doodles posted to remind me to play more often.
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8 bit alpha
Another week, another launch. I really need to find a cure for whatever illness I have that results in compulsion to built stuff. Maybe there's a Builders Anonymous group where you can go for support in coming to terms with the fact that you don't always have to solve the problem yourself. Learn to accept that sometimes things are just the way they are.
Pshaw!
A few days ago, I read this article by Kornel Lesiński. It describes the curious and interesting ways of PNGs, particularly highlighting the fact that the 8-bit PNG with an embedded alpha channel needs a lot more love than it gets. It gives you the small file sizes you get from 8-bit PNGs (resulting from the maximum 255 colour palette) but also the benefits of a full partial transparency alpha channel unlike GIFs or standard 8-bit PNGs in which pixels are on or off, nothing in between. The reason this file type is ignored is because the most common web graphic creation application in the world (Adobe Photoshop) doesn't support them. At least not yet. You need Adobe Fireworks or some other application to convert your 24-bit alpha channel images.
After a quick search turned up nothing but instructions on how to enable command-line convertion on a Linux server, I figured this would be a handy web service. Drag, Drop, Download, Done. This also gave me an excuse to play with some File API stuff. In the end, I decided to use a jQuery plugin because there was a greater chance that it had been tested and bugfixed than my own script.
With a name like that, I had to go for a retro theme. I even created a nice 8-bit spinner.
If you have a use for the service, let me know, if you want to learn how it works, browse the source. If you want to popularise the phrase “Drag, Drop, Download, Done” for this kind of simple web application, do that too.
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Shelvist
I've been a bit quiet for the last couple of weeks. Now I can reveal why!
All my spare time has been taken up building Shelvist (well, that and looking after a 4-month old). It's a way of keeping track of which books you have read, which ones you are currently reading and which ones you want to read. That's it.
Just over a year ago, I started listening to a lot of audiobooks and, 12 months after I subscribed to Audible, I decided I wanted to see just how many books I'd read*. All the existing book tracking sites (e.g. Shelfari, Goodreads) focus on recommending, rating, reviewing which just seemed like hard work.
Building this was also a chance to learn some new tech. I've been wanting to play with CakePHP for a while so this seemed like the best opportunity. It's been a while since I used any kind of framework and I've never used a PHP MVC framework (although I did build one last year as an intellectual exercise).
I got over 90% of the site built in spare time over about 5 days and most of that was spent just reading the CakePHP docs. The reason for the lengthy delay between initial build and launch is down to that last 10%. As often happens with frameworks, nearly everything you'd ever need to do is bundled into some nice, easy to access functionality. That is, after all, kinda the point of a framework. It's the stuff that makes your product or website unique that proves trickier. I won't go into any details just now although I might come back to it in a later post.
More later, first of all, go shelve some books: Shelvist.
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Scoped Style
I couldn't let it lie. The nifty JavaScript from the previous post was all well and good but I had to have a go at jQuery plugin-ifying it. It has been Enpluginated.
Your options now are simple:
- Have a look at a demo
- Check out the source on GitHub
- Download it and start scoping some styles.
If you still have no idea what I'm talking about, you can read about the attribute. There are still a couple of bugs when the scoped blocks are deeply nested within other scoped areas so I'm hoping someone with a keen sense of how to straighten out Webkit oddness can help. When browsers don't implement functionality, it's a bit tricky to guess what they'd mean.
Aside from that, it's cross-browser (IE7+) compatible and ready to use. I'm interested to know if anyone finds it useful or finds any odd combinations of styles that don't scope nicely.
