A web presentation and Resig’s cool Processing script

I finally got around to uploading a presentation I did on optimising techniques for websites from the last Brisbane web design meetup. So here it is on slideshare.

And speaking of web design, here’s something I thought was too good not to share: a Javascript port for the Processing visualisation language, by John Resig: Processing-js. Basically, it allows for dynamic visual rendering in the browser using the canvas element via javascript. The canvas element is a low level C software renderer, similar in function to Flash, and since Actionscript and Javascript are functionally pretty similar, it has the potential to basically replace Flash/actionscript. Check out the demos to see it in action.

Note: It only works in browsers that support the Canvas element, ie. not IE…

Another very cool implementation of the canvas element is a playable, javascript version of super mario embedded in a png file - look ma, no Flash! This guy has some pretty impressive code experimentations.

Files on the Sporepedia use a similar technique to embed all the 3D data for the model in the alpha channel of a png image, so the image essentially becomes the datafile as well.

Anyway, I tend to get pretty excited by the prospect of some of these projects. It’s so good to see the innovative things people come up with and to have my own tinker with them, even though I’m not that good of a coder (though I try). Anyone else interested in this stuff?

Also: In relation to that web presentation, here is a great tool for optimising the client-side of websites—SmartOptimizer. It caches, gzips, minifies and collates js, css etc and I’m using it on this site to get a L337 YSlow score of 89. Go check it out.