Tag: open source

I've rejoined Mastodon! Driven by the potential Twitter costs and wanting more control, I'm now self-hosting my instance for about the same price as a Twitter Blue subscription. I'll keep using Twitter for learning, but I'm excited about Mastodon's open, interoperable nature and its excellent PWA. Come find me on Mastodon!

HTML5Rocks, a beloved resource for web developers, is shutting down. This post reflects on the site's history, its impact, and the reasons behind its decline. Key factors include the shift away from "HTML5" as a buzzword, changing team priorities, lack of a focused content plan, and challenges with community management. Despite the shutdown, the author expresses gratitude for the experience and the connections made, highlighting the lessons learned about content creation, developer engagement, and the open-source community.

I'm starting a project to document web technologies that didn't become mainstream. For every success story, countless others fade away. I want to explore these untold stories, starting with my own experience with Web Intents. I aim to understand why some projects thrive while others don't, and share these learnings with the community. If you have a similar story, please reach out!

I've just added the pinch-zoom-element web component to my photography blog. It's a tiny (~3kb), dependency-free custom element that allows for easy pinch-zooming on any HTML element. Check out the implementation on my blog (touch-enabled device/trackpad needed for testing) and see how simple it is to integrate! This element was crucial for the Squoosh app and perfectly exemplifies the power of web components for clean, reusable UI. I hope to see wider adoption of elements like these, especially for common use-cases like image zooming on e-commerce sites.

Topicdeck is the module that aggregates a selection of RSS feeds into a tweetdeck style view

I've created a Progressive Web App using FFMPEG.js that applies device frames to Android screen recordings. I've also streamlined the ffmpeg.js build process. This opens up exciting possibilities for building powerful web apps for audio and video manipulation. Many existing web-based video tools are outdated and ad-heavy. I'm interested in creating smaller, focused PWAs, each performing a specific task efficiently. I'm planning to build several apps based on this, such as video trimming, format conversion, watermarking, resizing, and splicing. The codebase from my Device Frames project provides a good starting point. I invite others to collaborate on this effort.

We've done a lot of work using Github in the recent past and here is some of the work that we have optimised.

Badgemator is a web app that simplifies the process of creating badges for your Chrome Web Store listing. It generates a single script tag that you can embed on your website. This tag displays a badge to Chrome users who haven't installed your app, encouraging them to visit your store listing. Badgemator automatically fetches your logo and other details, and you can customize the badge's appearance with CSS. The project is open source, and contributions are welcome!

I've created Appmator, a tool to help developers get their web apps into the Chrome Web Store quickly. Just enter your app's URL, and Appmator generates a zip file ready for upload. Appmator is available in the Chrome Web Store and is built using some cool technologies like webfonts, Modernizr, jszip, and more. Source code is available on GitHub.

I'm looking for a few web services that don't seem to exist yet. First, a way to save my Twitter favorites to Instapaper (or similar services). Second, a webhook that sends content to Instapaper, as I dislike relying on third-party app integrations. Finally, a service that sends full RSS feed content directly to my email inbox in near real-time using pubsubhubbub. Existing services only send partial archives. If I can't find these, I might build them as open-source projects.

I've released a new, open-source Microformat parser for .NET, available on Codeplex! This stream-based parser uses a flexible XML configuration to define how microformats like hCard and rel-tag are extracted from HTML/XML, allowing for easy adaptation to spec changes. The provided C# code example demonstrates the simplicity of using the framework to read and process microformat data. Feedback and contributions are welcome!

I've just released the first alpha version of my XNA Parallax Engine! You can download it from CodePlex. It's still early stages and needs a lot of work, including examples, documentation, artwork, and more. If you're interested in contributing, please get in touch!

I've started an open-source parallax scrolling component project on CodePlex to help game developers create repeating scrolling backgrounds for their XNA games. It's still in early stages, but currently includes a 2D camera, layer oscillators, scrolling, and clipping functionality. Check out the XNAParalax Component project on CodePlex and provide feedback!