TOKI WOKI. 

A few days back a very simple idea struck me right before going to bed. The more I thought about it, the less I could sleep. The day after this short night I fired up Photoshop and started writing a little bit of JavaScript. All this led to Fluid Corners.

The idea is pretty simple but could come in handy: when your OS’s windows are moved off-screen, their essentials UI elements (think: buttons) stay at reach, sticking to the screen’s limit. Go ahead and play with the demo, you’ll get it!

Thoughts welcome, of course.

ps 1: A hot thread about it on Hacker News.
ps 2: @raphaelbastide‘s take on the idea: greasy!

A few months back I discovered the concept of CSS pre-processors. At that time I knew about LESS and Sass and had to decide which one was the best option for me. I thought the concept was really cool but lacked a real project to start getting my hands dirty with it.

Then I started working on a freelance project and Crunch came out; I was sold. This app made me choose LESS over Sass, which may not be the best of reasons, but it seems like I’m not the only one to pick this language. As you may know the second iteration of Twitter Bootstrap also relies on LESS, even encouraging you to use Crunch.

Saturday @ilovetypography tweeted this:

Dreaming of something that takes my CSS & LESSifies it — automagically.

To which I replied that:

This seems possible! Will try and see if I can write such a tool, interesting idea…

Sunday morning I started writing JavaScript, and a few hours later I had a good-looking script. Took some time to create a simple yet efficient UI, and that was it. Least.

The tool takes basic CSS as an input and tries its best to output the LESS or Sass source it would correspond to (including nesting, classes and pseudo-classes). I also added an option to output something for the not-so-popular-but-interesting Stylus language.

As you’ll notice in the footer of the tool’s page it’s a “five-hour project”. In order to have a decent UI as fast as possible I used Twitter Bootstrap, which has its downsides but fits perfectly this kind of projects. A “five-hour project” also means it may still be a bit buggy. Don’t hesitate to ping me on Twitter or to drop comments here.

ps: Least both references LESS and “To Say the Very Least”, a track by Buck 65 on Vertex. Ah!

Remember Kwot, my Flash quote viewer? I published it back in December 2008.

It is a mix of Flash (most part of it), JS (for the add form and its communication with the main UI) and PHP (CRUD logic). Read the blog post for more details on it.

I recently started looking at JavaScript frameworks and tools, probably like most Flash developers. Not because Flash is dead, but because the more tools you master, the better you are. And because yes, everyone is asking for JS and CSS3 these days. After some investigation I decided to give Backbone.js a try. And re-writing Kwot from scratch with it seemed like a great exercising opportunity.

So here its: Kwot JS!

It should work really well on Safari, OK on Chrome, not-that-perfect on Firefox and poorly on Internet Explorer. You were looking for a reason to continue using Flash for building “experience sites”? There you have it: compatibility. Kwot JS relies on CSS3 transforms to allow this perspective view on quotes, and on property transitions to animate the quotes’ colors. Of course this doesn’t work in all browsers!

Now, about Backbone.js. The framework’s requirements and logic are good, but coming from an AS3 world mostly everything looks odd, for better or worse. Note this is my first project with it and I might have missed some good practices or handy tips.

The good thing is its persistence layer. In Kwot, quotes are stored in a database, I simply wrote a simple RESTful API with Slim (try this PHP framework: win) and connected it to my Model classes. That’s it, it just works. Underscore.js’ templating system is handsome, too. Never used that before, cool stuff.

The bad things are, as far as I’m concerned:

• No strong typing. Of course this isn’t Backbone’s problem, but rather JS’ one. On this particular point your IDE can help, but you won’t get runtime errors.
• The “this” keyword. You always end up with plenty of lines all starting with a “this.something”. It frustrates me.
• Scope issues: when listening to events you pretty much always have to use Underscore.js’ bind method in order not to lose your infamous “this” scope. I don’t like that.
• The MVC pattern. If you ask me: it sucks. I’m no integrist but I wouldn’t have called what Backbone provides MVC. I was always wondering “who should do that?” and never really came up with a satisfying answer.

Overall the learning curve is pretty steep, I think it took me less time to write this version than the Flash one, but I’m a 3 year more mature developer. Also, when I wrote the Flash version I didn’t really know where I was going and I kept experiencing with concepts and ideas to see what would look best.

On a side note the Flash version uses Neutra, whereas this one uses Questrial (hosted and served by Google Webfonts).

Tell me what you think, both about the app and the framework!

“W-Architectures is an architecture and urban-planning agency. The firm brings together a highly-qualified team of architects with international experience.” This is how they introduce themselves and I couldn’t have said it better myself.

I recently published their brand new website, designed by Christelle Bonnet and developed by me. It’s been a pretty long process (they are very busy guys) but it’s here and I like it!

I used mostly WordPress and MooTools to develop it. Everything was designed to be light and subtle, I think I can safely say that it is.

While redesigning this blog I wanted to keep the “one color per post” concept I had in the previous version by changing (tweening) the logo’s color accordingly to the article being viewed (or scrolled to). I rapidly realized I couldn’t achieve this with just HTML+CS+JS and I didn’t want to use Flash (mainly because of iOS devices but also to avoid loading a SWF file on every page).

I remembered hearing — a few months earlier — about Raphaël (a JS lib to render vector graphics). At that time I found the concept really interesting but couldn’t see where to use it.

OK, so I know what I want to do, I know the tools I’ll use, but how do we do that? Raphaël is cool, but its syntax looks a bit cryptic at first. It says it handles SVG, and — guess what — Illustrator can export to SVG. We’re getting closer…

SVG is XML, but Raphaël doesn’t eat XML, it eats a specific syntax meant to be compatible with SVG and VML. Hum… This is when I fire Flash Builder and start writing code. The goal: accept an SVG XML file as input and spit some “Raphaël-compatible script” out.

Boom (plus a little demo of an output).

I then simply had to export my Ai logo to SVG, open it in SVG2RaphaelJS, copy paste the output, and wire all that to the scroll/color tweening logic. Pretty easy.

Everything worked and looked nice on all browsers and OS’s but I realized the sole idea of having a logo changing colors didn’t work that well. For purely visual reasons. So I dropped it from my theme and rolled back to the black PNG version you can see right now.

The good thing is, the tool works pretty well (at least with Illustrator SVGs) and is OpenSource. Either use it or modify it, and tell me what you think. I did this in a hasty fashion and I probably won’t use it a lot, so don’t expect updates or bug fixes… But if you feel like improving it, please do so!

Facts

So the other day I had an hour to waste, I decided to learn how to use MooTools classes and, as the best way to learn something is to play with it, I played with it.

About 30 minutes after, I had something  running. Dirty and buggy but still, looking cool. It took me an extra 30 minutes to clean that up, make sure it was working on most browsers, add the Google Analytics tracker, push it online and add it to the projects page…

You probably guessed it already, I’m talking about the Scroll Clock. Well this hour might be the least wasted one of my life. Think I’m radical? Read on!

Results

After tweeting about it twice (once to someone who’s interested in netart, and once to the MooTools team) things went big. I don’t know exactly how this happened but it (the Scroll Clock page) got love from Gizmodo, swissmiss, QBN, Ajaxian, Neatorama and many more. Wow.

A few days after the tsunami, here’s what my Analytics page looks like. My daily average of 600 page views has seriously been put to shame, with a climax on the 19th of November: 313,000+.

Side effects

This is probably the funniest part, not only did I worry for the server the site is hosted on, but a few things happened…

I got 3 job offers ; many friend requests on Facebook, Flickr, Vimeo and so on ; received a donation ; was contacted by a Google guy to add the project to chromeexperiments.com, which I did ; and of course had to bother my friends and colleagues about my new web-fame…

Conclusion

The short one: don’t spit on Twitter, it might make you a star. Just joking, keep spitting on it.

The long one: the simplest and shortest project of mine is the one which received the most visitors and love, ironic right? What does that mean? Should I stop working on full-fledged AIR apps?

Prove me wrong!

Introducing my latest project: TW Paper, a simple iPhone/iPod touch wallpaper gallery+collection.

A little bit of JavaScript and some Photoshop/CSS trickery to present a growing collection of images designed for your favorite piece of technology!

The page also works on iPhone/iPod touch but looks a little different for better usability. Just tap+hold on the image to save it.

Expect the gallery to evolve, with new images and quotes!

I played with MooTools a bit and did that. Useless, opensource, nerdy.

I also set up a gallery, so if you’ve got nice scrollbars that aren’t here yet, send’ em right away!

Introducing Boks, my latest and most ambitious AIR app to this day!

Do you design web pages? Do you write HTML and CSS? Ever heard about the Grid System and Blueprint CSS? Thought it was a pain to implement? Think again, fool!

Boks is some kind of WYSIWYG to help you setup a grid and baseline rhythm, build and fill your layout and export all this to HTML and CSS in no time.

Got your own CSS style already? No problemo, Boks can use them and eventually merge and compress them within a single “screen.css”. Your styles use images? Simply point to your asset directory and it will be included too! Afraid of breaking the baseline rhythm with you randomly sized images? Just select the “Add JS to fix baselines” option and you’re good to go!

Enough. Just go grab it (or just have a look at the lovely screenshots) and send feedback!

Apr 01, 2009: Update! I’ve done some wacky video screencasts that can help you understand everything about Boks, go and have a look! Yes, the sound is not perfect.