Animation is just moving something over time. The rate at which the something moves is defined by a function called an easing equation or interpolation function. It is these equations which make something move slowly at the start and speed up, or slow down near the end. These equations give animation a more life like feel. The most common set of easing equations come from Robert Penner's book and webpage.
In my hunt for what's next I've been reading a lot of books lately. A lot of books. As part of my search I decided to hunt down some of the classics in the computer science field that I'd missed over the years. First articles, then research papers, and some Alan Kay work. That led me to a book I'd always meant to read but never found the time: Mindstorms, by Seymour Papert.
I recently wrote an amusing rant on programming languages called "An open letter to language designers: Kill your sacred cows." It was, um, not well received. If you read some of the comments on Reddit and Hacker News you see that most people think I'm an idiot, a novice, or know nothing about programming languages. *sigh*. Maybe I am.
An open letter to language designers: please, for the good of humanity, kill your sacred cows. Yes, i know those calves look so cute with big brown eyes and soft leathery skin, but you know what? Veal is delicious!
I know IFRAME, I know. We've had a good run. You've tried hard and back in the day you were somethin' special. The way you could bring in content from any domain was nothing short of amazing, and you certainly took out the trash when you bumped off FRAMESET. But that was then and this is now. A lot has changed in the past few years. CSS and AJAX are really hitting their stride and you just can't hack it. I'm willing to overlook a few margin bugs, but this?! Well this is simply the last straw.
I'm tired of hearing people talk about how we need a new pipeline to bring oil from Canada to Texas for processing. They say we need to do this for the US to have "energy independence". This is bullshit. Anyone who claims this has no idea how global commerce works. Oil is a fungible commodity so whether Canada sells their oil to the US, China, Brazil, or Switzerland makes no difference. Let me explain.
For some reason the concept of Genetic Programming got stuck in my head the other evening. At midnight, after spending about four hours reading up on the topic around the web, I came away disappointed. The concept of evolving code the way genes do is fascinating but the results in the field seem to be very narrow and limiting. Thus began this rant.
The twit-o-sphere came alive last week with the news that Adobe is canceling their Flash for Mobile products. I even briefly joined in. Many see this as evidence that the open web has won (it has), or a justified comeuppance for Adobe's historical slights to Apple (it might be), or perhaps vindication of Steve Jobs' rant anti-Flash (it was), and maybe even that Microsoft was really to blame (it's a stretch). Lost in all this, I wonder, is the effect this actually has on Adobe beyond their short term problems.
I've heard a lot of noise recently about these new fangled smartphones and tablets not replacing 'real computers', especially since the announcement of many new tablet products, including the HP TouchPad. That they are just expensive FaceBook machines. I've also heard people say that there's no room in the market for more devices: iOS and Android will take up the market and leave nothing for anyone else. It'll be just like the PC wars again!
There's been a ton of talk lately about several mobile operating systems and their problems, such as language restrictions, fragmentation, and anti-competitive practices. It's never a good idea to talk bad about your competition, so I'll take this opportunity to simply say a few things about the webOS (the OS that powers Palm's Pre and Pixi phones) that you might not know.
It's been a month since I posted so I'd say it's time for a rant. I've been traveling a lot lately so the object of my wrath this week is alarm clocks. Most specifically the alarm clocks in hotel rooms, but home use clocks don't get off easy either.
Listening to some podcasts about mobile devices I heard over and over statements like "iPhone changed the world with multi-touch" and "Android could compete with Apple if it had multi-touch." This simply isn't true. Okay, while perhaps not a lie, the success and value of of multitouch is extremely overrated. In fact, the iPhone barely uses multi-touch!
An essay in which I expound upon the benefits of the lowly wire and resist the temptation to wireless-ize the world of personal gadetry.
Yes, that's right microwaves are evil. More specifically, the microwave in my office. Or, to get right down to it, the interface on this microwave. You see, it's awful. Just plain awful. And yet, I've seen worse.