Circle Grow
About a month ago I heard tell of a JavaScript Demoscene contest called JS1k. For those who haven’t heard of the Demoscene, it’s basically a sort of programming art-form that allows a programmer (or team of programmers) to show off their hacking skills. Originally due to the storage and processing limitations in the past, demo programmers would have to pull out all sorts of clever tricks or hacks to reduce the size of their program as well as make it run as efficient as possible. Nowadays, with our obscenely fast CPU’s and practically infinite storage capacity, those limitations are self-imposed – Demoscene contests will set a limit on the size of the code to make it challenging. In the case of JS1k, 1000 bytes of JavaScript is the maximum.
What makes this particular contest so exciting is that most modern browsers now have a cool new toy for JavaScript programmers to play with: the canvas object. The canvas object basically defines an area on a webpage where a developer can programmaticly draw images using JavaScript. For the first time, web developers can use an open-standard, non-proprietary technology to create dynamic and engaging rich media.
Inspired by JS1k (but by no means talented enough to compete), I decided to create my own JavaScript and canvas-powered demo. It’s extremely basic compared to the JS1k demos, but it did help me learn a lot more about canvas, and it was fun to program! So, without further ado – I present to you… Circle Grow!
A Better Bus Tracker
During one of our brainstorming sessions for our upcoming You Are Here opening, I remembered once stumbling onto a GPS data feed for the Seattle metro transit system. The metro website has a bus tracker that runs in a java applet from 1999 (that’s like 100 in internet years!), so I grabbed a modest maps flex component and whipped up a less-crappy proof of concept. If all goes well I’ll be featuring this in an interactive window here at the studio during the opening.
