MeetJS Summit

Last weekend, during MeetJS Summit in Poznań, I gave my first talk this year. It was just another great frontend event organized by Godfather of Polish web conferences, Damian Wielgosik, together with Polish GTUG.
Since ICT Conference in Kathmandu in November, where I spoke for the last time in 2011 (with simple .ppt slides), something really big happened in a web conferences world. Because of impress.js, stunning CSS 3D based presentation framework by Bartek Szopka, it became inappropriate to use prehistoric tools like PowerPoint for creating your own slides (It has 600 Github watchers more in two weeks than CoffeeScript in more than 2 years, SIC!). And since I had just couple of days before the event, I used mine & Jakub Siemiątkowski's port of Jordan Mechner's Prince of Persia as a base of my presentation. I'm quite satisfied with the result, you can check it HERE or just click on the iframe below. It is optimized for my presentation remote so you can change the slides only using PgDown & PgUp. Sometimes it needs to be refreshed, and sometimes it craches, but it's more like a prove of concept, not real life product.

NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR: DOM Exception 7

Since Mibbu framework supports CSS animations, it's good moment to create version exclusively for mobile devices, without using heavy and hard to render canvas, and with very limited JavaScript DOM interactions - CSS FTW! So I remove about 50% of code from original branch and test it on my Samsung Wave (bada has one of the best mobile browsers ever, so that was my starting point). And it simply doesn't work:

After short research I saw that Allegro ('Polish Ebay') had the same problem on Desktop Chrome months ago. After couple more hours of reading documentation I found a clue, that Webkit is freaking out if you try to put HTML content into style tag. So I switch

var cssStyle = document.createElement('style');
    cssStyle.innerHTML = 'body { color: #000; }';

to

var cssStyle = document.createElement('style');
    cssStyle.innerText = 'body { color: #000; }';

and everything works.

Few words about my CSS Nyan Cat

Last week Mozilla together with Finnish demoscene hackers organized Flame Party in capital of Finland, Helsinki. More than 100 participants worked whole day on outstanding web demos in two main categories - Single Effect and Main Demo.
Because of nearly release of stable Firefox 5, first Mozilla's browser with CSS3 Animation support, I decide to create CSS3 demo for the Single Effect Compo.
Since I really enjoy all that 4chan-like mems stuff, I chose Nyan Cat, as one of the most 'fresh' ones. In case you don't know it (check the progress bar!):


I didn't use any graphics to code my CSS Nyan Cat. It is completely drawn and animated in CSS. The 'pop-tart' body is created with two rounded cornered divs and big, pink dots separated with non-breaking spaces:

#toastBody {
    background-color:#fad695;
    width:100px;
    height: 70px;
    border: solid #000 5px;
    border-radius: 15px;
    padding: 2px;
    position:absolute;
    z-index:19;
}

#toastBody > div {
    width:100px;
    height:70px;
    border-radius: 30px;
    background-color: #fc9dff;
    display:block;
    color: #da3eb9;
    font-size: 40px;
    line-height: 10px;
}

All the animations was declared with @-moz/webkit-keyframe (I wrote a lot about this method before).

I made couple of unusual things during development. For example, look on the cat's mouth:


Yup, it is rotated 'E' letter:

<div id="mainHead" class="skin">
    <div class="mouth">E</div>
</div>

.mouth {
    position: absolute;
    -moz-transform: scale(2, 0.7) rotate(-90deg);
    -webkit-transform: scale(2, 0.7) rotate(-90deg);
    font-family: Arial;
    font-size: 25px;
    font-weight: bold;
    top:9px;
    left:37px;
    color: #000;
}

What about the rainbow behind the cat? I just cropped part of original image, put it into CSS Gradient Editor by ColorZilla (awesome tool BTW, but still without couple of necessary features I use daily; I think I will create something like this on my own), which generates me css gradient ready for pasting into the div background:

.rainbow {
 position:absolute;
 width:45px;
 height:90px; 
 background: -moz-linear-gradient (top, #d91a12 15%, #e13300 15%, #ff7f14 16%, #f2ab03 32%, #ebc000 32%, #fade00 33%, #efff03 48%, #56fc02 49%, #52ff01 66%, #4ade7e 67%, #3baaf2 67%, #3baaf2 84%, #7337f7 84%, #6b40f2 100%);
}

The most annoying thing was the star. Animated stars in the background are made up from 8 animated elements. I google "nyan cat sprite" and found all the star frames [like this]. The only way to animate it was pixel-perfect animation of each of 8 divs. It took me really lot of time:

@-moz-keyframes star1 {
 0% { top: 0; height: 5px;}
 33.19% { top: 0; height: 5px; }
 33.2% { height:10px; top:0; }
 49.79% { height:10px; top:0; }
 49.8% { height:10px; top:5px; }
 66.39% {height:10px; top:5px; }
 66.4% { height:5px; top:10px;}
 82.99% { height:5px; top:10px;}
 83% { height: 5px; top: 15px; }
 99.99% { height: 5px; top: 15px; }
 100% { top: 0; height: 5px; }
}

@-moz-keyframes star2-3-6-7 {
 0% { visibility: hidden; }
 16.59% { visibility: hidden; }
 16.6% { visibility: visible; }
 33.19% { visibility: visible; }
 33.2% { visibility: hidden; }
 100% { visibility: hidden; }
}

@-moz-keyframes star4 {
 0% { left: 0; width: 5px; visibility: visible;}
 33.19% { left: 0; width: 5px; }
 33.2% { width:10px; left:0; }
 49.79% { width:10px; left:0; }
 49.8% { width:10px; left:5px; }
 66.39% {width:10px; left:5px; }
 66.4% { width:5px; left:10px;}
 82.99% { width:5px; left:10px;}
 83% { width: 5px; left: 15px; visibility:hidden;}
 99.99% { width: 5px; left: 15px; visibility:hidden;}
 100% { left: 0; width: 5px; visibility:hidden;}
}

@-moz-keyframes star5 {
 0% { left: 38px; width: 5px; visibility: visible;}
 33.19% { left: 38px; width: 5px; }
 33.2% { width:10px; left:33px; }
 49.79% { width:10px; left:33px; }
 49.8% { width:10px; left:28px; }
 66.39% {width:10px; left:28px; }
 66.4% { width:5px; left:28px;}
 82.99% { width:5px; left:28px;}
 83% { width: 5px; left: 15px; visibility:hidden;}
 99.99% { width: 5px; left: 15px; visibility:hidden;}
 100% { left: 0; width: 5px; visibility:hidden;}
}

@-moz-keyframes star8 {
 0% { top: 32px; height: 5px; visibility:visible;}
 33.19% { top: 32px; height: 5px; }
 33.2% { height:10px; top:28px; }
 49.79% { height:10px; top:28px; }
 49.8% { height:10px; top:23px; }
 66.39% {height:10px; top:23px; }
 66.4% { height:5px; top:18px;}
 82.99% { height:5px; top:18px;}
 83% { height: 5px; top: 15px; visibility:hidden;}
 99.99% { height: 5px; top: 15px; visibility:hidden;}
 100% { top: 0; height: 5px; visibility:hidden;}
}

.star {
 position: absolute;
 width: 40px;
 height: 40px;
 z-index: 10;
}

.star div {
 width: 5px;
 height: 5px;
 background-color: #fff;
 position: absolute;
 -moz-animation: star1 0.4s linear 0s infinite;
 -webkit-animation: star1 0.4s linear 0s infinite;
}

Here is the final result of everything: CSS NYAN CAT, and Github repo. If you like it, don't forget to click "I like it" on Mozilla's page!

The Flame Party Helsinki

If you are planning to spend next weekend in Finland, you cannot omit Flame Party organized there by Mozilla, Alternative Party Crew and DOT. It will be awesome weekend full of coding, BBQ, free drinks, Finish saunas and outstanding workshops including one lead by my - "Dive into HTML5 Animation":

"During the workshop you will learn about different methods of animation in JavaScript. We will compare the performance and ease of it's implementation in various browsers on different devices. Are we condemned to use DOM? What about new CSS techniques? Or maybe canvas is future of the web games?"

So what are you waiting for? Register now and follow the party on Lanyrd and Facebook.