Say you're writing a browser game. Everything's going great until your user hits "backspace" and BAM! The browser goes to the previous page. How annoying is that? Forget about annoying, it means your game is unplayable because it doesn't trap important keys.

Or say you have an autosuggestion box. It pops up below the textfield the user types in. A handy suggestion pops up, and the user presses the "down" cursor key expecting to navigate to the entry. In addition to doing so, the browser also decides to scroll the page down.

For the redesign of Nihongo resources I needed client-side CSS macros. Not just to get initial styling, but also to keep design elements linked on those macros so that they could be changed whenever the page interaction required it.

This means something like SASS is out, because it doesn't let you keep shared design elements actually shared once the CSS it generate is loaded in a browser.

I've been moving some of my work onto github so that it's easier to share and work on with others.

One of these is a ridiculous easy to use commenting system for webpages using PHP. And you don't even need to have a php page to use it, plain html works too thanks to the magic of JavaScript.

A demonstrator page is up on EasyPageComments webpage, with the project on github here.

I've been moving some of my work onto github so that it's easier to share and work on with others.

One of these is a simple PHP user administration system that lets you add user authentication to your pages with pretty much zero hassle.

A demonstrator page is up here, but if you want to start using it right away, head over to the project page and start adding user authentication to those pages.

I've been moving some of my work onto github so that it's easier to share and work on with others. The first of these is an implementation of much, much better Canvas2D font metrics in the form of a JavaScript library.

fontmetrics.js is waiting for you to pick it up and play with.

I've been working on a mass of Processing.js tickets latety, since we're trying to get as much work for 1.3 done before vacation schedules conflict again, and most of them have been about improving the way we handle fonts. The most recent one I looked at had to do with not starting a sketch until all user-indicated preload fonts were done preloading.

It has taken quite a long time to finally get everything together in a way that allowed me to write a proper kanji compositing application, but it's finally done!

If you head over to http://kanjicomposition.com you can see the final result of developing lots of different technologies over the past 2 years, and the combined result works really well.

So, next up: compositing all the kanji for sequencing based on incremental vocabulary! (closer and closer to the ultimate goal of a book on vocabulary-and-kanji to effectively learn Japanese)

So I've been working on Processing.js for the most part the past few weeks, but I've also revisited my "bookstyle" script. It's been all jQuery-UIed, and looks for all the world like some fancy app for reading things on an ipad or the like.

I'm still in the process of sleeking it up, so it's still missing the "how many book pages visible at a time?" and "what are the page dimensions?" settings, but http://pomax.nihongoresources.com/downloads/bookstyle is starting to look pretty nice I would say.

Not a lot of posts in the last month, but that's mostly because I've been busy moving from the Netherlands to Canada. I am now a permanent resident, hurray!

I've also picked up some more work for processing.js and one of the outcomes of this is a very lengthy explanation of Bezier curves, and all the things people commonly try to do with them, in the form of this Bezier Curves Primer.

I actually had fun making it, and hopefully it benefits someone out there when they're stuck on something Bezier-related.