I’ve shied away from JS frameworks on the mobile platform primarily due to performance. I had not been able to find one that came close to native performance on Android. This changed last weekend when I tried out the Sencha Touch 2.0 dev preview. Performance is vastly improved over Touch 1.0. Animations and transitions are smooth, even on my Android 2.2 device and I was able to get up and running very fast.
Grab the Sencha Touch 2.0 Dev Preview here: http://www.sencha.com/blog/sencha-touch-2-developer-preview/
While I was able to get a basic app …

With all the recent Goruck-ness it’s time to throw out a tech post. I’ve been prepping for a NodeJS presentation recently and wanted a unique demo. I had also come across the experimental build of Opera which supports accessing the native webcam of a mobile device. So I threw these two technologies together and came up with a Javascript powered way to stream a video camera from a mobile device to a bunch of desktop (or mobile) clients.
HTML5 had originally laid out support for a new element (the “device” …

Last time [LINK] I discussed how virtual Worms could “eat” a picture, seeking out the lighter or darker areas as food and leaving a trail in their wake. I’ve dumped the source here: http://francisshanahan.com/demos/worms/test.html so you can interact, create your own images and figure out how it’s done. To be honest I haven’t had much time to clean this up as I’ve been focusing on other things and doing a bit of travel for work so be gentle.
Just enter a URL of an image and click “create drawing” to …

If you have not heard of Node.js (or “Node” as Ryan Dahl calls it) [LINK] it is more fun than a barrel full of monkeys and faster than stink. Node.js is built around the Google V8 javascript engine and aims to solve the issues of concurrency and blocking IO which are prevalent in todays web servers. It also improves over traditional OS threading by using an event model to handle requests. This leads to the ability to handle many more concurrent requests but also handle them faster since less memory …

Mycelium (plural mycelia) is the vegetative part of a fungus, consisting of a mass of branching, thread-like hyphae. Hyphae are any of the threadlike filaments forming the mycelium of a fungus. And YES I had to look both of those up.
Typically they travel and branch along a source of nutrients, following the source. I came across this awesome work of Ryan Alexander [LINK] whilst messing around with Processing one evening. Ryan used Processing which is similar to Java. Processing is a great sketch-language which makes whipping up graphical wonders …

A good architect stays current with technology to better enable their team’s productivity. One often overlooked area is that of CSS, there have been many improvements. In this post I record the steps taken to successfully setup SASS (Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets) with Sencha Touch on Windows.
If you’re building a website with a non-trivial CSS file (aren’t we all),  SASS  makes managing the CSS a lot simpler.
“Sass is a meta-language on top of CSS that’s used to describe the style of a document cleanly and structurally, with more power than …

The otherwise excellent Kindle 3 doesn’t natively let you subscribe to RSS feeds. To me this is a major failing but we can write a simple service to aggregate feeds into an HTML file. If you email this file to @free.amazon.com Amazon will convert (for free) into an AZW file and deliver to your Kindle. Presto, free feed aggregation. This is essentially what http://kindlefeeder.com does and I recommend this service if you don’t feel like writing your own.
Since switching to WordPress I hadn’t looked at RSS in a …

Irreducible Complexity – the world is too complex to have evolved!  Let’s see…
HTML5 introduces the ability to perform multi-threading in the browser using Javascript through the notion of “Web Workers”. So far I have only seen examples of using workers to calculate very high prime numbers. I took a fresh look at these from the standpoint of genetic algorithms and applied it to the Traveling Salesman Problem (a classic). The results are a multi-threaded implementation of the TSP in Javascript capable of converging on a solution for up to 200 …

Here I show how you can re-use your Canvas images as CSS backgrounds using another interesting feature coming in HTML5. You’ll need a browser supporting CSS3 and Canvas, Chrome, Opera, Safari or Firefox will do.

What do you get when you combine Digital Identity, MD5 Hashes, the Canvas element, JQuery and Quilting? Answer: My first JQuery plugin – “Identicon5″ for want of a better name.
Identicon5 is a JQuery plugin that takes an MD5 hash and converts it to a unique image. It’s called Identicon5 since it works through the HTML5 Canvas element.
Working Demo is here: http://francisshanahan.com/identicon5/test.html
Project page is here: http://francisshanahan.com/index.php/identicon5
JQuery Plugin page is here: http://plugins.jquery.com/project/identicon5
Identicons provide a nice visual representation of a user’s identity, that’s unique to that user, without divulging any …