Tank Control experiments #
I'm still a bit sad about Flash going away. Yes, I know lots of people hated it. But it was an amazing tool for quick prototypes. There are some projects that I keep revisiting, and over time I'm converting them to HTML5.
Last year I converted my Flash procedural tree generator (succeeded) and attempted to convert my Flash spaceship flyer (failed). This time I wanted to run my Tank Control prototype from 2012:
Labels: flash
Making-of: draggable objects #
I noticed last year that some of my projects behave inconsistently on touch devices. I didn't do anything about it. But then I was working on a tutorial about how I make my interactive tutorials, I had to show how to handle touch events, and I was embarassed by my code. I decided to take a week to learn about mouse, touch, and pointer events.
That week turned into two. And three. And eight.
I learned a lot. Not only about the event handling spec, but also differences in browser behavior and operating system behavior.
I was able to greatly simplify my code by using newer APIs and by removing unnecessary code.
Labels: making-of
Making-of: circle drawing page #
People sometimes ask me how I write my interactive tutorials. I started out using d3.js, and five years ago I wrote an interactive tutorial about how I made interactive pages with d3.js. I recreated a diagram from my line drawing tutorial, which was implemented in d3.js. I now use Vue.js v2, so I wrote a new tutorial about how I make interactive pages with Vue. I recreated several diagrams from my circle drawing tutorial.
One letter variable names #
I admit I use one letter variable names in my code. But which names? Here's what I use in for loops:
# rg 'for \(let . ?=' # | perl -pe 's/.*let //g' | perl -pe 's/=.*//g' # | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head 509 i 132 x 122 y 118 r 57 t 53 q 47 j 43 s 31 e 14 k
Labels: code