Eclipse
A delightful bit of creative JavaScript from Cameron.
Tags: fun
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Geometry Wars
Graham is recreating the (beautiful and addictive) Geometry Wars in canvas.
Best played with a twin-stick controller (or WASD + Arrow keys as a fallback)
If you’re on Windows, XBONE or XB360 controllers are the easiest to use. On Mac, a PS4 Dualshock 4 or wired 360 controller (with a downloadable driver) works well.
Really Bad Design Exercises || Matthew Ström: designer & developer
This is a fun—and useful—way of improving the interview process. The Rubik’s Cube examples brought a smile to my face.
Constellations
A fun game with pins and string in canvas.
Hack for the craic: David McKeown on making hackathons fun for everyone
A great write-up of Science Hack Day Dublin—the 6th iteration is coming up next month.
What struck me about this hackathon is that the only end goal is for people to have a bit of fun and make stuff. There’s no flashy big-ticket prize and no commercial agenda. They’re not looking for start-up pitches or scalable business plans, and there’s no Dragons’ Den interrogation. Just good old-fashioned, high-tech making and mingling.
Cub n Pup - puzzle game demo
A deceptively simple but thoroughly addictive little in-browser puzzle game.
(It would be neat if this were turned into an offline-first progressive web app; it’s already keeping everything locally.)
Battleship Solitaire: Mindless Podcast Companion
Once I got the hang of this game, I found it incredibly addictive. I would describe it as mindless fun, but I think it’s more like mindful fun: it has the same zen contemplative peacefulness as Sudoku. I can certainly see how it makes for a good activity while listening to podcasts.
Note: click once for water; double-click for ships. And don’t blame me if you lose hours of time to this game.
Mini Tetris
The spirit of 5K.org lives on. View source: this JavaScript version of Tetris is less than 1K. Details on Github.
Lynn Fisher
This homepage is media-querytastic. It’s so refreshing to see this kind of fun experimentation on a personal site—have fun resizing your browser window!
Accessible custom styled form elements - Rian Rietveld
An excellent level-headed evaluation of styling and scripting form controls, weighing up the benefits and trade-offs. The more tightly you control the appearance, the less you get to benefit from the functionality (and accessibility) that the browser gives you for free …meaning you’ve now to got to work harder to replace it.
HTML elements like check buttons, radio buttons or select options can be hard to style with CSS in a custom design. There are many workarounds for this, but are they accessible?
Learn Web Design Fundamentals and Shortcuts with Hello Web Design - Hello Web Books
Tracy’s new book is excellent (and I had the great honour of writing a foreword for it).
Programmers, developers, marketers, and non-designers — want to become a better designer? This short book has everything you need.
Coding with Clarity · An A List Apart Article
Good advice on writing code that is understandable to your fellow humans (and your future self).
plainJS - The Vanilla JavaScript Repository
Some more useful snippets of JavaScript. The functions and helpers are particularly handy if you’re weaning yourself off jQuery.
Essential Vanilla JavaScript Functions
The title is overkill, but these functions ported from PHP to JavaScript could be useful (especially for dealing with arrays).
mbeaudru/modern-js-cheatsheet: Cheatsheet for the JavaScript knowledge you will frequently encounter in modern projects.
A handy guide to navigating all the new-fangled JavaScript.
Even Racists Got the Blues – The Geeky Gaeilgeoir
The perils of self-translation.
I’m often baffled by the number of people who seem to think that you can translate from one language to another simply by pulling the words of one language from a dictionary and plugging them into the syntax of the other. It just doesn’t work that way, friends.
Read to the end for a wonderfully delicious twist in the tale.
Amadán.
New A List Apart wants you! · An A List Apart Article
We’re getting rid of advertisers and digging back to our roots: community-based, community-built, and determinedly non-commercial.
I approve!
A List Apart has given me so, so much over the years that becoming a supporter is quite literally the least I can do.
Three Readings and a Festival | Unbound
More on that event with Brian Aldiss I was reminiscing about: that was the first time that Kate unveiled part of her Purple People book:
Jeremy insisted this would be an excellent opportunity for me to read an excerpt from Purple People, and so invited me onto the stage with those illustrious, wordy wizards to share an early indigo excerpt. I was quite literally shaking that night (even more than a talking tree, ho ho), but all was jolly. I read my piece without falling off the stage, and afterwards, folk made some ace and encouraging comments.
Now the book is being crowdfunded for publication and you can take part. It’s currently 59% funded …come on, people, let’s make this happen!