Link tags: interactive

Why the super rich are inevitable

The interactive widgets embedded in this article are excellent teaching tools!

An Interactive Guide to Flexbox in CSS

This is a superb explanation of flexbox—the interactive widgets sprinkled throughout are such a great aid to learning!

Color and Contrast.com

A lovely website (or web book?) dedicated entirely to colour contrast, complete with interactive illustrative widgets.

A comprehensive guide for exploring and learning about the theory, science, and perception of color and contrast.

Pizza Exchange Rate | FlowingData

This is a story about pizza and geometry.

The interactive widget here really demonstrates the difference between showing and telling.

How normal am I?

A fascinating interactive journey through biometrics using your face.

Patterns | APG | WAI | W3C

This is a terrific resource! A pattern library of interactive components: tabs, switches, dialogs, carousels …all the usual suspects.

Each component has an example implementation along with advice and a checklist for ensuring its accessible.

It’s so great to have these all gathered together in one place!

A visual introduction to machine learning

I like the split-screen animated format for explaining this topic.

Simple things are complicated: making a show password option - Technology in government

This is a great deep dive into a single component, a password toggle in this case. It shows how assumptions are challenged and different circumstances are considered in order to make it truly resilient.

Nature 150 Interactive

A beautiful interactive visualisation of every paper published in Nature.

CSS transitions and hover animations, an interactive guide

This is a really nice introduction to CSS transitions with interactive demos you can tinker with.

Cameras and Lenses – Bartosz Ciechanowski

This is a truly wonderful web page! It’s an explanation from first principles of how cameras and lenses work.

At its most basic, it uses words which you can read in any browser. It also uses images so if your browser supports images, you get that enhancement. And it uses interactive JavaScript widgets so that you get that layer of richness if your browser supports the technology.

Then you realise that every post ever published on this personal site is equally in-depth and uses the same content-first progressive enhancement approach.

Quantum to Cosmos

Well, this is rather wonderful! It’s like an interactive version of the Eames’s Powers Of Ten.

CSS Vocabulary

This is a nifty visual interactive explainer for the language of CSS—could be very handy for Codebar students.

Grid Cheatsheet

A useful resource for CSS grid. It’s basically the spec annoted with interactive examples.

The Map of Mathematics | Quanta Magazine

An absolutely gorgeous piece of hypermedia!

Data visualisations and interactive widgets enliven this maze of mathematics. Dig deep—you may just uncover the secret passages that join these concepts together.

Complexity Explained

Emergence and complex systems, explained with interactive diagrams.

The Atlas of Moons

Take an interactive tour of our solar system’s many moons.

Complexity Explorables

A cornucopia of interactive visualisations. You control the horizontal. You control the vertical. Networks, flocking, emergence, diffusion …it’s all here.

Going Critical — Melting Asphalt

This is an utterly fascinating interactive description of network effects, complete with Nicky Case style games. Play around with the parameters and suddenly you can see things “going viral”:

We can see similar things taking place in the landscape for ideas and inventions. Often the world isn’t ready for an idea, in which case it may be invented again and again without catching on. At the other extreme, the world may be fully primed for an invention (lots of latent demand), and so as soon as it’s born, it’s adopted by everyone. In-between are ideas that are invented in multiple places and spread locally, but not enough so that any individual version of the idea takes over the whole network all at once. In this latter category we find e.g. agriculture and writing, which were independently invented ~10 and ~3 times respectively.

Play around somewhere and you start to see why cities are where ideas have sex:

What I learned from the simulation above is that there are ideas and cultural practices that can take root and spread in a city that simply can’t spread out in the countryside. (Mathematically can’t.) These are the very same ideas and the very same kinds of people. It’s not that rural folks are e.g. “small-minded”; when exposed to one of these ideas, they’re exactly as likely to adopt it as someone in the city. Rather, it’s that the idea itself can’t go viral in the countryside because there aren’t as many connections along which it can spread.

This really is a wonderful web page! (and it’s licensed under a Creative Commons Zero licence)

We tend to think that if something’s a good idea, it will eventually reach everyone, and if something’s a bad idea, it will fizzle out. And while that’s certainly true at the extremes, in between are a bunch of ideas and practices that can only go viral in certain networks. I find this fascinating.

Unraveling The JPEG

A deep, deep, deep dive into the JPEG format. Best of all, it’s got interactive explanations you can tinker with, a la Nicky Case or Bret Victor.