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Yuckfu for the iPhone

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yuckfu screenie
Mindless retro action :)

About a week ago a friend of mine released his very first indie game – for the iPhone of all platforms. Sounds like a bit of a pain and probably it actually was. The game is basically a bigger and better version of one of his old games. The old one was written in C++ for Win32 (the source is also available over there). Later on he also ported it over to the GBA.

The new version looks and sounds pretty cool. If you're interested check out the video over at the official site. By the way, all models were done with everyone's favorite box modeler Wings3D. And the final audio cutting was done in Audacity. Both tools are mind-boggling awesome for these tasks. Check them out if you haven't yet.

Well, about a week has passed and he only sold a dozen copies so far. In the meantime it was pirated a few thousand times. Ouch. So, if you got $2.99 to burn (and an iPhone to boot) you can make one poor student very happy.


CSS Sprites are Stupid – Let's Use Archives Instead! (Firefox Demo)

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simple sprite sheet
A simple sprite sheet

Update: Good news, everyone! A proper proposal for this kind of thing is already on its way. :)

CSS sprites are a nuisance

While CSS sprites offer nice performance benefits (less connections/overhead), they are troublesome in every respect. Putting lots of tiny images with different dimensions into one bigger image is fiddly and very hard – np-hard in fact. But that's the smallest issue. It doesn't need to be perfect after all. Deflate will happily squish all that extraneous white-space to virtually nothing.

One of the real problems is CSS. It just isn't flexible enough to let you do everything you might want to do with your sprite sheet. For example repeating parts of the image isn't possible. And if you want to display a sub region of an image in the upper right of some element, it only works if that sub region is in the lower left of the sprite sheet. So, the best thing you can do is to use elements in the size of the sub region and use background-position to slide the image around, but that usually means extra markup for something that should be very simple.

But it doesn't stop there. The real nightmare is maintenance. A year or two and several iterations later it becomes very hard to figure out which parts of the sheet are used. Where can you add one? Which one can be removed? How many places do you have to fix if you move this column a bit up? It all becomes a mess of fuzzy uncertainty.

CSS sprites are a huge time sink. They waste my time, they waste your time, and they also waste the time of millions of other front-end developers. It's about time to do something about it.

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Static Initializers in AS3

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static illustration
bzzzzzzt

In a nutshell: A static initializer is executed whenever you do anything with that class. It's executed before whatever you wanted to do (e.g. calling the constructor or accessing a field). It's also only executed once.

Many moons ago I released some code which utilized a static initializer. That code worked fine back then, but recent versions of the Flex SDK compiler don't really like it. Well, to tell the truth I also didn't like it, because the construct I used was sorta ugly and, well, pretty wrong.

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Lenient Validation

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lenient validation illustration
Well, it does fit

I really like standards and absolute strictness when it comes to things which are interpreted by zillions of different programs. After all, a scenario like this just asks for trouble. Validators do help there and as I wrote a few months ago they can really help you avoid many issues, potential issues, and also future issues.

However, I do like automation a bit more and herein lies the problem: 100% standards compliance isn't always an attainable goal. And if you simply can't get a perfect score, you cannot use those validators for your automated tests. A test which always fails isn't really helpful.

There are many things, which never will be valid and you can't do anything about it. Proprietary or legacy content management systems and components thereof are a good example. Another source of pain are those bloody rich text editors. Some of them produce amazingly awkward markup with zillions of font tags all over the place for good measure.

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3 Handy Komodo Macros

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Komodo Logo
I ♥ Komodo :3

Komodo Edit– the open source spin-off of Komodo IDE– is hands down my personal open source application of the year. It had a massive impact on my productivity and it made web development so much less of a pain.

I used so many different text editors in my life, but none of them comes anywhere near the sheer awesomeness of Komodo. There is proper Unicode support, smart indent (which actually behaves smart), remote file editing (FTP, FTPS, SFTP, and SCP), Code Intelligence (~IntelliSense™), and lots of polish on top. It supports many languages and runs on the three most popular platforms (i.e. Windows, Mac OS, and Linux). It's also extremely stable, which is very important for this kind of tools.

The ActiveState guys are also very helpful and surprisingly responsive. For example there were some issues with active mode FTP, but after a bit of nagging and poking around in the code (mostly nagging though) the problem was solved. Just like that. I also asked for some shortcut which basically does the same as a double click; selecting the word below the caret. A few minutes later the JavaScript macro was there (thanks Todd!) and it even made it's way upstream; the next version of Komodo will include it as a regular command.

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Off-Screen Rendering (Render to Texture) with HTML5's Canvas Element

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eye catcher
Caching makes it feasible

Generally speaking: off-screen rendering allows you to cache expensive drawing operations in some sort of image, texture, or buffer. With the new Canvas API the vector drawing operations for example can be a bit taxing. Same goes for gradients or patterns (Firefox 3.x). Or well, anything that requires many drawing steps or per-pixel calculations.

If you have used any other 2D drawing API in the past, you'll probably picture this a bit more complicated than it actually needs to be. As it turns out, it's surprisingly easy with Canvas since the drawImage function can also take another Canvas as parameter. So, there is no need to construct an actual image – you already got one, kinda.

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OOCSS Module Blue-Printing – Using External Constrains to Assure Markup and CSS Quality

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illustration
Keep them in check

Update: This whole thing has been superseded with a more uniform and rigid concept. You can check an early draft outline over at the OOCSS Google Group.

There is no coupling whatsoever between your CSS and your markup. But don't get me wrong – this is a very good thing. However, this also means you can't use your markup to verify your CSS and of course it also means that you can't use your CSS to check your markup.

If you create a relatively complex website with more than 2000 lines of CSS this gets pretty annoying. With practice this just gets more annoying, since the impact on your productivity becomes more apparent with each project. During a site's lifetime you'll often notice how theoretically solid structures start to crumble. One mistake in the markup, another one in the CSS, and sooner or later everything will be in a somewhat inconsistent state.

If you come from a programming background this feels just plain wrong. It's almost like your selectors happen to coincidentally select some things here and there. There is no clear way to define a structure and to check if your markup and CSS adhere to your rules. There is currently only one way to check it: the dreaded, time-consuming, and error-prone manual one.

Also, if things are inconsistent – and chances are this happens right off the bat – it's very difficult to reason about it. You might look at two pieces of markup and their corresponding CSS and both might wrong in different places. Sure, you can just refer to your documentation… eh, yea, who am I kidding? No one knows how stuff like that is supposed to be documented. And if they do, it probably still won't happen.

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Emulating Lossy RGBA Images with HTML5's Canvas Element

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eye catcher
Lossy RGB is smaller

Lossy RGBA images are something that always has been missing on the web (If you ignore Mozilla's brief support of JNG, that is). Nowadays, browsers typically support JPG, PNG, GIF, ICO, and BMP. There is obviously some feature overlap, but there isn't any good choice for true color images which also happen to use alpha.

Generally your choices boil down to JPG and PNG. If you ignore animated GIFs (which are pretty useless for Canvas usage), PNG can easily replace GIF, ICO, and of course BMP.

Today, I'll demonstrate how you can create RGBA images which use JPG for the RGB channels. Since this can decrease the file size up to 75%, it's a very easy and intriguing way to speed up the loading time of your game or application. (If you are currently using heavy PNG32 images, that is.)

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The Web Needs a Lossy 32bit Image Format – Bring JNG Back

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eye catcher
It's photo-based with alpha, JNG would be a good choice [cc-by]

I always wondered why browsers don't support any lossy 32bit image format. With opaque images you can always pick a suitable image format, which will be reasonably small while looking reasonably good. There are always some trade-offs, but that's alright.

If it's photo-based (or just a plain photo), JPG is a great choice. If there are less than 257 colors a PNG8 will work great. If it's also very tiny (like a 1x13 gradient) a GIF might be even a tad smaller than a PNG8. If there are only a few thousand colors and little noise (i.e. there are large areas filled with a solid color), a PNG24 should work great.

Now, if you throw alpha channels into the mix, things become a bit annoying. PNG8 and GIF support so called "bitmask transparency", which marks one specific color as fully translucent. PNG8 actually supports one transparency value per palette entry. This means it's effectively like an RGBA palette with up to 256 values. This option is somewhat less well-known and the support by most tools is also somewhat lacking.

You can quantize and dither PNG32 images with pngquant and pngnq. PNGOUT will also create this kind of PNG, but only if there are less than 257 colors to begin with.

So, this area is covered pretty well by current browsers. However, once you need a "few" more colors, you'll run out of options. There is only PNG32 and – as we all know – PNG is a poor choice for photo-based images. Well, of course it will look perfect (it's lossless after all), but it will be prohibitively huge.

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HTML-Node Tagging via Conditional Comments Redux – Same Specificity for Everyone

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eye catcher
Can we fix it? No, it's f-ed. :)

In today's episode of Pick your Poison we'll take a brief look at popular options for dealing with Internet Explorer's rendering issues, glitches, and bugs. Basically, it's all about feeding specific versions of IE version specific property/value pairs which happen to yield the desired result(s).

I say "happen", because those pairs are always complete nonsense and they will usually break the layout in horrible ways if a sane browser were to interpret them. Well, we aren't talking about sane browsers today, but we need to make sure that we won't get in their way with these questionable and awkward workarounds.

If you're already familiar with these concepts, you can jump right to "The Small Twist" at the bottom of this article.

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