On the heels of my recent find, I stumbled on this collection of multiple JavaScript demos.  I’m both blown away by many of these, and yet, at the same time, becoming slightly jaded by all the JavaScript goodness being realized these days.  On one level, I *know* this stuff is possible, so it doesn’t feel like ‘magic’ like these sorts of things did years ago.  On the other hand, these are just so darn *cool*, it’s hard not to think that JavaScript frameworks will continue to improve and rival ‘traditional’ RIA tools (Flash, Flex, Silverlight, etc).

Have a look at these couple demos:

http://mugtug.com/sketchpad/

http://js-fireworks.appspot.com/

Do these sorts of things continue to carry the same feeling of ‘magic’ for you that they did when you first saw them?

The “Sublime” video player is a new HTML5-based video player, offering you a way to stream video directly in to a browser without the need for any plugin (Silverlight, Flash, etc.)  The project looks to be in relatively early stages, but works fine on my Chrome browser, supports Safari now, and will support Firefox soon.  The project also states that a ‘fallback to Flash’ mode for IE will be supported soon too.

Definitely looks like a project to watch.  While I assume there will be more projects like this in the coming months, Sublime may become one of the default choices for a generation of early adopters.

It’s not exactly what I was thinking of at first.  I’d imagined some type of ray tracing showing details of cloth texture.  Howver, this demo from Andre Hoyer is infinitely cooler than what I’d first imagined.

“Cloth simulation” simulates the outline of a piece of cloth/fabric dangling on the screen, which you can drag around by various points on the object.  And the “cloth” will react and move and eventually resettle to its original hanging position.  All with realistically generated animations based on physics/gravity, and all computed in real time in JavaScript.  Simply amazing.  This is the sort of thing that wowed the world with applets 14 years ago, and wowed the world again when Flash started to make a big play in the browser a few years later.

HTML5 is coming, and the sorts of things that were reserved for plugins only will be “in browser” and common in the next few years.

“Cloth simulation” demo.

YouTube is starting to roll out experimental support for HTML5 video playing, using native browser HTML5 support rather than relying on Flash plugins.  The support is limited to certain browsers and certain videos, and can be accessed by visiting the ‘TestTube‘ area of YouTube (or directly here).  While this is early stages, having such a large company like YouTube supporting this (and hopefully rolling it out soon) will certainly help drive adoption of the multimedia uses of HTML5.  I’m looking forward to see what’s next!

Just saw this making the rounds:

From : http://apcmag.com/Content.aspx?id=5078

Developer Tobias Schneider created the software called “Gordon” which allows Flash apps to display on the iPhone. It’s a Flash interpreter written in Javascript, the language which is supported by all web browsers, including the iPhone, for allowing elements on web pages to be interactive, without requiring a full page refresh. Javascript is heavily used in web apps like Gmail and Facebook, but until now has been mostly used in its pure form — it generally isn’t used to interpret other languages.

Sounds promising  :)

JSMag January  2010 Issue

SKIN OF THE RHINO

Charles Lowell demonstrates building a command line in JavaScript.

USING JSDOC

Learn all about inline JavaScript documentation with JsDoc, from Michael Mathews.

MANY FUNCTIONS OF FUNCTIONS

Tom McFarlin explores the many uses of functions.

WEBOS: PALM’S GAME-CHANGING MOBILE OPERATING SYSTEM – PART 2

Frank Zammetti’s back and shows you why Palm’s webOS deserves the hype it’s been getting – part 2 of 3

WRITING WINDOWS GADGETS IN YUI

Christian Tiberg shows you how to exploit YUI to build desktop for Windows.

JAVASCRIPT PATTERNS – SANDBOX PATTERN

Stoyan Stefanov explores the Sandbox Pattern.

COMMUNITY NEWS

Matt Henry rounds up the latest news from the world of JavaScript.

Learn more or purchase today!

A new Firefox project called Electrolysis is attempting to bring multicore support to Firefox.  Currently, official Firefox builds only support one processor.  If a computer has multiple cores, there’s no way for Firefox to take advantage of that extra power.  Some other browsers already support multicore processing, and their JavaScript speeds are often much faster than Firefox.

Benjamin Auffrath wrote up a post detailing his speed experiences with Electrolysis, and found that Firefox with Electrolysis is indeed faster, but it still has a ways to go to catch up to Chrome.

I recently stumbled on two different JavaScript loaders – labjs and runjs. Each can help you manage loading JavaScript dependancies for your projects, including (it seems) specifying a load order. If you’ve ever hit a situation where certain JS files needed to be loaded before others, you’ve hit the problem that JavaScript loaders are addressing. There’s a bit of an interesting comparison/thread between labjs and runjs here.

What other JavaScript loaders do you know about or use?

Palm’s webOS was given a surprise upgrade just a few days ago with the addition of SDL in their 1.3.5 upgrade.  Here’s a few stories about the upgrade and what the community did within hours of its release.

• http://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/Application:Doom
• http://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/Application:Quake
• http://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/OpenGL_Triangle_of_Doom

Some more reaction from Slashdot is here.  Looks like the webOS is heating up a bit.  :)

The WebDevRadio podcast did an interview with Frank Zammetti, who has a multi-part series in JSMag on JavaScript development with Palm Pre’s webOS.  Have a listen!