Hello again,
So it’s been a crazy week, I spent countless hours trying to figure out how this whole html5, css, and javascript project thing works. Who would have thought it would be so confusing, just trying to figure out how to set up a test project? To only then realize you were foolish for ever thinking it was difficult. Great, right. I guess what I am trying to say is things are progressing steadily though perhaps not as smoothly as I had originally intended.
This past week, I scoured the internet for every fragment of information involving coloring to an html5 canvas I could find. Ah, that reminds me, this week we chose teams for our Worcester Art Museum project; I chose to be on the coloring book team because I thought it would be challenging but fun as well. I am delighted to say there are a vast amount of web development resources available on the Internet. I found a tutorial that helped me work through some of the html5 canvas basics, but after detailed study into a few of the subtopics, I opted to change a vast majority of the code I started with.
One choice I have made is to avoid jQuery, I know what your thinking why? jQuery is so useful. Especially know that I have learned “how all the cool kids call jQuery” a quote taken from some random site, for an idea which they in turn took from the widely known boilerplate template. Let me explain; it may come as a surprise to some, perhaps not many, but jQuery is nothing more than a javascript file with a vast amount of helpful tools; about ten thousand lines of tools, uncompressed. However if you only need a very small portion of the library it make more sense to make up your own solution, rather than sacrifice load time. Or at the very least just take what you want from the jQuery library. Probably no big deal if your on your own laptop, but everyone browses the internet on their phone know so performance is key.
Any way now to the progress. This week, I designed a very simple coloring web page based on html5 css javascript and jQuery, which I later discarded for the homegrown solution, no jQuery. Thus far, as of friday night 2/8/13 I have a fully functional drawing to app which draws whether you click the mouse or not, functionality lost to the abandonment of jQuery, but soon to come back, …just saying. With a palette of nine colors and an eraser I call the refresh button lol, me and Beto; my team partner a poised to strike a blow in the name of free source code.
I must say it is nice to finally work on a project that has a value to the public. I suppose the only thing that brought my pure jubilation of having a working webpage back to reality, was when I gave it to my daughter to test. Within ten seconds she asked where is the eraser, to which I replied just hit the refresh button and be quiet. She’s five.
Till next week.
Jason
From the blog jasonhintlian » cs-wsu by jasonhintlian and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.