Comments on: Designer, Engineer, Geek

Designer, Engineer, Geek

netbros — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 08:22:40 -0800

Acko.net is the web home of Steven Wittens, designer of AVS presets for WinAmp, as well as the current Bluebeach theme at Drupal.org. Steven also dabbles in programming; for instance his Farbtastic jquery color picker. Be sure to watch his blog for development jewels like Projective Texturing with Canvas.

By: schyler523

schyler523 — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 08:33:41 -0800

I used to love making those AVS visualizations with the built-in editor. It is quite fun.

By: ardgedee

ardgedee — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 08:52:56 -0800

For added head-exploding, visit his site in Firefox and (from the Firefox menu) go to View -> Page Style -> No Style to see how ackno.net's title graphic is built.

By: sdodd

sdodd — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 10:13:49 -0800

Thanks for this -- it lights up that little geek indicator deep in my brain. These are sweet hacks in the truest sense of the word. I'm looking forward to the Canvas tag becoming widely supported. There's gonna be lotsa cool stuff done with it.

By: Artw

Artw — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 11:24:57 -0800

Heh. So proprietary tags are cool when Apple does them...

By: Freen

Freen — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 11:30:19 -0800

ardgedee: great, now I'm going to have to pick pieces of my skull out from the cracks in my keyboard. sweet jesus, that's some css magic right there.

By: Pronoiac

Pronoiac — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 11:45:18 -0800

Wha'choo talkin' 'bout, Artw? Oh, the marquee tag is dead? *sniff*

By: verb

verb — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 12:07:31 -0800

Steven is definitely one of the cool guys on the 'net. Most of my interaction with him has been via his work on the Drupal project -- he served as the one-man R&D team, coming up with slick hacks and cool solutions for thorny problems that had locked many other devs in arguments for a while. Back before anyone had really heard about it, he lobbied hard for Drupal to adopt jQuery for all of its internal Javascript, and that choice has paid off handily. Once on IRC, I made a passing comment about overlaying cartoon talk-bubbles onto images using PHP. He noted that it could probably be done with the Canvas element on the client side, but making curly tails for the talk-balloons might be tough. Then he paused, and said, "Then again..." and vanished for four days. When he reappeared, he'd had about six hours of sleep and had launched an online comic-book layout app that was all Javascript powered. Good times.

By: spock

spock — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 12:08:16 -0800

Anybody care to educate me on why this guy (or is it Drupal) is using XHTML-Transitional instead of Strict?

By: ardgedee

ardgedee — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 12:11:46 -0800

> So proprietary tags are cool when Apple does them... Which tags are you referring to? acko.net uses a couple -webkit and -moz declarations to style dropshadows in the title graphic, but they're not relevant to his canvas hacks.

By: Artw

Artw — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 12:13:33 -0800

Canvas is an apple invention, originally created for use with their dashboard widgets.

By: verb

verb — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 12:21:04 -0800

Oh, and he's also the guy who did some of the crazy early Linerider videos...

By: ardgedee

ardgedee — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 12:42:17 -0800

> Canvas is an apple invention... It's a component of the HTML 5 spec. The hover pseudo-class started as a proprietary Microsoft tag and became a component of the CSS 2 spec. I do not have a problem with this, when it's a good idea backed by good implementation.

By: Artw

Artw — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 13:09:16 -0800

Hey, at least it's not Layer.

By: sdodd

sdodd — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 13:54:59 -0800

Yes, proprietary is bad. Is anybody going to argue that Canvas is worse than Flash? It's all about the direction you're headed, right?