Designer, Engineer, Geek
November 21, 2008 8:22 AM   Subscribe

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.
posted by netbros (14 comments total) 7 users marked this as a favorite
 
I used to love making those AVS visualizations with the built-in editor. It is quite fun.
posted by schyler523 at 8:33 AM on November 21, 2008


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.
posted by ardgedee at 8:52 AM on November 21, 2008


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.
posted by sdodd at 10:13 AM on November 21, 2008


Heh. So proprietary tags are cool when Apple does them...
posted by Artw at 11:24 AM on November 21, 2008


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.
posted by Freen at 11:30 AM on November 21, 2008


Wha'choo talkin' 'bout, Artw?

Oh, the marquee tag is dead? *sniff*
posted by Pronoiac at 11:45 AM on November 21, 2008


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.
posted by verb at 12:07 PM on November 21, 2008


Anybody care to educate me on why this guy (or is it Drupal) is using XHTML-Transitional instead of Strict?
posted by spock at 12:08 PM on November 21, 2008


> 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.
posted by ardgedee at 12:11 PM on November 21, 2008


Canvas is an apple invention, originally created for use with their dashboard widgets.
posted by Artw at 12:13 PM on November 21, 2008


Oh, and he's also the guy who did some of the crazy early Linerider videos...
posted by verb at 12:21 PM on November 21, 2008


> 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.
posted by ardgedee at 12:42 PM on November 21, 2008


Hey, at least it's not Layer.
posted by Artw at 1:09 PM on November 21, 2008


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?
posted by sdodd at 1:54 PM on November 21, 2008


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