Tony Thomas

Update: There is at least one WYSIWYG impress.js editor available now.

I came across Impress.js a while back and I was, well, impressed. It makes sense to do presentations on the web, given the powerful animations and transitions available in modern browsers. Impress is sort of like Prezi improved. Improved because it takes advantage of 3d animation. It does require some technical skill however. You need to know a bit about HTML5 and you have to be able to code a web page and write styles.

Right now you can only learn how to use Impress.js by reading the comments and experimenting. I thought it might be good to go through each of the features here to give a sense of it’s capabilities. If you’re interested, there aren’t really any insights here that you can’t find in the source. (more…)

I came across Sean McCambridge’s JQuery Tubular plugin a while back and I thought it would be fun to experiment with it. So I set up a little demo and I thought I’d walk through it here.

I should say that it wasn’t until I came across Phil Plait’s amazing moon simulation that I was inspired to build the demo.

I should also say that my example is completely unnecessary given Sean’s documentation. It’s really as simple as this:

$('body').tubular('someYTid','video'); // where someYTid is the YouTube ID and wrapper is your containing DIV.

Once you have JQuery and JQuery Tubular linked in the head of your document and replace ‘someYTid’ with the id of your YouTube video, it will just work. The rest is styling. In the interest of explaining things all in one place, I’ll walk through what I did. (more…)