Happy New Year!

9 years ago

Well it’s now 2014 and it’s looking to be a great year. I have a trip to Canada planned which will be exciting. I bought a new camera just before Christmas – a Sony A7R – which I am loving so far. I can’t wait to take it over to Canada. I am hoping the web industry will begin to settle down a bit as the excitement over the millions of JavaScript and CSS frameworks, libraries and pre-processors that seem to come out every week slow down and the tools consolidate. I hope to see this year some good news for Adobe AIR too. I feel like it has kind of died over the last 12 months with nothing really exciting happening. Opening up to new platforms such as Windows 8 (metro) would be massive, allowing us to create truly cross platform apps with a single code base. iOS and Android is great, but unfortunately they are not the only two platforms around now and it’s usefulness is lagging.

Over the past year my JS and CSS knowledge has skyrocketed, partly thanks to the professional development and R&D opportunities at my current job. I have developed a HTML/CSS/JS based e-learning framework and accompanying authoring tool built on Adobe AIR for my current employer which has consumed most of my time over the last 18 months. I’ll try to make more posts this year, but I know every one always says that

Top Posts from 2013

I thought I’d list some of the most popular posts made this year on Purple Squirrels so here they are:

• Windows 8 Start screen in HTML, CSS and JavaScript
• Webcam to Canvas or Data URI with HTML and JS
• Hover shine effect with CSS
• Getting all element attribute values with jQuery

Also, the cover picture for this post was taken on my new A7R last night in Ocean Grove, Victoria.

Happy 2014!

Gadgets in Japan

12 years ago

As some may know I have just returned from a 4 week trip around Japan. Whilst in Japan I spent a bit of time in different cities browsing through giant electronics stores such as BIC Camera, Yodobashi and Yamada-Denki. One of the great things about the Japanese electronics stores is not only do they stock just about every range in every colour, they also have demo models of nearly everything as well. So I was able to play with some pretty cool gadgets which I would have otherwise probably never used back here in Australia. Below are some of the cool things I got to play with while in Japan.

Sharp Galapagos 3D Android Phone

The screen in this phone was a glasses free 3D screen, it was pretty cool but I don’t think I would be able to use it day to day. Especially since the viewing angle to get the 3D effect is very narrow.

READ MORE