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Ajaxian

Cleaning up the web with Ajax

It’s Friday. Play some drums…. HTML5 styleYesterday

Brian Arnold created a fun sample drum machine simulator using HTML5 <audio>.

PLAIN TEXT

JAVASCRIPT:

1.  
2. function playBeat() {
3.         if (isPlaying) {
4.                 var nextBeat = 60000 / curTempo / 4;
5.                 // Turn off all lights on the tracker's row
6.                 $("#tracker li.pip").removeClass("active");
7.                 // Stop all audio
8.                 stopAllAudio();
9.                 // Light up the tracker on the current pip
10.                 $("#tracker li.pip.col_" + curBeat).addClass("active");

Machsend: P2P file sharing via Browser PlusYesterday

Alex MacCaw has released Machsend, a Yahoo! Browser Plus plugin that enables P2P file transfers from inside the browser.

It showcases what can be done with a BP plugin, leaving you wish cross browser functionality.

I guess it is kinda fun to hack the browser :)

GChart 2.5: Faster, sharper, canvas-rendered, pie, line, and area chartsJuly 2

John Gunther has released GChart 2.5, a client-side library that adds a new canvas-rendering option for sharper, better looking, alpha-transparent, pie, line, and area charts.

John told us:

Canvas-rendering corrects GChart's most serious visual quality limitations (including the most often mentioned problem by its users: the banded-filled pie slice).

Coupled with its existing feature set and ease of GWT integration, the canvas-rendering option makes GChart an excellent choice for those who want to add basic charts to a GWT application without a lot of fuss.

To access these features, you'll need to plug an external canvas library into GChart (GWTCanvas in the gwt-incubator is reccommended) as described in detail in the setCanvasFactory method.

With the external canvas in place, the next step is to tell GChart you want a curve to be "continuously filled" by invoking setFillSpacing(0).

With each such continuously filled curve, GChart automatically exploits your external canvas library to improved the quality an

More than you ever want to see about encodingJuly 2

Paul Baukaus linked to jsescape, a little form that shows escaping and unescaping across a number of encodings.

Andrea Giammarchi had his own post on encodings in a different way.... as he talked about
en-code which you can check out in action here on the page that lets you do simple encodings, especially for source code, in short order.

GeoMaker - geo locations as microformats or a map from texts or URLsJuly 2

As preparation for an upcoming tech talk about Placemaker I thought it would be good to take a bit of the pain out of the geolocation service by making an interface for it. Placemaker works the following way: you post some content or a URL to it, it goes through the content or gets the content from the URL and analyzes it. It then finds geographical locations in the text and disambiguates them (for example to skip names like "Jack London" and not consider it the city London). Finally you get it back as XML.

The annoying thing is that Placemaker only support POST request and does not have a JSON output - for now. GeoMaker allows non-developers to enter some text or a URL, filter the results (using YUI datatable) to remove false positives (no system is perfect) and get the embed code for a Yahoo Map or a list of microformatted locations as copy+paste. See the screencast to get the end user experience:

Of course, every time you build something like that, red-blooded developers will ask for an API to do the same thing (and pointing them to Placemaker wasn't enough). So here it is:

http://icant.co.uk/geomaker/api.php takes two parameters: url of the web document to load and output which could be map, kml, microformats, csv, or json (with callback