10th may 2006

have you tween this!?

philippe maegerman from belgium has created an amazing motion tween library - yeah, as in flash's motion tweens - completely in javascript that is really worth a look. the documentation and examples are superb, and it looks so simple.

whenever i see things like this nowadays i always think back to how it used to be. anyone remember brent gustafson's assembler.org? i know it's still there, but i mean the black one that had several beautiful javascript experiments, using coloured atari style blocks, at the beginning of the century? that was my favourite site for years, and probably still is. i spent so much time (excuse me brent) hacking around that code, and learnt so much about javascript, but creating those types of effects was so complex and, often, very difficult. you needed a masters degree in mathematics.

nowadays of course, it's pretty much all done for you. what with scriptaculous and maegerman's motion tween engine (and prototype of course), you call a few lines of other people's code, and it's all done for you. i'm not bitter by the way - i think it's brilliant (for a start, the testing has been done for you). however, i am glad that i attacked javascript in the late 90s early 2000s as i think a lot of developers today know how to embed scriptaculous and make a div magically appear, but would struggle if they were just asked to do something dirty like quickly validate a form or create a date object for example. also, i fell in love with javascript, and many today miss out on that. ahh, the walks on the beach with flanagan's definitive guide; watching the sunset with the pocket reference; sharing a private joke with a print out of gustafson's assembler source code; those where the days my friend.

related:

blog,

javascript,

web dev