Viewing profile — brendanr

Music Lab by Code.org is a Blockly-based experience, built for K-12 education, at https://code.org/music . It's open source, and we wrote some technical documentation at https://gi…

The vegetables gardens were there literally 90 minutes ago when I took a photo of them.

The transition to CSS transitions seems primitive to me. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Animati... makes it sound very much like a fire-and-forget approach. M…

It's not a question of browser support, it's a question of infrastructure support. When I was using them years ago, there were a lot of networks which blocked them.

Is it okay to rely solely on websockets these days? I was always impressed by pusher.com's commitment to a variety of fallback protocols (and there are three blog posts about it, s…

Big fan of Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin biography, but also did not enjoy his Jobs one. The most interesting part of the story was when Jobs returned to Apple and executed perfectl…

Canvas drawing is fast on platforms where it's hardware accelerated, which has been the case on things like iOS Safari for years now. At least in the past it was also beneficial to…

Canvas doesn't have a DOM, for what it's worth.

The perf issues sound suspicious. At least in the past, canvas sprites on iOS can get very slow if you don't render to integer coordinates. Hopefully the author attached macOS Safa…

Does anybody remember the old Manhunter games from Sierra? They used a very similar idea of replaying a timeline multiple times to track a bunch of suspects as they interacted thro…

Seems to be in https://github.com/bookiza/bookiza

For Code.org, you will find https://code.org/about/2015 to be quite interesting, including a breakdown of where money was spent. You'll see that a lot goes towards training teacher…

nice design, but i wonder if their design team has any non-retina machines? the anti-aliasing in the tilted phone UI is pretty bad in Chrome on a non-retina display.

If you found this article interesting, check out the book Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, by Natasha Dow Schüll. It's an incredibly interesting book about build…

I might add that never alerting my phone was the worst thing simply because it was the only reason to buy a Protect. A regular smoke detector continues to detect smoke just fine.

Actually mine just runs on batteries. I think they have an optical sensor which can be triggered by dust. I was told by support that they used to recommend blowing the debris out, …

Nest did a great job with their thermostat, but the Protect leaves a lot to be desired. I was vacuuming which triggered the sensor. The alarm went off, and it was really loud. I lo…

Good point. It's essentially a scene-by-scene navigation model, where you jump from one scene to another. While inside a scene there can be animations.. looping, triggered, one-off…