fun CS3 rotate

[auntnini]

Did you see Mathew James Taylor;s starburts
http://matthewjamestaylor.com/blog/css3-starbursts ?

[djr33]

If the blog allowed comments, I'd write this there:

The animations (and shapes in general) are great. But one very odd property is that the area that registers the mouse (=the shape) changes when the shape changes. It's clearest with the green one that extends into a line-- if you put your mouse near the top of the circle, it will jump back and forth-- confusing and odd. I'm not sure what the solution is, but I guess that's a personal preference if you'd use that one on your site or not. The code in general is useful.

[jscheuer1]

Cool, but limited as the author himself points out. It probably won't be too long though. There's so much that one can do in the new CSS 3 standard in a browser where it's fully implemented.

Years ago, so long I forget what it was called now. I was into an HTML (in its literal sense as meaning Hyper Text Markup Language) designed for BBS's that allowed one to draw Bézier curves and all sorts of shapes. You could use a drawing program, but it saved it in a text form that transmitted well over dialup. And once you had a drawing, if you knew the language, you could fine tune it. It's pretty amazing what some folks came up with. I remember, it was called RIP Graphics (Rapid Interface Protocol).

I bet something like that could be done in CSS 3, or 4. And there's always the canvas tag. Somebody has to make a full featured paint program for that where you just draw using intuitive paint program like tools and it saves it as HTML, css and/or javascript.

[djr33]

There's a reasonable submission in the "submit a script" section for drawing, about the best I've seen in just HTML (using <canvas>).

But getting to the point where a drawing 'program' like that would really be productive is pretty far away, I think-- so many components just won't work with the current technology (how would the paint bucket work, for example?).

With a plugin of course you can do this, and it's been done. When it can finally work in HTML that will be cool, although maybe plugins are really where this sort of thing belongs (as long as it integrates well and works on all devices).

[jscheuer1]

OK, it was actually Remote Imaging Protocol:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_imaging_protocol

And I bet it would be easier than you think. I'm surprised there isn't anything out there yet. Might be and we just don't know about it.

[djr33]

It depends on what you mean exactly by "it" (a finished product). It's certainly possible to create a program for drawing in a browser, but it will be a very long time before it can replace Photoshop effectively. The real question is where, in between, the limit is (currently, or in the near future).

One permanent issue will be speed-- running anything in a browser will take longer than in a standalone program, so if it takes 1 minute to run a filter in Photoshop, it might take 5 in the browser. In the future maybe everything will be so fast that it won't make a noticeable difference... we'll see.

[jscheuer1]

That's an interesting point of view. I'm thinking more from the perspective of a standalone program where you can create your image and save it as HTML, css and/or javascript. Then you could incorporate it into your web page(s).

I'm not looking to supplant PhotoShop with a live web app. Though I suppose in time . . .

This would be more for things like the starbursts linked to in the original post in this thread.

If you had seen a good selection of some of the RIP graphics, you might have a better idea of the things that could be done. They weren't photo quality. I think there were only 256 colors. But depending upon the artist they could be quite nice.

[djr33]

I don't think we disagree-- now that I understand what you're describing, it actually makes a lot of sense... some way to standardize easy-to-use graphics for using/sharing on the web.