Hot off that last tortilla post (1 year later), it's time for something completely different. I released my first album today: SpaceFlight - under the moniker of Interstellar Voyager. For the last year, I have been making music as a way to stay creative during the pandemic. This album came about after I started making music for the podcast I co-host, Memory Protection. My co-host Josh and I wanted to add some music that reminded us of the analog synth music from the '70s & '80s. One particular inspiration was the music from the children's television show The Secret City Adventures. After creating interlude music for the podcast for almost a year, I decided to take some of what I was working on and write longer compositions around them, the first song to come out of this was Voyager, which took a long time to get to a point where it felt finished. Even though Voyager was the first song I wrote for this album, I released the first single Approaching The Vortex last July, and over the next 8 months, the other songs followed. If you're interested in listening, head over to my Bandcamp page and give it a ...
When iOS7 was revealed in 2013, Apple showed off a new design language that was much simpler, and cleaner than the versions that preceded it. It occured to me that these could be easily replicated in CSS and thought it would be a fun experiment to try. I found that a few people had already tried their hand at it, but I thought it wouldn't hurt to give it a shot. I started with the Weather and Clock icons, and that went pretty well, so since then I have been periodically creating more. It's a fun little diversion that lets me explore new techniques for CSS/SASS. This past Spring I created a website to showcase the collection, you can view them here. It's a work in progress and over time I hope to add many more icons to the site.
Mix-blend-mode is an interesting addition to the CSS specification, it enables front-end developers to composite layers in CSS in a way previously available only to image editing programs. If you're a designer, you know these effects as "Blend Modes" in Adobe Photoshop. The mix-blend-mode property belongs to the CSS Compositing and Blending Level 1 Spec. For those unfamiliar with Photoshop, the blend mode is a way of combining 2 or more elements laid on top of one another into something new. Each element retains it's original data, but when a blend-mode is applied - it can losslessly modify an image's visual attributes and allow it to combine with other elements it overlaps. What's good? Gives front end developers & designers more parity with photoshop. Lets developers do in code what could only have been done using images previously. Enables a developer focus on keeping visual concerns part of css, instead of wrapping it up in an image. Syntax is easy to understand. What's not so good? Browser Support: mix-blend-mode is fully supported in Firefox, Chrome and Opera. It's partially supported in Safari on Mac & iOS. It's not at all supported in any version of IE...
Simple, Responsive iframes. jQuery mediaWrapper is a plugin for wrapping and making iframes and embedded videos behave more like images when developing a responsive website. Currently iframes will default to an arbitrary width set by the embed code, just like images. Unlike images, the max-width: 100%; height: auto; technique doesn't work. mediaWrapper.js helps solve this problem by providing a wrapper that enable iframes to work responsively. Check out the plugin over at GitHub.
