Tag Archives: HTML5

How You Can Draw Regular Polygons with the HTML5 Canvas API

Posted by on July 24, 2013 2 comments

polyiconSo maybe you need to draw a pentagon? or a hexagon? How about just a simple equilateral triangle? Any of those seemingly basic primitive regular polygons that you learned about back in geometry class. The Canvas API is extremely powerful and enables you to draw just about anything with Javascript. But that doesn’t mean that the Canvas provides a simple API for every shape that you might want to draw. In fact, the Canvas API provides almost no simple shape drawing outside of rectangles.  Rather the Canvas API provides a set of very powerful and flexible basic drawing functions based on the path abstraction that  can be used to draw just about anything.  But in order to wield the Canvas properly, you have to have a good understanding of the APIs and sometimes a tad bit of trigonometry.

In this article, I’m going to show you how to not only draw an arbitrary regular polygon, but we’ll also be delving deeper to understand the algorithm and the math behind the code and hopefully in the process providing a better understanding of how to use the HTML5 Canvas API.

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Introduction to HTML5 Canvas

Posted by on May 20, 2013 Comments Off on Introduction to HTML5 Canvas

canvas_sun_orangeMaybe you’ve heard of the HTML 5 Canvas API, but don’t know what it’s good for…?  Maybe you’ve heard that it’s the way to go if you want to code an HTML5 game? Or maybe you’ve heard that it gives you explicit control over drawing in your browser? So what does all that mean?… Just what is the HTML5 Canvas API?

Let me pull back the curtain a little for you and give you some insight into what the HTML5 Canvas API is all about and what it can do for you and your web apps.

In this article, I’m going to give an introductory overview of the HTML5 Canvas API.  The sample application that comes with this article, “Canvas Playground”, gives a number of canvas drawing examples and even lets you interactively play around with the Canvas API. Give it a try.

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Complex Animations Using HTML5 Canvas

Posted by on May 13, 2013 Comments Off on Complex Animations Using HTML5 Canvas

In my upcoming ebook, “Essential Canvas for HTML5“, you’ll not only learn the basics of animation but you’ll also learn how to do complex Flash-like animations using HTML5 and Javascript that impart dynamics through tweening and other advanced techniques. I’ll break it all down for you and walk you through the source code. Here is just one of the samples that come with the book.

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How You Can Build an HTML5 Photobooth App

Posted by on May 7, 2013 Comments Off on How You Can Build an HTML5 Photobooth App

photo-booth

You want the users of your web app to be able to use their webcam to take their own profile shots and you’d like them to be able to personalize or stylize the picture before uploading it your weberver. Or maybe you’ve seen one of those fun photobooth-type apps that takes photos, applies cool image effects to them and lets you share them… wondering how they worked.

Imagine if your HTML5 app could programmatically access your webcam, take snapshots and modify the image data procedurally. You could then let your user’s upload or share their self portraits.

In this article, I’m going to teach you how to do that and more. Building on some articles that I’ve shared in the past, I’ll walk you through a sample application that displays the video from your webcam, applies image processing effects to that video, lets you take still snapshots of the filtered video and lets you serialize the snapshots so that they can be uploaded to a web server.

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Make Your UI More Responsive with HTML5 Web Workers

Posted by on April 19, 2013 11 comments

HTML5 Web Workers

Argh!!… Your web application has to sort a lot of data and you get the dreaded error message… “A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding…” Or maybe you’re writing some image processing code that takes forever on large images… Your UI is non-responsive. What are you going to do!!?… You could try to break up the work into small pieces and use timers to spread out the work. But what a PITA!

What if JavaScript had the ability to run your code in the background and not interfere with the responsiveness of your UI. What if you could spawn a thread to do long running computations such as image filtering and sorting. Well with HTML5 Web Workers you can do just that! In the rest of this article, I’m going to teach you how to use Web Workers within your own applications. Click here to try the sample app.

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How You Can Do Cool Image Effects Using HTML5 Canvas

Posted by on April 6, 2013 11 comments

You need to know how image filters work!  You’re writing an HTML5 application that works with images and you’d like to let your users dynamically alter the brightness of their images. Or maybe you’d like them to be able to give their image a vintage look…. or convert it to black and white to give that sense of drama…

Wouldn’t it be great if you knew how to apply cool image effects such as these from JavaScript dynamically? Would you like to learn the code behind how these image filters work? You totally can… This article will give you the fundamentals for basic image processing using the HTML5 Canvas API. You’ll learn how to write code that accesses an image’s pixel data and transforms this pixel data programmatically to perform cool image effects. Click here to try the sample app.

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Lights, Camera, Action!

Posted by on March 23, 2013 Comments Off on Lights, Camera, Action!


So You Want to Access Your Webcam from Javascript?

Web Real-Time Communications or WebRTC is an exciting new HTML5 technology that not only gives JavaScript the ability to do peer-to-peer (P2P) audio/video conferencing and P2P data communications between browsers, it also lets you have programmatic access to attached cameras and microphones. Prior to WebRTC you had to rely on a browser plugin such as Adobe Flash to be able to do similar things. But recently there has been a big push to add these capabilites as intrinsic features to web browsers with Google really leading the charge and through standardization efforts by the W3C WebRTC working group. It is a brave new world in that only some browsers have added WebRTC support and even those that do can have subtle (and some not so subtle) differences in both interface and implementation. But more and more you’re seeing real applications appearing that are using WebRTC in very cool and interesting ways. One great example of WebRTC in action is a PhotoBooth-like app called WebCam Toy. This application should give you a sense of the possibilites that WebRTC is opening up.

In the rest of this article, I’m going to walk you through the minimum code needed to get your webcam to display video in your browser. The latest versions of Chrome or Firefox are recommended for running the code included in this article and for experimenting with WebRTC. If you already have one of these browsers you can try out my example.

So lets get started…

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