Not a critique of this in particular, but does JS styling inconsistency not drive everyone else mental? I'm not a big fan of camelCase, but when I see veer_coefficient_horizontal next to setTimeout, I get itchy.
Getting all sorts of text artifacts remaining smeared across my browser. Not this site's fault, and is something I've experienced before. It does make me wonder where the blame lies, though: Linux, Firefox or my graphics card?
The most likely would be Firefox. As Linux has nothing to do with graphics, so I assume you mean your X Server - like Gnome or XFCE or KDE - none of which have much affect into major browsers, which are designed to render themselves entirely separate from the system's window manager to be multi-platform. It's also not likely to be your graphics card, otherwise it would happen outside of your browser too. It could be the browser attempting to "accelerate" web pages by using your GPU - in which case you can find out by disabling GPU Accelerated Rendering - both Firefox and Chrome have settings for this.
Sorry, I should have specified better. By "Linux" I meant the overall mix of Xorg and whatever display or GUI toolkits are in use, and instead of "graphics card", I should have said "graphics card drivers". If the card itself were having issues, I'm sure more than Firefox would have problems. Alternatively, I always hear about how "Linux has bad font rendering!" but since I'm not much of a font guy, I'm not sure if they're referring to how the fonts look, or some deeper part of the process which displays the fonts.
I recently had to switch to the radeon (open source) drivers instead of fglrx (AMD's proprietary) drivers due to some incompatibility with a kernel upgrade. It makes sense that the problem would exist somewhere between Firefox and its use of those drivers.
That does sound like it could easily cause problems. Graphics drivers are bad in all Linux systems. NVIDIA's I've seen tend to work better - just hope Steam does well with Linux and pushes ATI to finally make some good drivers.
Is there a blog post about this? I get most of it but a couple things, namely how the css transitions interact with the property updates in in the veer & fly functions and how opacity is governed. Good show, nice example of a tidy little JS object!
Hey, thanks! I haven't written anything about txtbirds yet, but might soon. In the meantime, a brief explanation about those transitions and property updates:
- With the exception of the `margin` transition, all the transitions are set to 10 seconds — roughly each bird's lifespan.
- The `left` and `top` transitions move the bird toward the center from a randomly-assigned position on the screen.
- The `font-size` and `color` transitions create the impression that the bird is receding into the distance, getting smaller and more lightly-colored.
- The `margin` transition governs the veering. Every half-second, the bird is given new, randomish left- and top-margins. The transition (set to slightly less than a second in duration, after some trial-and-error) smooths that shift.
If you're on a Mac check out https://github.com/liquidx/webviewscreensaver - Works well but you might not always have an internet connection so I just saved the HTML/CSS/JS into a folder and linked directly to that (and it works!)
