The Twelve Basic Principles of Animation is a set of principles of animation introduced by the Disney animators Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas in their 1981 book The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation. Johnston and Thomas in turn based their book on the work of the leading Disney animators from the 1930s onwards and their effort to produce more realistic animations. The main purpose of the principles was to produce an illusion of characters adhering to the basic laws of physics, but they also dealt with more abstract issues, such as emotional timing and character appeal. Read more – ‘Disney’s Twelve Basic Principles of Animation’.
jQuery, a JavaScript library, is definitely something worth knowing. Here are some resources to help you learn and master it. Read more – ‘3 Free eBooks on jQuery’.
Last week Firefox 4.0 was released to the world. Web developers everywhere celebrated with delight, the new browser. Well, almost! The browser comes packed with a super-fast JavaScript engine called JägerMonkey, improved support for HTML5 and CSS3 and a bunch of new interface updates. Read more – ‘Run Two Versions of Firefox on Mac OSX’.
Compressing your Web components will help speed up your Website. The majority of your visitors will benefit as most all Web browsers support GZip compression. You’ll want to compress all text, which includes HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, JSON, etc. Read more – ‘How to Configure Apache to GZip Your Components’.
Before Ant, building and deploying web applications required a series of scripts or manual processes, which often led to mistakes. Apache Ant is a software tool for automating software build processes. It is similar to Make but is implemented using the Java language, requires the Java platform, and is best suited to building Java projects. However, that doesn’t mean it is restricted to Java projects. I use Ant increasingly for all my web development projects as it is an integral part of Eclipse, my IDE of choice. It makes building applications and releasing them across different servers far more efficient and less problematic. Read more – ‘Apache Ant Best Practices’.
Some time ago, well almost a year ago actually, I posted an article called Parsing Twitter Usernames, Hashtags and URLs with JavaScript. From that article, it became immediately apparent that this was an issue many people were confronting and one that required an answer. Now, belatedly, it is the turn of ColdFusion to get the Twitter love. Read more – ‘Parsing Twitter Usernames, Hashtags and URLs with ColdFusion’.
Okay, so many of the points below aren’t purely my philosophy, but ideas and principles I have picked up along the way throughout my [development] career. Some relate to the UNIX philosophy, or even the Zen of Python, but wherever they’re from, they can be applied to many other domains. Read more – ‘My Work Philosophy’.
