This is a light plugin that allows you to define maps, and gives you the option to display the directions between two points using Geolocation or a specific point. Also it has the options for searching a new route.
The post Gs Google Maps Directions appeared first on jQuery Rain.
A simple jQuery plugin that allows you to reorder elements on a page by clicking a “up” or “down” button. The element being reordered stays still while the other elements scroll behind it. Great for big elements and on mobile where drag & drop is really not convenient.
The post jQuery SortScroll : Sorting without Moving appeared first on jQuery Rain.
A simple jQuery plugin that allows you to reorder elements on a page by clicking a “up” or “down” button. The element being reordered stays still while the other elements scroll behind it. Great for big elements and on mobile where drag & drop is really not convenient.
The post jQuery SortScroll : Sorting without Moving appeared first on jQuery Rain.
Early Thursday morning I attended a midnight opening night screening of 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens'.
It's amazing to me to think that it was way back in February of 2013 that Disney announced there would be a new Star Wars film for the first time in a decade.
A long time ago...
[author_more]
[/author_more]
Over the last ten years, poor ol' George Lucas has been under the blazing 'nerd blowtorch' for those prequels - some of it probably justified. But while we might question some of his directorial and screenwriting decisions, there's one thing that's beyond question:
George Lucas was a brilliant visionary.
As designers, I think we can still learn a lot from George's ability to research, to collect a bunch of weird and disparate inspirations and re-assemble them into a new, captivating and original whole. I want to touch on that ability today.
As much as Star Wars is a story about farmboy with wanderlust, the truth is that it's two droids that drive the story in the first half 'A New Hope'. In fact, we barely see a human for the first 20 minutes. It's essentially a tin man and a rolling trash can in the desert - so if his robots can't carry the story, the film dies.
It's well documented that Lucas borrowed large parts of the story of 'A New Hope' from Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress (1958).
That film begins with two squabbling peasants - a tall one and a short one - trekking through the wilderness to join a rebellion. The peasants are played mostly for their 'three-stooges' comic value, but we also see the story through their eyes.
'The Hidden Fortress' also includes a sassy, independent princess, a secret treasure and, yes... a hidden fortress. But Lucas knew the success of his two droids-peasants was critical to his story.
George Lucas's golden droid was a very original blend of old and new ideas on what a robot should be. The visual design borrows from 'Maria' in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), probably the most famous robot in early cinema.
However, like most humanoid robots in 20th cinema, she is not to be trusted. In fact, generally the more human they look (or sound), the more dangerous they are (WestWorld, Alien, Hal9000).
If a robot was trustworthy, it had to be mechanical, monotone and clearly non-human, like Robby the Robot in Forbidden Planet.
C-3PO was different - more like a blend of the Cowardly Lion's fretting in the Tin Man's body. Not a hero but certainly not a villain either.
Somehow C-3PO managed to feel both completely original and instantly familiar at the same time. That's hard to do.
If C-3PO could perform a role mostly like a human character, R2-D2 was a much braver decision. This little tin can needs to help tell the story with:
On the surface, it's like trying to get an important performance out of an espresso machine. It must have seemed a crazy decision for people arriving on the set.
But two years earlier Lucas had seen a little-known sci-fi film called 'Silent Running (1972) that inspired him.
Silent Running is set in a dystopian future where Earth is a dead planet, but plant and animal life has been preserved in giant floating space domes (yes, Wall-E was also inspired by this film). Bruce Dern plays the part of 'Freeman Lowell', one of the men charged with maintaining these domes until life can be returned.
Lowell works with three small service 'drones' - Huey, Louie and Dewey - who become his main companions for the film.
Like R2-D2, these drones are short, faceless and very industrial looking, yet as Lowell teaches them to care for plants and even play poker. Even though they couldn't smile or frown or shake their fist, Lucas saw that they could still drive the story forward like a human character.
In fact, the drones were given life by four amputee actors - Mark Persons (Dewey), Cheryl Sparks and Steven Brown (Huey) and Larry Whisenhunt (Louie). Silent Running didn't get a lot of attention at the time, but was a critical influence on George Lucas.
You probably only need to watch about 10 minutes of something like H.R. Pufnstuf or Sigmund and the Sea Monsters to get a feel for the contempt that kid's fantasy entertainment was held in before Star Wars. "They're kids! Give 'em any ol' drivel" seemed to be the catchcry of producers. Cheap sets, tacky costumes, awful dialogue, and idiotic plots.
In comparison, Star Wars was smart, creative, intricately-planned and took the art of storytelling more seriously than any kid-friendly sci-fi drama before it. It's little wonder that people lost their minds in 1977.
Mr. George Lucas - I'll be forever grateful to you for that.
Continue reading %Designing Droids: From Metropolis to Huey, Dewey and Louie%
CORS is a relatively new API that came with HTML5 which allows our websites to request external and previously restricted resources. It relaxes the traditional same-origin policy by enabling us to request resources that are on a different domain than our parent page.
For example, before CORS cross-domain, Ajax requests were not possible (making an Ajax call from the page http://ift.tt/LWARzD to http://ift.tt/1IbUcwJ).
In this article we'll see how to use CORS to further interact with other systems and websites in order to create even better Web experiences. Buf before deepening the topic, let's have a look at how well supported it is first.
Internet Explorer 8 and 9 support CORS only through the XDomainRequest class. The main difference is that instead of doing a normal instantiation with something like var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest() you would have to use var xdr = new XDomainRequest();.
IE 11, Edge and all recent and not-really-recent versions of Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera fully support CORS. IE10 and Android’s default browser up to 4.3 only lack support for CORS when used for images in <canvas> elements.
According to CanIuse, 92.61% of people globally have supporting browsers which indicates that we are likely not going to make a mistake if we use it.
Now that we know that the same-origin policy prohibits websites in different domains from making Ajax requests to other domains, let's see how we can bypass this in order to make a cross-origin Ajax request to another website.
If you simply try to shoot an Ajax request to a random website, it would most likely not be able to read the response unless that another website allows it.
Continue reading %An in-Depth Look at CORS%
