The second is the return of the original CreativeJS workshop – JavaScript Graphics and Animation, updated for 2014. Just as you’d expect, there are all kinds of visual effects and advanced interactions. A great way to improve your JavaScript and it can really help to renew your excitement about programming.

Tickets go on sale on Tuesday 14th at 11am UK time. Register your interest on the ticket page for a reminder email.

PS if you can’t get to the UK, then mini online courses are coming – sign up to the mailing list to be the first to hear.

More info on the CreativeJS training page.

Jen describes it better than I ever can:

I’ve put my heartbeat on the internet.

It’s March 25, 2014 and the best technology I’ve found to save my heartrate is the Basis watch. It saves an average heartrate for each minute. It fails to record any heartrate for ~17.5% of minutes. When there is no data for a minute, you’ll see the heartrate from the previous minute.

This really works for me on a number of levels. Obviously there’s neat tech, described in her writeup on what’s involved, but there’s also something about connecting herself to her work in this way that feels really thoughtful and inspired. It’s one thing to say that as a society we’re always connected to the Internet – this is something else entirely. There’s something to be said here about privacy, personal data and openness. Yet more on healthcare. I’m not sure exactly how to describe what Jen has done here but it feels like there’s something soulful and refreshing in this project to me.

One Human Heartbeat by Jen Lowe

This experiment using an undocumented part of Street View, the depth data. With that a depth map and a normal map is generated, which can be used in the shaders and to plot geometry and sprites in (almost) the correct position in 3d space.

Considered alongside Hyperlapse and Little Planet, Street View has become one of the most fun and interesting corners of the web to explore and hack. Can’t wait to see what’s next!

UPDATE: Here’s a writeup by Einar himself on the technical details.

Urban Jungle Street View by Einar Öberg

The Arbitrary Logo

CreativeJS for Designers is a perfect way to get started with javascript in a visual way. And for more experienced coders, CreativeJS Fun and Games will get you started making HTML5 games. There are still a few tickets left for each course. Get yours before they’re gone!

While not a new project it’s the first time I’ve seen Ironbane, a 3D MMO that’s been under development since 2012.

The chunky pixellated graphics work well and despite being a little glitchy in places it’s still quite polished and fun to play

Ironbane appears to be updated quite frequently, so definitely one to keep an eye on!

Ironbane via /r/javascript
Assets and server source are on Github.

While I personally can’t imagine any immediate practical use I really admire this kind of hack. This had me looking up the maximum hearing range of humans and laptop microphones – one of those things that just sends me down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. I’d also be curious to see if there’s any way to solve the higher frequency bleeding problem described in the readme: It’d be really cool to use this without hearing high pitched tones.

I also wonder – does anyone out there have ideas for practical applications for this?

Remote.js by Hage Yaapa.

Deck the halls, hang the mistletoe and fill your website with a cheezy snow effect. Yes it’s Christmas! My favourite time of the year, but if you want to go straight onto the naughty list, all you need to do is hotlink to external JS files without permission.

Over the years, I’ve programmed Christmas twinkles, Christmas trees and snow for many of the world’s largest websites so three years ago, I posted a Three.js 3D snow effect on my blog. And since then, it’s spread over the internet like wildfire. I love when people use my stuff – that’s why I share it!

But rather than take the files and host it on their servers, people have been hot-linking to my image and JS files. Of course, you all know to only ever hot-link to JS files that you can absolutely trust – like Google hosting JQuery for example. To hot-link to any old JS files can at best cause your pages to break, and at worst, open yourselves up to any crazy code running on your website!

My server’s been crushed by the weight of websites linking to my files, the current biggest culprit is an Arabian weather website that seems to get 10,000s of hits a day. I could have just moved the files, but my server would still be having to deal with the 404s, and that’s quite a lot to deal with.

I asked on twitter what I should do, typically most people responded that I should replace the snow with a particular body part. My favourite suggestion was to make yellow snow But boringly, I replaced them with 0 byte files, and I added an alert to the JS files. Have you got any better ideas? Let me know!

And, um. Happy Christmas!

…or maybe it isn’t, thanks to Moonjs! From the site:

Moonjs is an online Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) simulator. It is a port of Virtual AGC by Ronald Burkey from C to javascript/asm.js using the Emscripten compiler.

The site comes complete with instructions on how the guidance system worked. While using the controls is obviously complicated and cumbersome (no UX back in the day!) I still felt connected to a piece of history learning how the system worked. So inspiring!

Moonjs by Shahriar Iravanian

Back when most people were just starting to get to grips with 3D CSS, Steven Wittens redesigned his site, acko.net, with clever mathematics, shiny geometry and a nice (not too heavy) bit of interactivity. Eighteen months later, he’s taken another jump forward in combining 3D CSS with WebGL and the DOM to create a 3D interactive graffiti-inspired piece of interactive art.

Really, just go look at it. It’s lovely. Scroll down a bit and you can see the seamless merging of 3D elements with the 2D blog content. Once you’ve done that a few times, scroll up past the top of the page and enjoy the show. Then drag it around and look vertiginously down at the content below, press play and drive through the tubes.

There’s so much to do with it, there’s even a set of unlockable achievements of which I’ve managed to get 4 so far. If you figure out any of them, please let us know in a comment here or on our Facebook page.

• acko.net/blog/zero-to-sixty-in-one-second/

A related sidenote

In Steven Wittens post about the development of his site, you’ll find a link to voodoo.js, a nifty little library to help build things in a similar style and add in those nice little 3D/HTML interactions.

• voodoojs.com/