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Issue #28 - March 7, 2012
News and Latest Developments
Sencha's Touch framework is a popular way to build HTML5 mobile apps with over 50 built in components and an MVC system. Version 2 focuses on performance with huge speed improvements (always an issue on mobile devices, alas.)
appMobi's 'directCanvas' technology dramatically boosts the performance of HTML5 canvas based games and has so far been focused on iOS. Now, directCanvas for Android (2.2 through 4.0) has gone into beta too, although unfortunately you have to apply to join.
Adobe shares an update about Flash's forthcoming export to HTML5 feature, including a video of how it works. It'll eventually be released as part of the 'Adobe Flash Professional Toolkit for CreateJS'.
From Our Sponsor
by Louis Lazaris, is a compact and practical eBook reference for dealing with browser inconsistencies in CSS3-based designs. (Ads by LaunchBit) 
Reading
Technitone is a new Web Audio and WebGL experiment built by gskinner.com in association with Google and this fascinating case study is dripping with awesome info about how they pulled it off.
A fine introduction to WebGL, the Web-based OpenGL ES2 API, by Erik Moller on the Dev.Opera blog. Even better is there's a link to a full 2 hour WebGL tutorial video on YouTube - a must watch if WebGL is on your list of technologies to learn.
If you think the topic's past its prime, move on, but Google's Paul Irish argues that vendor prefixes are not developer friendly and we'd all be better off without them anyway.
Some slightly controversial benchmarks from Spaceport.io via VentureBeat looking at the performance of HTML5 games on iOS and Android. The iPad 2 came out in the lead overall but Android 4.0 showed a massive improvement over Android 3.0.
Various 'image replacement' techniques have been popular for years as a way to replace various elements by images while maintaining their textual content. Here, Jeffrey Zeldman shares an interesting new approach that's more efficient than the text-indentation trickery of yesteryear.
We're all probably familiar with display: block and display: none but what about inline-block? Joshua Johnson takes a look at what it can do for us.
Peter Lubbers takes an in-depth look at the different APIs and standards around HTML5 real-time communication, including Server-Sent Events, WebSocket and SPDY.
A proposal to implement an interface for getting the current time with sub-millisecond resolution in Web browsers. This could be useful for improved synchronization, animations, FPS calculations, and benchmarking.
Watching
Sass is a popular CSS extension that adds a lot of features and compiles down to regular CSS and here are 11 handy Sass tutorial videos on YouTube.
Code and Libraries
Demos
A well executed HTML5 platform game built with Scirra Construct 2 using a Rolando style game mechanic.
Last but not least..
Trevor Burnham, author of the forthcoming book 'Async JavaScript', has built a simple Web based sandbox to play with the Web Worker API (an API for spawning and working with background scripts on your page).
Marcos Caceres is heading up a W3C course on building Web applications, focusing on HTML5 and JavaScript. It's focused on W3C standards and taught directly by people working on some of those standards. It runs over 8 weeks (starting on March 12!) and doesn't seem to cost much at all.
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