Weekly Noise 3 - "So it's like a screensaver..." (Part II)
Series: worklog November 08, 2010
I got a lot done last week and I am really liking the Weekly Noise format. I’ve even got a new idea ready for after I finish this project – and even though I want to jump ship and start on that, I will be patient and follow my new system.
Currently, I’ve got almost all of the functionality done. There are a few minor
things left, like sorting based on the timestamp and doing some refactoring in
the node app, but for the most part all that remains is styling the pages and
then getting the background animation going. I will probably move the sorting
onto the client so that I can avoid looping in node and use some kind of
asynchronous map to build up the results set as I mentioned in my recap.
I need to find a way to draw polygons in raphael.js – I know there are a
few add-on
libraries out there that I can probably use, but there is still some legwork
involved with that.
The other challenge that remains is getting pseudo-random paths for the shapes to animated along. I saw “pseudo-random” because there is a general path that they should follow so that the background “flows”, but I need some randomness to make it look more natural.
And then, fingers crossed, it will be done. Hopefully, adding 50-100 more
shapes to the SVG canvas won’t bring the browser to it’s knees; if it does
then I might have to figure out a better way to draw the background. I don’t
know how SVG compares to <canvas> from a performance stand-point so that
might be worth investigating.
Goals for the week:
- Fix announcement sorting
- Draw a polygon
- Get the full background going
- Style the page
Time budget: 4 hours