In the last couple of months we’ve seen API after API being released, many of which make life easier. Today we’re going to focus on the Speech Synthesis API, which uses system libraries to speak, whatever you want, making the Web considerably more accessible. Browser support ... This API is fairly new, so not widely supported. Currently only Chrome Canary and Safari support it. (Safari supports it on desktop and mobile.) So, we can play with the API, but it’s not production ready unless we have...
We’re all used to browser notifications; we get them all the time on sites like Facebook and now, using the Notification API, we can actually push notifications to the desktop. Imagine a site performing a task whilst the user checks her email, she would still receive our completion notification on her desktop. Browser support ... At present, the Notification API is a working draft, so it’s not universally supported. However, it is supported by Chrome, Mozilla and Safari. Even more helpfully,...
One of the best ways of presenting graphics online is as scaleable vector graphics. That’s because SVG can adapt to any screen size, without losing quality. The increased demand for the format has lead to the open source Snap.svg library. What is Snap.svg? ... Snap is a JavaScript library that aims to help web developers bring advanced SVG features to the Web. This library can load, animate or even create SVG graphics right in the browser. Snap was written by Dmitry Baranovskiy who was also the writer...
HTML5 has brought a lot of new features to HTML and whilst we all concentrate on the big advances like canvas, and audio & video, some of the simpler improvements get overlooked. This is the case with the File Reader API, which although not glamorous, is an excellent addition to our toolbox. In terms of browser support the File Reader API is supported by everything modern with the exception of Opera Mini, so you can be confident using it right now. What this new API does is read the contents of a file on...
A lot of us create JavaScript animations in our projects, these animations are usually simple and require no physics whatsoever. PhysicsJS aims to change that by making it easy for us to add physics to our JavaScript animations without slowing download time. This library is modular, that means you only need to load what you want to use, and the core files are just 31kb. Why use this library ? ... One of the reasons is its modular workflow. This has the advantage of removing the clutter you don’t need and...
Something that's always welcome are plugins that enhance usability on websites, especially when they assist people with disabilities. Annyang is a great example of that. It's a plugin that helps you set up speech recognition on your site. It assists people with visual impairments and it's just plain cool to boot. Currently it's only supported by Chrome, but it degrades gracefully so it's usable now. Using Annyang ... Annyang doesn't have any dependencies, so all you need to do to get it working is to...
Web applications today are nothing like the ones we saw just a couple of years ago, they're far more complex and many rival desktop equivalents. In order to create this kind of application, we can't really rely on libraries like jQuery that are intended for DOM manipulation. This new rise of web applications has lead to JavaScript developers taking the MVC route simply because it creates much cleaner and more manageable code. A number of JavaScript frameworks have emerged for creating web applications...
In recent years web pages and applications have been requiring the use of more, and increasingly complicated, JavaScript. Google Drive, for example, is a full blown desktop application which relies on JavaScript being responsive. Although JavaScript performance has improved, large, complex scripts can still slow browsers down, or even cause them to freeze. This is where Web Workers come in. They tell the browser to execute large, potentially problematic, scripts in the background so the user...