Articles by Robert Nyman [Editor emeritus]
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Single Div Drawings with CSS
Why A Single Div? In May of 2013 I attended CSSConf and saw Lea Verou speak about the humble border-radius. It was an eye-opening talk and I realized there was much about CSS behavior I did not fully understand. This reminded me of my time as a fine arts student where I was constantly pushed […]
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Firefox Add-on Enables Web Development Across Browsers and Devices
Developing across multiple browsers and devices is the main issue developers have when building applications. Wouldn’t it be great to debug your app across desktop, Android and iOS with one tool? We believe the Web is powerful enough to offer a Mobile Web development solution that meets these needs! Enter an experimental Firefox add-on called […]
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350 posts on Hacks in 2 years!
Two years ago, we made a number of changes to the Mozilla Hacks blog. Since then we’ve had over three million unique visitors and 350 quality posts in just less than two years – almost one every second day! Part of these changes included: A clear focus on learning about the Open Web & open […]
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Enabling Voice Input into the Open Web and Firefox OS
With the advent of smartphones triggered by iPhone in 2007, Touch became the primary mode of input for interacting with these devices. And now with the advent of wearables (and other hands-free technologies that existed before), Voice is becoming another key method of input. The possibilities of experiences Voice Input enables are huge, to say […]
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Webapplate – Maintainable web app template for Firefox OS and Chrome Apps
There are many powerful tools and technologies surrounding the Web, and we can reuse them to develop cross platform mobile and desktop apps, especially in light of installable apps appearing on platforms such as Firefox OS. This article looks at the best way to do this, and presents Webapplate, a powerful new template to help […]
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Introducing Blast.js
After releasing Velocity.js, a highly performant web animation engine, I wanted to leverage that power for typographic manipulation. The question soon arose, How could I animate one letter, one word, or one sentence at a time without bloating my HTML with wrapper elements? If I could figure this out, I could create beautiful typographic animation […]
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Black Box Driven Development in JavaScript
Sooner or later every developer finds the beauty of the design patterns. Also, sooner or later the developer finds that most of the patterns are not applicable in their pure format. Very often we use variations. We change the well-known definitions to fit in our use cases. I know that we (the programmers) like buzzwords. […]
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Building Interactive HTML5 Videos
The HTML5 <video> element makes embedding videos into your site as easy as embedding images. And since all major browsers support <video> since 2011, it’s also the most reliable way to get your moving pictures seen by people. A more recent addition to the HTML5 family is the <track> element. It’s a sub-element of <video>, […]
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Launching Open Web Apps feedback channels – help us make the web better!
About three months ago we launched a feedback channel for the Firefox Developer Tools, and since it was a great success, we’re happy announce a new one for Open Web Apps! For Developer Tools, we have, and keep on getting, excellent suggestions at http://mzl.la/devtools, which has lead to features coming from ideas there being implemented […]
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Browserify and Gulp with React
The JS world moves quickly, and nowadays, there’re some new kids around the block. Today, we’ll explore Browserify, Gulp, and React and see whether they’d sound suitable for our projects. You might have heard of them but not have had the time to check them out. So we’ll look at the advantages and disadvantages of […]
