After 4 years of LeuvenSpeelt.be aka the Interfacultair Theaterfestival at my old university, the organisers are calling it quits. I was their resident web monkey, and designed a new site and poster every year. I always saw these designs as an opportunity to explore unconventional web design, as the sites were low on content and high on marketing — essentially being fancy brochures with a news feed.

With a track record of originality, I figured we should end it in style, so I whipped up a new page which explains the reasons for quitting (i.e. the politics) and highlights the work done with a timeline and some photos.

Of all the free extras that Mac OS X has, Grapher has to be one of the coolest. This little app, hidden away in the Applications/Utilities folder, is a powerful graphing tool for mathematical equations and data sets.

As you might expect from Apple, it typesets symbolic math beautifully and produces smooth, anti-aliased graphs. But this isn't just a little tech demo to showcase some of OS X's technologies: Grapher's features blow away your crusty old TI-83, and it comes with its own set of surprises. For example, not only can you save graphs as PDF or EPS, but it can export animations and even doubles as a LaTeX formula editor.

In fact, it does so much that its main weakness is the documentation, which only covers the very basics. The best way to learn Grapher is to look at the handful of included examples, although it might take you a while to find out how to replicate them from scratch.

The other day I needed to quickly graph a couple of things involving complex numbers, and it seemed that Grapher was doing some very freaky shit. Either that, or my math was really rusty. It turned out I'm not as stupid as I thought, and there are some weird caveats with using complex numbers in Grapher. Oddly, there is very little information online about it, so I figured for future reference, I should document the workarounds I discovered.

Let's dive in. Fuck MS Paint, I've got math to do.

(Note: this post assumes you know and like math.)

The days of static UIs that only have jarring transitions between pages are pretty much over. With frameworks like CoreAnimation or jQuery, it's easy to add useful animations to applications and webpages. In the case of jQuery, you can easily animate any CSS property, and you get free work-arounds for browser bugs to boot. You can run multiple animations (of arbitrary duration) at the same time, queue animations and even animate complex properties like colors or clipping rectangles.

But what if you want to go beyond mere CSS? You might have a custom widget that is drawn using <canvas>, whose contents are controlled by internal variables; maybe you're using 3D transformations to scale and position images on a page, and simple 2D tweening just doesn't cut it.

In that case, it would seem you are out of luck: jQuery's .animate() method can only be applied to a collection of DOM elements, and relies heavily on the browser's own semantics for processing CSS values and their units. However thanks to JavaScript's flexibility and jQuery's architecture, we can work around this, and re-use jQuery's excellent animation core for our own nefarious purposes.

(with apologies to Matt Groening)

After about two years, it's time for another make-over of my site.

My last design had a relatively quirky look, with a bold red/yellow theme built from various irregular vector shapes. The idea was to step away from the typical mold of rectangular aligned frames on a page. I tried to incorporate some elements of perspective into the page composition, but it ended up being a relatively flat, geometrical theme.

This time I wanted to work on the depth aspect and try to create something that feels spacious. To do this, I based the entire redesign on a two-point perspective. While the content itself is normal 2D markup, it sits in a 3D frame.

Observe:

An incredibly long standing issue, that keeps popping up, gets a handful of follow-ups, none of which actually address or even mention any of the technical problems that need to be solved.

Instead, all it gets is a bunch of "+1 Subscribe" follow-ups. Whenever I see such a comment, it tells me this:

I really want this feature, but I'm not prepared to do anything about it. I won't spend any time educating myself about it, exploring the problem space or prototyping possible solutions. I fully expect others in the community to solve it, while I reap the benefits.

Go ahead, call me cynical and misguided.

Taken today when chilling on the grass by the water with Louis Armstrong playing in the background.