Inspiration

I was inspired by chris messina‘s idea of integrating Readability into a twitter client. Sadly, I don’t have newtwitter yet, so I can’t actually do that. But since I do have the ultrahackable Streamie client, I’ve updated my fork of streamie with that functionality. It relies on a chrome extension that sort of makes an exception to the cross domain policy that makes all frames with a URL that includes #readStyle automatically load the readability bookmarklet.

Inspired by this

Death Star 2

Alderaan

So for the past few days, I discovered this neat app called Sculptris. It’s this amazing digital sculpting app where your canvas is basically a blob of virtual clay that can be molded into any shape with any level of detail. It’s windows-only, and I thought it would be neat to have something like it that works in the browser. First I thought of using WebGL, but trying to start chromium with webgl always ends up with a GLXFBConfig error, and on Firefox, it’s stuck with using libosmesa which gives absolutely terrible framerates (IDK why but Fx4 crawls on my computer. Panorama is so slow it lags from simple dragging). Eventually, I ended up basing it off my js1k function plotter, because it’s a fairly simple 3d renderer.

The pictures on the top of the page are of the death star and alderaan, respectively, mostly because planets (and moons that aren’t moons) are mostly spherical and explosions and light rays are pretty much the only things that this app is suitable for at these stages.

So how does it work? It’s actually really simple, and probably too simple. At ~300 LOC of pretty trivial JS, it’s not much at all (though it is hideous, I must warn you). It is based on my js1k entry, and I considered making this a 1k submission, but I gave up and said I couldn’t. It starts off simple enough, do lots of freaky trigonometric loops to generate a set of points that lie on a sphere. Then loop through every 50 milliseconds, apply a 3d transformation, get points that lie within a radius of the mouse position and reference them in the selected array. Then you segregate the selected array into the foreground and background, find the arithmetic mean of the fg and bg, respectively and find the difference. Then I convert it to spherical coordinates and get rid of the ratio to ignore the magnitude of the vector and add it to the position of foreground points. Then loop through all the points and wherever there’s a long distance, insert a new dot at the midpoint.

For no apparent reason I decided not to put many words on it. I was actually reluctant to add “points” and “undo”, but it’s fine print in faded color that doesn’t help the user at all.

• Middle Click + Drag to rotate (in 3d)
• Right Drag to deflate the shape
• Left Drag to inflate the shape
• Middle Scroll to zoom in/out
• The slider bar is for controlling the size of the selection.
• The checkbox enables/disables Undo/Redo (via CtrlZ/CtrlY or CtrlZ/Ctrl+Shift+Z). App: http://antimatter15.github.com/3d-sculpt/3d.html

Mirrored Version: http://antimatter15.github.com/3d-sculpt/mirror.html

(Not as in the other meaning for mirror, but it actually reflects the X axis so that it’s symmetrical, which is a neat feature in sculptris)

Github: http://github.com/antimatter15/3d-sculpt

So the future is here and everyone is forking running websites. The rate of development is pretty insane and I’ve already disabled Chromed Bird and I’m switching to having Streamie as a pinned tab, which also leads inevitably to the question “Why is a pinned application tab aesthetically different from a Browser Action?” . But back to the point, this post will detail every little feature that is utterly insignificant in the grand scheme of things that I felt like improving on in the streamie client.

Screenshot-6

This is a feature that was in Chromed Bird and Tweetie and was pretty easy so why not implement it.

Screenshot-9

This feature is accomplished using Dion Almaer’s endpoint resolver.

Screenshot-8

My fork uses John Gruber’s improved liberal, accurate Regex pattern for matching URLs. This allows cases like the above to be properly ended at the parenthesis while still allowing wikipedia links that include parentheses.

Screenshot-7

Mine displays what client the poster is using.

You can try it out on http://antimatter15.streamie.org/ But seriously, all the forking of streamie is probably great for the project, and my role is very insignificant, and it would be great if some of the features got into the master branch :)