My hatred of Microsoft and Adobe as a GNU/Linux user and a web developer
I had used Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks, and other Adobe products long before Adobe acquired Macromedia. At that time, I didn’t know the existence of GNU/Linux and open source communities. I didn’t even decide on my career as a web developer yet. Thanks to Microsoft’s announcement of Windows Vista, I decided to look for other Operating Systems beyond Windows that are able to run on the older hardware eternally (by the way, I didn’t know other OSes besides Windows back then), meaning that the future version of OS will still be able to work on old hardware. I found GNU/Linux, specifically Ubuntu.
After one year of switching back and forth between GNU/Linux and Windows, I finally made the decision to stick to GNU/Linux. However, I still would test the browser compatibility in IE through VirtualBox. And here comes my hatred of MSIE. During the course of my web development, I’ve read numerous articles about how Microsoft doesn’t follow the W3C standards for their Internet Explorer to make web developers suffer from browser incompatibility issue. I had enough struggle for the Internet Explorer, I decided to use some jQuery to encourage those who view my website to ditch their Internet Explorer.
I have become to hate Adobe since the day I switched to the Eclipse and NetBeans IDE to develop my projects. After Adobe announced that Flash Builder and ColdFusion Builder are based on the Eclipse, I was excited to know that Adobe finally makes their development tools available on all of the major OSes. It disappointed me when I went to download the beta version of these two builders, it only offers Windows and Mac versions, no GNU/Linux version anywhere. Since Eclipse uses its own EPL license instead of GPL license to govern the use of Eclipse, Adobe can make modification to its code and sell it as their own products. This doesn’t mean that Adobe can discriminate against GNU/Linux users from using their products since Adobe uses Linux on their Adobe.com website.
As an opposite effect, these hatreds actually make me become more involved with open source technologies, such as HTML 5 and Ogg theora. I use open source ColdFusion engine Railo to develop ColdFusion websites as well. I think that ActionScript will be replaced by jQuery and other JavaScript frameworks and FLV will be replaced by either H264 or Ogg Theora depending on which side will win the online video wars.
6 Cool jQuery Animation Plugins
Here is a list of jQuery plugins that I found over here (each link below links to the demo page of the plugin):
I personally think that Flip jQuery plugin is best to replace Flash with JavaScript. In the near future, there will be many creative animations written in jQuery. I believe that Flash will be replaced by jQuery and HTML 5 video.
For more information about each of the above plugins, please read the original article.
Animate Objects along Paths using jQuery Path Plugin
jQuery Path plugin animates an HTML element along a specified path, much like Flash motion guide layer. The path can be a curve or a line. You can see a demo on this page and checkout its source code. According to the source code, the syntax for this plugin is integrated to the jQuery animate function:
$(“#div”).stop().animate({path: pathType}, time_in_millisecond);
One disadvantage of using this plugin that I’ve found is that there is no pre-set path type. Fortunately, the plugin documentation explains how to create bezier and arc path, as well as custom path types.
CSS 3 Transition Effect
When I first learned about the transition effect of CSS 3, I was not very surprised because I was using Firefox 3.5 at that time. I viewed CSS 3 transition effect again in Chrome today and finally know the benefits of using transition effect.
Unlike other web developers, I hate Flash. One reason is because there is no good Flash IDE available for GNU/Linux, another is that Flash is a proprietary and monopoly format, just like Windows and PDF. After I saw the smooth animation using CSS 3 transition effect in Google Chrome, I decided to implement this effect as replacement for Flash. For those browsers that don’t support CSS 3 yet, such as IE, I might use jQuery to create same effect.
CSS 3 specification is still at early draft stage. Right now web developers have to define two versions of each CSS 3 property: one for Gecko, another for Webkit. However, the Webkit-based browsers have already have CSS 3 animation engine, such as Safari and Chrome. I believe that CSS 3 spec will standardize the syntax for these properties in the future.