Web And Say All we have to say about the Web

A few web based operating systems have emerged the last few years including Jolicloud and EyeOS with many more to come such as Google's own Chrome OS but none of them have the "cool" factor of Michael Vincent's Windows 3.11 browser edition. How cool is it to use the old calculator, play YouTube video on the 3.1 media player and even browse the web through the integrated Internet Browser or use the MS-DOS Prompt. I think a tear just fell down my face while seeing this oldie again, and for that, congrats Michael.

What can you do in 25 lines of ActionScript ? How about participating to the The 25-Line ActionScript Contest! January finalists include amazing entries, such as a real-time webcam video to ASCII art conversion, fire blending, 3D world exploring and Mandelbrot zooming amongst other. This really shows the power of Flash and Action Script as well as the gain of interest in the web-related demo scene. Now the question is when will we be able to see such advanced demos using only Javascript and Canvas ? My guess is pretty soon if the war for browser performance continues...

That's what I thought when I saw Anthony Calzadilla's article "Building an Animated Cartoon Robot with jQuery" article through WebAppers. Just check the demo to see how nice this is! "This project was created by layering several empty divs over each other with transparent PNGs as background images. The backgrounds were animated at different speeds using a jQuery plug-in by Alexander Farkas. This effect simulates a faux 3-D animated background dubbed the “parallax effect” originating from old-school side scrolling video games. The robot is comprised similarly to the background animation scene by layering several DIVs together to create the different robot pieces. The final step, was animating the robot with some jQuery."

The web is an immense source of information. You can learn, read, listen or watch just about anything. But let's not forget what we, humans, tend to do on our free time: we love to play! We just play with everything: gazillions of games have been created, both material or immaterial such as computer games. Many devices have been exploited and engineered for the sole purpose of entertaining people. And just when you thought this should be enough, someone had the idea of putting a game in your Favicon. Brilliant!