Brothercake
a round peg in a square hole, that still fits
Brothercake is a professional web-developer based in the UK, specialising in advanced JavaScript programming, and accessible site and application development. This site is a portfolio for my work, and a collection of useful resources such as scripts, games and articles.
There's also some bits of personal stuff,
and occasionally I sound-off about something or other 
Latest news and stuff
- Dust-Me Selectors 3.01 for Firefox (Final!)
- Development Tool | Published 7th April 2012
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Dust-Me Selectors 3.01 for Firefox is finally released, and available now from the add-ons directory. more →
It's been a sketchy year for Dust-Me, as the company who used to support its development no longer does so, and for a while it wasn't clear whether I'd have the time and resources to maintain it. But snatching development days wherever I could find them, Version 3 was eventually finished, and I realised that I owed it to the community to keep the project alive — especially since there really isn't anything else quite like it.
To all of you who've encouraged the continual development of this extension, and particularly to Will Morrison — a big thank you
Version 4 is already in development, and new features will include:
support for Sitemap XML files, expanded data export and import options,
some new preferences, and proper documentation.
I'm also investigating the possibility of being able to scan for different kind of data, or grouping and analysing rules in different ways. For example, identifying class names and attributes that are used by CSS, and those which are not. Perhaps the extension could identify rules which are not used by any media, or media which are not addressed by any rules. Or identify how images are used, whether by CSS, or markup, or not at all.
Quite a few possibilities suggest themselves, so I'll be guided by feedback on which of them would be useful. And of course, if you have any other suggestions or ideas for new features or improvements, please do let me know
more →
- Docking boxes 3.5 is on its way ...
- JavaScript Library | Published 28th March 2012
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dbx3.5 adds support for touch events, so it works on the iPad and other touch devices. It's not quite ready for release yet as it hasn't been extensively tested, but if you'd like to play around with the first beta, you can grab that now. more →
- Asynchronous Processing Unit (APU)
- JavaScript Class | Published 16th November 2011
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The Asynchronous Processing Unit (APU) is a fast and highly-controllable abstraction for performing intensive computation in JavaScript, without freezing-up the browser. The APU abstraction satisfies a need that Web Workers can't, because they have no DOM nor access to the parent document; but APUs are just ordinary code, with the same access to the host environment as any other script ... more →
- Post-Fling Update (Inebriation in Scotland)
- General News | 11th July 2011
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I've been recovering from my visit to Edinburgh, after an awesome weekend at the Highland Fling 2011. The conference was great, all the talks and QA sessions went really well, and I met and talked to some brilliant, interesting and (in one case) gorgeous people.
I'll be publishing my slides, and most of the demos I presented, once the audio is available — I have an idea to use HTML5
<audio>to embed it into the slideshow (which was written in HTML and CSS and presented with Opera in full-screen mode), then add a bunch of synchronisation events so it automatically steps-through the slides at the appropriate points in the audio.
(It will of course work in browsers other than Opera,
as it's relatively simple to script and extend
basic pagination display and control; so simple in fact,
I wonder why more browsers don't do this?).
- Image Transitions 2.0 (The Long-Awaited Sequel!)
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JavaScript Library | Published 31st May 2011
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After many months of work, I'm proud to release Image Transitions 2.0 — a long-awaited updated to this popular and widely-used script. more →
Transitions can add a touch of class to ordinary image-swaps, or form the basis of a slideshow, presentation or image-carousel. And although the latest CSS transitions are supported in most of the top browsers, the effects that this library creates are so much easier to control and automate ... not to mention providing full support for Internet Explorer — all the way back to 5.5!
Image Transitions 2.0 introduces a bunch of amazing new transform effects, that can twist, scale and skew the image to all kinds of funky angles! This version also adds new synchronisation capabilities, that make it trivial to sequence transitions together, for slideshows and other automation. It also provides some handy new utility methods, for things like pre-loading images, or testing whether images are enabled in the browser.