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 for Opera and Firefox
- Development Tool | Published 17th January 2012
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Dust-Me Selectors is a development tool for Opera and Firefox, that scans HTML pages to find unused CSS selectors. more →
The long-awaited updated to this popular Firefox add-on has just been released, after almost a year in development, while the new Opera extension was released a few weeks ago, to exclusively-positive reviews.
The Firefox version has a huge number of bug-fixes and improvements, most notably a fix for the spider's tendency to hang while scanning some sites, and a ten-fold increase in scanning speed — so on average, it can now scan five pages per second, where before it would take up to two seconds per page.
The Opera version is forked from the same core codebase, for parsing stylesheets and scanning pages, but its interface had to be completely re-designed to suit the capabilities of Opera's API. It's just as fast and just as solid as the new Firefox version, and brings this useful tool to all who have Opera as their browser of choice. 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.