Out There And Available For Everyone To See !!

I mean this blog of course.. Not ;) Even one shouldn't underestimate the importance of my first blog post, there's currently even hotter topic to talk about: Nokia's Starlight project !


Some lucky ones already got a peek of it at Qt Developer Days 2009 in Munich but if You didn't, don't panic: It's not too late :)

Starlight in a nutshell is an Open Source project that brings new building blocks for web developers to use. These building blocks include touch events, multi-touch gestures, CSS animations/transitions and CSS transforms.

The multi-touch part was done by introducing two new DOM-events to WebKit:

• TouchEvent for raw data per finger/touch point
  
• ManipulateEvent for higher-level data like pinch and rotate values for multi-touch gestures
  

The idea would be to get those eventually proposed as a standard to the W3C. This would be a giant leap for mankind since it would enable web developers to rely on an universal standard when adopting these new UI technologies. This is something that too often goes terribly wrong in the field of Web technologies and development.

What comes to the CSS animations, transitions and transforms, we implemented Apple's proposed specifications. It's pretty neat to be able to scale and/or rotate any element just by setting a CSS property. Even neater is to make that property animate smoothly from value A to B over a specified duration just by setting another CSS property. It's so easy that even I am able to quickly implement nice effects :P However, in my opinion the "API" could be better for creating interactive animations that can be controlled in real-time. Currently it suits perfectly for triggering predefined animations but controlling and changing them on the fly isn't as easy as one could hope in some situations.

The implementations are done to QtWebKit and are available with more information, videos, full documentation etc... here.

Please check it out and give comments !