CSS3 3D Transformations

Here's a nice, concise snippet to demonstrate CSS3 3D transformations, from Superted's Toy Story iAd Navigation post:

items[i].style.webkitTransform  = matrix.rotate(newAngle, 0, 0).translate(0, 0, 380);

Want to create a "wheel" of images? Rotate each one by its position around the wheel, so it will face the center of the wheel. Then shove it back (along z) to the edge of the wheel.

IE 9 + Canvas

From twitter:

jeresig IE 9 shipping with Canvas! http://j.mp/cTyuQg

Huzzah!

Hover on Multi-touch Devices

Technical Note TN2262: Preparing Your Web Content for iPad:

"For example, a mouse pointer can hover over a webpage element and trigger an event; a finger on a Multi-Touch screen cannot."

This is certainly true for multi-touch devices available now, but I wouldn't be surprised to see, someday, touch-sensitive devices which are also proximity-sensitive.

Update 2010/07/08: Others are thinking about implications of hover on multi-touch devices: http://trentwalton.com/2010/07/05/non-hover/ via http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1497108.

Update 2010/08/14: A recent Ars Technica article, exploring the similarities between the iPad and ST:TNG's PADD, contained a relevant snippet:

"Still, what new frontiers are out there for interacting with computing devices? Michael Okuda believes that removing the touch requirement will bring new advances in gesture-based control. "Once you don't have to physically touch the screen," he told Ars, "I think yet another window is going to open up.""

Stephen Wolfram on Alan Turing

Here's a part of the "suicide" story with which I was not familiar.

Wolfram|Alpha Blog : Happy Birthday, Alan Turing:

"When one first hears that Alan Turing died by eating an apple impregnated with cyanide one assumes it must have been intentional suicide. But when one later discovers that he was quite a tinkerer, had recently made cyanide for the purpose of electroplating spoons, kept chemicals alongside his food, and was rather a messy individual, the picture becomes a lot less clear."