I went to SuperHappy Block Party on Saturday. If you don’t know what it is check out the link:
It’s a gathering of hackers and artists — people who enjoy doing technical or creative work coming together for 12 hours to meet people, work on projects, or just hang out and party. I think Super Happy Block Party grows out of the hacker culture/ethic that sprang up around Silicon Valley, and it’s a good reminder to me that this is why I’d want to be here. I tend to hack code on my own — so it was a good excuse to spent the afternoon teaching myself some new things about old tricks, more about that later.
It rained like hell that Saturday morning, but I was committed to going. I got into Palo Alto around 2 pm after it stopped raining. The sun peeked through the clouds for a bit. High Street was entirely closed off to car traffic making it a small pedestrian’s paradise. After grabbing a name badge and a chicken sandwich from the Chicken Champion truck, I went around and checked out the place. In the High Street parking garage there were all sorts of booths for artists and tech companies. On the third floor of the garage there was a “VC office hours” thing where you could pitch or talk to a Venture Capitalist if that’s your thing. Next door was Talenthouse and the Silent Disco. I didn’t really stick around to figure out what the disco was all about, but I assume everyone walking around with headphones had something to do with it. I ended up meeting plenty of folks I knew — co-workers, folks that used to work at my company, and a fellow Drawing Meats buddy, whom I knew was coming. I also got to meet plenty of interesting people. One of them was the guy who worked on Word Lens. Another dude was showing off Bastion running in native code through the Chrome browser. A met a third guy who ran a startup company out of Canada.
I ended up hanging out in the building at the end of High Street and worked on my Mac. My pet project? I purchased myself a new web domain for This Mortal Coil and I wanted to build a website for it. I want something more than a WordPress site and there’s plenty of new web technology out there to learn. I’ve been looking at HTML5′s <canvas> tag. I’d like to make WordPress plugins that’ll enhance the site’s interactivity. I also want to make my own comic page plugin to display the graphic novel. I have plenty of other ideas too. I spent my time at SuperHappy learning more about HTML5, Javascript, jQuery, and a host of new tech, and also getting distracted from doing that about every 10 minutes, but that’s SuperHappy for you. I learned enough to setup an IDE, found a decent way to debug Javascript code, and managed to write a bit of code for a simple project.
I can’t say it’s anything amazing. A lot of my time was spent reading and bashing my head against broken code and trying to figure out what I was doing wrong or what libraries I needed to include to get the page to work. Things got pretty exciting when I learned that you could do gestures and touch callbacks and practically make iOS apps without having to through Objective-C or the App Store. Here’s a sample of the work I did get done. As a bonus, if you have an iPhone, you can add these to your home screen and play them without a web browser bar taking on the screen.
HTML5 Play. This uses the HTML5 canvas. I drew a red ball. It’s not much, but you can use this with your iPhone. Just touch the red ball and you can move it around the screen by dragging your finger.
HTML5 Image Manip. You can also use this with your iPhone/iPad. It’s basically the same as HTMl5 Play, but I loaded an image and you can drag it around. I know you can do rotating and scaling but after a lot of head-bashing I couldn’t figure it out. This was meant to be a prototype for handling high resolution artwork in a gallery display. It obviously needs a lot more work.
The’re small steps, but I’m pretty excited for the possibility of what I can do in building an interactive website. I’ll be talking more about this and This Mortal Coil in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.
