Category: Web

Items about code specifically for the web – fancy HTML5 animations and past website projects.

Hey folks, I’m back to talk about an app project from my day job.

A prototype website and companion app for a rewards scheme that allowed users to get discounts when they shopped at participating retailers as well as donating a portion to a charitable organization of their choice.

My team and I built the frontend, while a sister team worked on the backend.

Continue reading “Reward program website and app”

Greetings one and all, today we’ll be taking a look at another bit of concepting/messing around from the start of 2015. This time we’ve got an animation of some flying reindeer!

This follows on from the settling snowfall effect I’ve covered previously. This project was started directly after, but never reached the same level of completion.

Flying reindeer animation lapetus
Continue reading “Flying reindeer animation”

In early 2015 I was given a brief to create a mobile sales app for my employers travelling salespeople to use when they visit customers. I had to rush a prototype out in 4 days which was barely functional but largely UI complete.

A few more weeks of work and it all came together. There’s still a few feature gaps and such but all the important stuff is there.

jadecliff sales app start page
Continue reading “Remote Sales App”

Quick web project today – a website for a local scaffolding company atop WordPress. This was back in 2013 and having never used WordPress for anything other than this blog before it was a learning curve.

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Above the fold features the nav, a service guarantee, various accreditations and a short slideshow of sample jobs, and from there we break in to three columns to enumerate the types of work the company will undertake.

That’s all folks, thanks for reading.

Generating previews with imagettftext

Long time no blog! I’ve been so busy at work recently I haven’t had any time to work on other stuff.

But today I have a little php nugget I had to put together recently that I think someone will find useful.

In the past I’ve dabbled with generating images dynamically in php – usually basic stuff, website statistics etc. But recently I had to do something a little more advanced in generating preview images of “Letters from Santa” that people would be paying for.

This involved placing a large amount of text within a series of template images – including ones with oddly shaped spaces the text would need to wrap around. I guess you could brute force it – manually position each line – but that’s frankly ludicrous and not future-friendly at all.

So, let’s make a solution.

Continue reading “Generating previews with imagettftext”

Online highscore system for Haxe NME

Hello everybody.

Long time no blog, so here’s a quick catch up: I got a job at a small start up doing many varied and interesting things. The first project I was given built on my experiences with game development, and somewhat outstandingly I got to start writing a new game in Haxe NME! I can’t go in to details about the title right now, but it’s 99% complete and looking good.

One desired aspect of the game was an online leaderboard of some sort, so we can assign rewards to weekly/monthly winners. I’d never even looked at NMEs web function before, vaguely deciding I’d worry about highscores in Tower Defence “at some point”.

To my relief it’s super simple to use, and with a few php files on a server I’ve got a nice simple highscore system running.

Continue reading “Online highscore system for Haxe NME”

The old Nerdshack (circa 2009)

Before the current Nerdshack, and before the previous Nerdshack, there was the original Nerdshack – the same site really, blog, portfolio and random drivel, but in a more designed shell.

I recently found this single screenshot of the old design and figured I’d publish it for posterity. I still like it – those boxy headline backgrounds were based on the window frames from the Watercolour theme in Windows Whistler (XP) builds 2410-2419, and the boxy layout of the sidebar complimented it nicely.

In the final iteration, the lower boxes on the sidebar contained links to recent blog posts, and clicking any link in to the blog triggered a smooth transition to the identically laid out but much darker design of the blog. I’m currently investigating building a similar theme for the current site – the grey is nice but it is a bit depressing after a while!

26-11-09