Wes Gorgichuk

Wes has an extensive background in JavaScript, Node, PHP, and MySQL development. He enjoys learning new technologies and has unwittingly received the, unofficial, title of DevOps at gskinner for managing the internal server infrastructure in addition to his programming duties. When he's not learning new technologies he can be found hitting the trails on his mountain bike or travelling the world and eating at some of the best restaurants there are.

Alpha video in HTML5

Alpha video in HTML5 should be easy right? Not quite, certainly not as easy as Flash was. In an article a long long time ago, from an internet far far away … I wrote about alpha video in Flash 8. (remember Flash?). Back then alpha video was a huge new feature that allowed developers to create a .flv with a transparent background that worked in all browsers. Allowing us to do all sorts of fancy effects. With Flash being a thing of the past, modern browsers are not in agreement on what video format we should use on the web. It makes things a little more muddled today.

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Great Pumpkin Showdown 2017


Hallowe’en at gskinner means two traditions:

The first tradition is our annual pumpkin carving afternoon. Earlier in the week, we announced some teams, and on Friday we brought in food, drinks, snacks, and some classic Tim Burton Hallowe’en movies. The day was punctuated with visits from Dodo, our office dog for the day, on loan from Chris K.

The second tradition is the design and development of our Pumpkin Voting App. This privilege falls on our newest team member(s). They manage all the project stages, from initial sketches and ideation, right through deployment! It’s a great opportunity to provide some training and practice with real deadlines.
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The Dragon Age ISS

In 2014, we worked with BioWare to create the ISS: an interactive, animated cinematic of a player’s history in the first two games of the Dragon Age series, narrated by one of the characters, Varric.

When we first met with BioWare’s online team to discuss the Interactive Story Summary, we were floored. It’s always a privilege to work with one of the best game development companies in the world, and the ISS presented a challenge that was perfectly suited with some of the tech we have been focused on for the last few years. The goal of the ISS is to summarize the complex narrative and decisions that players have made in previous games in the series, and give them control of those choices leading into their latest chapter, Dragon Age: Inquisition.

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The Evolution of Video in Flash

Back in the good ol’ days, Flash was very popular among many for playing media. It was used, online and offline, for displaying animations, showing presentations, and general advertising. Though there weren’t all that many options back then, such popularity still came mostly because it was simple. It was able to animate vector art very smoothly as opposed to large, clunky .gifs, as well as allow users to use simple interactions like mouse clicks and keyboard input. Macromedia Flash itself also had a very simple interface and UI, and was used in schools all over to help teach students multimedia and animation.

As the internet evolved, so did Flash. As video playback started to become popular, Flash had no choice but to adapt to keep up with competition and provide its users with the best experience possible. This involved cutting corners, taking back-doors, and even adding a whole new programming language to the mix at one point.

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Technitone.com is back!

Create Music with Technitone (again!)

In 2011, we worked with Google on a Chrome experiment to demo the then-new Web Audio API. Although we were only tasked with coming up with something that could show the new audio features, our (often-excitable) team came up with a project that pushed our capabilities in a ton of technologies, including WebGL, Canvas, web sockets for multi-player, and CSS animations. For a great technical dive into the original Technitone.com we launched with, check out the html5rocks.com article!

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Introduction to the Flash CC HTML5 Canvas Document

With Adobe Flash Professional CC® you are able to publish HTML5 Canvas documents directly. Initially this was done using the Toolkit for CreateJS extension, however it has now been completely integrated into Flash, configurable from the Publish settings. Those who are familiar with publishing content with the Flash IDE will find themselves able to create HTML5-ready content using traditional Flash Pro timelines and tools. Even with little to no HTML/JavaScript experience, you can publish interesting and dynamic content within seconds.
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A Mental Model for Media Queries

Handling layout changes across a broad landscape of devices and browsers typically involves the use of media queries, which enable layouts to bend and flex based on their viewing environment.

Most queries I see are built around the concept of width:

@media screen and (max-width: 640px) {
    body { background-color: blue; }
}

I love the simplicity of this methodology. It’s straightforward, easy to implement, and it works with content that comprises most websites. But what about web-based apps, the website’s younger cousin? Is this model the most effective media query strategy that can help us with the unique challenges of designing web applications? Continue reading →