Take a look at this incredible Pen, it’s an homage to how radically the Apple mouse has evolved over the years. Using a clever blend of CSS drawing and transitions, Josh Bader illustrates the beautiful simplicity of a device that — without giving a second glance — we use every single day.

Clicking through the different mice (how meta!) is nostalgic. It is reminiscent of a time when what was possible to accomplish with the peripheral was nowhere near as impressive as it is today. With apps like BetterTouchTool and Apple’s own operating system, we can interact with the mouse in ways that Doug Engelbart could never have imagined in 1963 (twenty years before the original Lisa Mouse).

Watching the seamless transitions between the different models reveals some peculiar similarities in the mice, and gives a sense of the mouse evolving. The apple logo, while not always given the same emphasis, is present in all of the designs. We begin to see the slow disappearance of the standard single-click interface in 1998 with the release of Apple’s USB Mouse (iMac Mouse in the pen).

By reusing all of the same basic elements, and applying transitioning styles to each one, the code is, like the subject matter, elegant and simple. Using just a handful of <i> elements with mouse-specific styles applied to each of them, Bader has created a unique work of art that can be appreciated by even those who may be less CSS-savvy.

How’s it done?

As previously stated, each mouse reuses some of the same components. This allows the markup to be concise and the CSS to be structured in a logical way that is easy to read. Each mouse is represented by its own block similar to what is displayed below:

/* Name */
/* Shapes and Colors */
.name.mouse, .lisa.mouse .top { }
.name.mouse { }
.name.mouse .top { }
.name .cable, .lisa .cable i, .lisa .button { }
.name .cable { }
 
/* Common styles for all “cable” elements like side buttons or cable protectors */
.name .cable i { }
 
/* Handles size and positioning of “cable” elements */
.name .cable i:nth-child(1) { }
.name .cable i:nth-child(2) { width: 60px; height: 10px; top: 90px; left: -25px; }
.name .cable i:nth-child(3) { }
.name .cable i:nth-child(4) { }
.name .cable i:nth-child(5) { }
 
/* These are self-explanatory */
.name .button { }
.name .logo { }

 I’ve stripped out the actual styles so that we can focus on the actual structure of the CSS. It’s actually not as complicated as one might think. If you’d like to dig into what styles are applied where, refer to the original source.

The shapes and colors are mostly accomplished using the border-radius property with Multiple Box-Shadows, while the actual size and placement of the mouse-specific elements is handled by the cable’s child elements.

Finally, with some clever Javascript, Bader updates the parent mouse class based on the list-item that the user clicks on:

$('li').on('click', function() {
 var self = $(this);
 $('.active').removeClass('active');
 self.addClass('active');
 self.closest('ul').attr('data-mouse', self.data('mouse') + ' mouse');
 $('.mouse').removeAttr('class').addClass('mouse ' + self.data('mouse'));
});

Overall, this is very fun bit of code to play around with, even if just for the nostalgia. The patterns used here could easily be applied to other projects. It’s fascinating to see these projects come alive on a site like Codepen, and the open nature of the site means that anyone is able to fork this pen and change it in any way they see fit.

Have you tried drawing in just CSS? Which is your favorite Apple mouse? Let us know in the comments.

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The bikeshare will be launching tomorrow at the RAC, an opening celebration will take place at noon.

The retriever weekly reported: "Alongside SGA President, Jeffrey Kee, senior information systems major, [David] Murray is working on putting into action a "Bikeshare" program that should be in use within the next couple of weeks. It will allow students to use bicycles for free from the RAC and take them to Arbutus, Catonsville, or wherever else they may want to go. Murray has also been looking into possibly expanding the bus routes available for UMBC students." - http://www.retrieverweekly.com/features/david-murray-presents-new-ideas-as-sga-vp-1.3098952

UMBC Athletics has announced: "You are cordially invited to join us this Friday, October 25th, at noon, for a tour of the newly renovated UMBC Fitness & Wellness Weight Room in the RAC. Not only are we re-opening the weight room, we've added 15 new cardio equipment pieces to the RAC cardio balcony, and a new SGA/Recreation sponsored bike/ride share truss area.
The festivities will include giveaways (water bottles, pedometers, drawstring gym backpacks, and kotex products), along with some cool demonstrations.
I hope you'll join us for the Grand Re-Opening of these areas!"

Congratulations to all those who have worked towards this goal in the past few years- including the Climate Change Task Force Transportation Committee, and the UMBC SGA Department of Environmental Affairs and the Catonsville Hub!

Learn more about bicycling and other sustainable transportation options here: http://sustainability.umbc.edu/transportation/ 

• With bike racks, bike lockers, and even bike racks on the UMBC Transit buses, we have array of options to stay active on two wheels!
• Bicycles should be parked at racks and registered with the campus police.
• The UMBC Cycling club organizes road rides and mountain biking rides, long and short, near and far.
• Patapsco State Park, and the nearby Gwynn’s Falls Trail and Jones Falls Trail in Baltimore also offers scenic and safe routes to access the city. Learn more about biking in Maryland.

Developing for high-resolution displays often requires different image resources for each image. Because of this, there’s been a need for a more standard way of serving responsive content images – ones that adapt to different resolutions and viewport sizes.

What if the browser had a way of knowing which images to load without fetching any unused resources? We can already achieve something similar with CSS using a combination of media queries for pixel density or resolution to display hi-res background images. For instance:

@media (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2), (min-resolution: 192dpi) {
      .hero {
        background-image: url('../img/hero-bg-2x.png');
      }
    }

This will display hero-bg-2x.png as a background image only when the device pixel ratio is at least 2, or the resolution is at least 192dpi.

Fortunately, the new srcset attribute addresses our need for adaptive content images. It allows us to define high-quality images for high-resolution displays without affecting users on lower resolutions.

How srcset Works

Currently, the first implementation of srcset only lets us define a set of images for different pixel densities using resolution modifiers. To see how it works we’ll need the latest nightly build of WebKit, as it’s the only browser that supports srcset. This is cutting edge stuff!

Simply add the srcset attribute to an img element and at least one resolution modifier. The browser then displays the most appropriate image from the available options. For example, the 2x modifier targets the image to use if the display has a pixel density of 2 or higher:

<img src="my-dog.jpg" srcset="my-dog-2x.jpg 2x">

This tells the browser that if we’re on a display with 2 or more device pixels per CSS pixel, it should use “my-dog-2x.jpg”. Meanwhile, users on lower pixel density displays will see “my-dog.jpg,” so no bandwidth will be wasted on the hi-res image.

Conclusion

Undoubtedly, srcset has a long way to go, but it’s pressing forward in the right direction and helping us solve a problem we’ve needed solved for quite some time. Overall, this will be a more intelligent way to serve our content images.

A future implementation of srcset will allow us to load images based on the viewport size:

<img src="dog.jpg" srcset="dog-mobile.jpg 720w, dog-tablet.jpg 1280w, dog-desktop.jpg 1x, dog-hi-res.jpg 2x" alt="Rover">

Of course, we still need to use the src attribute for browsers that don’t support srcset. Those browsers will simply ignore the srcset value and gracefully fall back to src. Although browser support for srcset is currently our biggest hang-up, Boris Smus and James South have developed some handy polyfills we can use in the meantime.

The post Thinking Ahead: Multi-Resolution Images with srcset appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

The Geolocation Working Group has published a W3C Recommendation of Geolocation API Specification. This specification defines an API that provides scripted access to geographical location information associated with the hosting device. Learn more about the Ubiquitous Web Applications Activity.