Comcast has made the Japanese NHK channel available for the next week. It can be accessed via channel 330 on Comcast. The broadcast is in Japanese, but if you have an SAP enabled TV or set top box, you can listen to a translation of the broadcast. It took me a while to figure out how to enable secondary broadcast on my Comcast box, and I didn’t find much info online, so I wanted to post it here in case anyone else was interested.

I have been having fun playing around with JavaScript, the HTML5 Canvas element and EaselJS lately, and have been building a lot of small experiments. I wanted to share a simple one I created, which creates spiral designs. The example was pretty simple to put together, but is fun to play with, and can make some pretty nice patterns / spirals. I have uploaded a couple of images that I have created using the example:

If you have happen to have been watching my Flickr feed for the past week or two, you have probably noticed that I have been playing around with creating some graphics using Canvas and EaselJS. What started as a simple EaselJS experiment, quickly morphed into an excuse to build a mini app / example and play around with some of the new HTML5 and CSS3 features. The example I created (named PixelFlow) is a simple example / app that allows you to choose an image, and then create some designs using the colors from the image.

I am wrapping up a code example that uses the Canvas.toDataURL API to save canvas data to an image. I am almost done, and was doing a final round of browser testing when I noticed that my example wasnt working on my Android based Google Nexus One Device (2.2.2). After some debugging, and then Googling, I discovered that the Canvas.toDataURL API is not implemented on Android (you can view the bug report here).

One of the cool features of the HTML5 canvas element is the toDataURL method. This returns a Base64 encoded image in the form of a data url string. Among other things, this can be displayed directly within an IMG element on the page, or sent to the server so the image can be saved. However, one thing that I found out this weekend is that there is no background color for the image returned from toDataURL.

Just a quick note, but I have created a Flickr set which contains some of the generative graphics I have been creating using canvas, JavaScript and EaselJS. UPDATE: All images have been archived here from Flickr. You can view the set here. I haven’t released all of the code used to create all of the examples, but I will release the code / examples as I finish them. Ill post new images on the set whenever I create something I think is interesting.

If you run my EaselJS Drone Follow example from yesterday on any non-Android / iOS computer / device, you may notice that a graphic is drawn between the mouse touch point and the current position of the drone. This is done by managing and drawing to two canvas elements and is provided to help make it clear what the drone is following (your mouse) and which direction it is currently heading.

As I posted the other day, I have been spending some time playing around with dynamic drawing with the HTML5 Canvas element and EaselJS. I have put together quite a few examples and experiments and will be posting them (along with what I learned from them) over the next couple of weeks. The first example I want to share is a simple one which I call “follow”. It basically uses EaselJS to create a snake like shape that follows you mouse.

One of the features of HTML5 that developers are most excited about is the Canvas element. The Canvas element essentials provides a bitmap canvas for dynamically rendering shapes and bitmap graphics. It is very similar to the Flash Player’s Bitmap and BitmapData classes. However, working with the Canvas element can be difficult, especially if you need to manage, update and or / animate multiple shapes and bitmaps. Unlike the Flash Player, the Canvas element does not have a concept of a display list or individual items to render.

As you have probably heard, Apple has updated the terms of their developer program license. In particular, section 3.3.1 has been revised and now allows developers to develop applications with a wider array of tools and technologies, including Flash CS5. We have posted some more information on this on the Adobe Conversations blog. Speaking about the packager for iphone included in Flash CS5: The feature is available for developers to use today in Flash Professional CS5, and we will now resume development work on this feature for future releases.