simple drawing of a falling airplane doodles on test

Too many, literally, moving parts on one hand – and on the other not enough complexity to warrant splitting into multiple overlapping canvases and updating them selectively.) (I decided to have just one canvas, and clear it and draw from scratch with every frame. This approach comes with some interesting challenges – for example, moving or changing an object in DOM has immediate consequences, whereas for canvas there’s a specific moment when everything’s drawn at the same time. I put together a graphic engine that abstracts away graphic primitives called “rects,” and then renders them using either canvas, DOM if canvas is unavailable.

However, some of the older browsers we cared about didn't support it – and even though I am literally sharing an office with the person who put together an otherwise excellent excanvas, I decided to choose a different way. Graphics via DOM and canvas #Ĭanvas is powerful and created for exactly the kind of things we wanted to do in this doodle. So, let's go through some of the modern Web technologies that found their place – and some that didn't – in the Stanisław Lem doodle. This means carefully looking at whatever part of broadly understood HTML5 is available, and whether it helps us make the doodle better without distracting from it or overshadowing it. With our doodles, we want to celebrate specific people and events, and we want to do that using the best art and the best technologies we can summon – but never celebrate technology for technology's sake. Today, I want to share that code with you – perhaps you'll find something interesting there, or point out my mistakes – and talk a bit about it.Ī thing worth keeping in mind is that Google's homepage is not a place for tech demos. We learn a lot from each interactive doodle, and the recent Stanisław Lem mini-game was no exception, with its 17,000 lines of JavaScript code trying many things for the first time in doodle history. And while my relationship with pens and brushes has long had that distinctive flavour of a restraining order, I often contribute to the interactive ones.Įvery interactive doodle I coded ( Pac-Man, Jules Verne, World’s Fair)– and many I helped with – were in equal parts futuristic and anachronistic: great opportunities for pie-in-the-sky applications of cutting-edge Web features… and gritty pragmatism of cross-browser compatibility. I’m talking about Google doodles, the special illustrations that occasionally replace our logo.

It comes with many challenging restrictions: particular focus on speed and latency, having to cater to all sorts of browsers and work under various circumstances, and… yes, surprise and delight. The Google homepage is a fascinating environment to code within.

Simple drawing of a falling airplane doodles on test