Brian Grinstead

Instant Sprite is a CSS Sprite Generator I built to learn some of the new (at the time) JavaScript APIs and to make it easier to follow the good practice of using CSS Sprites. I found it annoying to make sprites, especially if it required opening up an image editor and calculating offsets manually. I wanted to make the tool as easy as possible to fit my workflow. I use it now when doing any design work.

Note: this is a cross posting from my article at the foliotek devblog. This improves some of the code formatting.

I have implemented DrawWindow (HTML rendering) functionality in Canvas. It is essentially rendering HTML inside of the canvas tag without modifying the original DOM. This took a lot of trial and error, but it is working pretty well now. The code is online here: https://github.com/bgrins/DrawWindow, and a really minimal project page is here: DrawWindow demo.

I decided to add in throttling functionality to the jquery bindWithDelay plugin. This is a nice feature that didn't require very many changes to the code (see the: diff).

I was playing around with unscrambling words recently, and decided to implement a solver in JavaScript. I called it wordsolver.js.

I read a nice write up on on JSON and JSONP by Angus Croll. He provided a sample implementation of a safe JSONP library.

I am working on project that needs to read local files. This relies on the FileReader interface, and I couldn't find any JavaScript libraries to help out with common usage for this, so I made one.

Get all the updated source code from github.

Sometimes, I want to have a JavaScript event that doesn't fire until the native event stops firing for a short timeout. I've needed to use that pattern in almost every project I have worked on.

I wrote an article, Make Table Rows Sortable Using jQuery UI Sortable on the Foliotek Development Blog about a problem that I ran into when trying to set up a basic sortable table using jQuery UI. The columns would collapse down once the dragging began.