Posts about Graphics And Interactive Applications

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Optimizing Scratch 3 Pen Blocks

Earlier this year, we shared our work on the launch of Scratch 3.0, a major version of the visual programming environment for children of all ages. The new version of Scratch marked a complete rewrite of the runtime in JavaScript leveraging open web APIs. In our previous post, we enumerated the many performance optimizations that […]

Glitching Scratch 3.0 on an Embedded Web Game Console

Today, we are excited to announce our partnership with JoyLabz, which began in 2017 and has centered around the development of a new game console called GameBender. JoyLabz, developers of Makey Makey and Drawdio, and founded by former Lifelong Kindergarten researcher Jay Silver, has been an incredible partner. We are excited to finally share the […]

Porting Scratch from Flash to JavaScript: Performance, Interoperability and Extensions

Last year we formed a team focused on using the growing number of new web APIs to build multimedia applications that push the edge of the web platform. Our main work in this area over the last 2 years has been with the wonderful team behind Scratch at MIT’s Lifelong Kindergarten Group (LLK), and with […]

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Introducing Gaia

I’m excited to share that our technical partnerships team has developed a deeper focus on graphics and interactive application programming, a focus area which we are affectionately calling Gaia. As of today, Technical Partnerships is now Graphics and Interactive Applications (Gaia for short). In many ways this is a reflection of what this team has […]

Adapter Pattern – A Must for Vendor & Service Integrations

Software development is a costly process. Requirements need to be gathered, decisions need to be made, and resources need to be scheduled to write the software. All of these steps require an investment of time and money to get a feature to the point where it starts bringing value to a business. After the feature […]

Ergonomic Testing with Webpack, Part One, File Resolving

This is part one in a series on the intersection of module bundlers and testing frameworks. Our focus will be webpack and jest but the techniques explored here can be reused with other tools as well. Modern websites and applications are routinely built by combining hundreds of small JavaScript modules. In order to increase the […]

Accessibility for Robots

Maybe you’re not a “people person.” It’s not that you dislike other humans, but you recognize certain realities of your work. Your day job is maintaining a web application, after all, not carousing with your users. You know that accessibility is an important topic, but you haven’t been able to find the time to learn […]

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Webpack: A simple loader

A webpack loader is a Node module that tells webpack how to take some input content and transform it into output JavaScript. I often build one-off loaders to experiment or fulfill specific needs for projects—their most basic interface is simple, but can get a lot done. They can be pretty easy to follow and understand, […]

How BoxArt Provides Fast DOM Animations

Our last article about BoxArt showed how to use BoxArt’s Animated component to animate a tile-dropping game built in React. This time, we are going to look at some features of how Animated optimizes animations for performance. The Beastliness of Layout Thrash There’s a performance nightmare constantly threatening when you’re animating in the browser. As […]

Animating React Elements with BoxArt

Have you ever tried writing animations into a website? It’s complicated. There’s lots of room for error, and no tool seems to fill every animation need. Recently, while writing some DOM-based games, the Bocoup team realized there wasn’t existing software for all of the projects’ animation needs. To help fill the gaps, Bocoup created BoxArt, […]