Gury: HTML5 Canvas jQuery-inspired helper

thechangelog.com

21 points·thegoleffect··6 comments

(Disclaimer: I am writing a currently-unreleased jquery-based canvas helper)

I really like the idea here, and am all for more people using the canvas element, but I don't really think the built in canvas API is unwieldy, or even remotely foreign to anyone working on the web.

The only interesting functionality exposed in the API that I could find was some basic animation - defining a translation, saving the context of the canvas (for later rendering?) and then running the animation. Can anyone explain why this is interesting? Maybe it's a little early to pass judgement?

edit: Okay, the support for tags on objects you draw onto the canvas is pretty useful. This would definitely be useful for anyone developing a canvas game.

It appears to just syntactic sugar. Chaining things, etc etc.

I like it, but I have to admit it doesn't seem to add a whole lot yet.

It'd be great is the canvas api returned the context object whenever you made a change to it, so we could do chaining without an extra library.

I find the raw canvas API to be a little bit clunky and unwieldy. The syntactic sugar makes it a lot more likely that I'll use canvas without a second thought.

Making something more pleasant, even just a little bit, can lower the barrier enough to get a lot of people going.

My idea wasn't to replace the Canvas API but to supplement it with a framework that allows for even faster/easier development. Hopefully in the way that jQuery doesn't replace JS but makes DOM manipulation and UI programming faster/easier.

Okay, this makes a lot more sense now. I'll definitely be watching this to see where you take it, since quick development of canvas applications is something we could definitely use more of.

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