Christian Heilmann

Browserfountain – playing with Canvas particles

Wednesday, August 24th, 2011 at 7:39 pm

Last week I attended the great Creative JavaScript training by Seb Lee Delisle. One of the things we talked about were simple particle systems using canvas with simulated physics. I was pretty blown away to see how easy that is, especially when you fake the physics rather than using the real formulas.

One of my experiments I just uploaded to Mozilla’s Demo Studio, the Browser fountain (source code on GitHub).

Here’s what it looks like on YouTube:

The performance is pretty amazing, although I am doing a few things that make me cringe while writing them if you approach something like that like you approach building production web sites. Sometimes it makes sense to let go, I guess.

I am currently in discussion with Seb if he is OK for me to write a simple tutorial on particles, so let’s see if that goes ahead.

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Check out the Dev Digest Newsletter I write every week for WeAreDevelopers. Latest issues:

160: Graphs and RAGs explained and VS Code extension hacks Graphs and RAG explained, how AI is reshaping UI and work, how to efficiently use Cursor, VS Code extensions security issues.
159: AI pipelines, 10x faster TypeScript, How to interview How to use LLMs to help you write code and how much electricity does that use? Is your API secure? 10x faster TypeScript thanks to Go!
158: 🕹️ Super Mario AI 🔑 API keys in LLMs 🤙🏾 Vibe Coding Why is AI playing Super Mario? How is hallucinating the least of our worries and what are rules for developing Safety Critical Code?
157: CUDA in Python, Gemini Code Assist and back-dooring LLMs We met with a CUDA expert from NVIDIA about the future of hardware, we look at how AI fails and how to play pong on 140 browser tabs.
156: Enterprise dead, all about Bluesky and React moves on! Learn about Bluesky as a platform, how to build a React App and how to speed up SQL. And play an impossible game in the browser.

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