Mark Embling

I'm the first one to say that I think new year's resolutions are a waste of time, but at the same time I think its always important to be striving to learn new things, improving your skills and generally bringing as much awesome as you can. Since we're saying hello to a new year shortly, I thought I'd take the opportunity to note a brief list of goals to achieve in the coming year.

Spurred on by the excitement of the HTML5 canvas hack night, I decided to put together something of my own using canvas and generally have a good play around with it all, and throw in a few extra new-and-shiny goodies such as audio.

Often I find myself needing a convenient way to pick colours for CSS files and various other things, pretty much every single day. Unfortunately, it has always been a bit of a hassle, with no convenient tool for doing so — certainly opening up something like Photoshop just for choosing a colour is not ideal! I know there are hundreds of these out there already, but somehow none of them really worked for me. I decided to write (another) one, with the really imaginative name of 'Colour Chooser'.

Last night I attended Rob Hawkes' first hack night, focusing on HTML 5 canvas. Ever since Rob first mentioned this idea, it was something which appealed to me and it did not disappoint. It was an enjoyable evening of learning and hacking, fuelled by a supply of pizza generously provided by Microsoft thanks to Ben Nunney and Martin Beeby.