Some people like to spend their long airplane time watching movies or playing phone games. That’s fine. Me, I usually sleep, but on my cross country flight yesterday I wanted to try building a little HTML/jQuery tool.

Because it’s something I can use this week.

Because I can (running in my laptop’s localhost).

Well almost. I lacked the internet to look up more of the code I got wrong. But I got about 80% there.

Presenting… Bigify. The thing it does?

There is a small form field at the bottom; whatever is typed or pasted there is “bigified” on the main display.

Stunning, eh?

I have a few days this week of hand on web workshops; I won’t be doing slides, mostly web demos. There is this part when I want to have everyone go to the same site, I will make shirt URLs, but still, it seems useful to display them as Big On Screen as Possible.

There are a number of jQuery code bits to dynamically resize text to a window size, I decided to try FitText, that is what I downloaded before my trip. I also made sure I had a local copy of jQuery as served by Google just so I could play while not connected.

There’s a lot of room for improvement; I wanted to make the form field disappear when not being edited, but the show/hide jQuery worked to hide, but never to show (same with CSS hover tricks, maybe it’s the absolute positioning??). Maybe it could use query parameters to save pre-configured strings as URLs. Maybe some options for different display colors (light text a black background for contrast??).

Got ideas? Fork this thing!

Who knows? I have a flight home Wednesday, maybe I will do an update.

Update

Thank for John Johnston or forking and putting into play better interface- a form field element that replaces the display text, so it feels like editing it right in place.

SOme more tweaks coming output, but this now uses a better fonf on mobile devices (I hope).


Featured Image: Large Order Of Toast flickr photo by JD Hancock shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

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An early 90s builder of the web and blogging Alan Levine barks at CogDogBlog.com on web storytelling (#ds106 #4life), photography, bending WordPress, and serendipity in the infinite internet river. He thinks it's weird to write about himself in the third person.

Comments

  1. This is really cool, such genius in its simplicity. The only problem is the default font (Anton), a zero and capital O look identical.

    If school wasn’t starting this week, I’d dive into it!

    1. Thanks Ryan, that’s a really good thing to fix. I’ll look for a different font, I was trying too quickly to find one.

      Actually there’s not too many thick fonts I looked at that had significant differences between zero and capital “O”. But I cannot think of too many URLs I would share that have capital letters in them.

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