The week it all went a little bit mad

On Tuesday, Google had a fancy new doodle, mouse avoiding bouncing balls. There was a lot of speculation on the internet, especially over Twitter about whether it was in HTML5 or not, and as I posted on Wednesday, it wasn’t done in HTML5.

And then it changed.

This was bound to catch some enterprising programmer’s attention, and it was only a matter of time before someone re-created the effect in HTML5 and canvas. Rob Hawkes was that guy and he produced Google’s Bouncing Balls in HTML5 Canvas in one morning. He has updated and tweaked it since but it has quite deservedly flooded the internet.

Despite all that, people were still convinced that Google’s original was created in HTML5. So I decided to rectify that. I purchased the domain www.aregooglesbouncingballshtml5.com and inserted a bit fat NO similiar to is CSS3 part of HTML5?. I had wanted to use Rob’s code to have the NO displayed in bouncing balls but I simply didn’t have the time to look into it.

Then Mark Brenig-Jones and Emile Petrone produced Dotty Dots which allows you to enter any text you want and have it displayed in bouncing balls (all using HTML5 and canvas of course).

I grabbed the code, altered it to just display NO! and hey presto! Are Google’s Bouncing Balls HTML5? now looked the way I wanted it to!

And I was pleased.

It took then took off a bit, nowhere near how much Rob’s did, but it was mentioned in a discussion on Google Groups and was then picked up by CNET and posted in an article there, which discusses Opera’s upcoming support for Google Instant. It’s also appeared in Webmonkey’s writing your name in bouncy Google balls.

Amazing how these things can take off. Rob’s original post and code has gone compltely viral, and CNN even mentioned him in an online article, referring to him as a “British Coder” (they’ve sinced removed the reference for some unknown reason).

But yes, the week that it all went a bit mad.