On 23rd of April 2015, Mihai Șucan passed away due to metastatic
cancer caused by RDEB.
My name is Mihai and I work on the Firefox developer tools.
When it comes to web development, I like both server-side and
client-side work. I am mainly interested in web browsers, web
standards and related technologies.
17 February 2010, 14:30
Just a quick note to people around here: Opera Software has
recently published a new article I wrote:
SVG or Canvas? Choosing between the two. You can also read the
article on my server. As usual,
thanks go to Chris
Mills for reviewing and providing feedback for improvements to
the article.
In unrelated news, things are going fine around here. A new web
site I've been working on will be released to the public pretty
soon. More cool stuff will come. ;)
Published in:
canvas,
opera,
svg,
tutorials.
24 July 2009, 12:21
Hello everyone!
I am getting closer to having a Moodle demo ready with PaintWeb integrated.
Wednesday I had a very fruitful discussion with my mentor, Martin,
on how I should proceed with the implementation of file saving
inside the Moodle data directory. We have come to a conclusion
which I am about to implement. More details soon.
For now, I have registered a Moodle Git repository mirror
over at repo.or.cz. I have also
registered a Moodle "fork" where I publish my Moodle branches.
You can do:
git clone git://repo.or.cz/moodle/mihaisucan.git ~/src/moodle-mihai
cd ~/src/moodle-mihai
git checkout -b mdl19-paintweb origin/mdl19-paintweb
With that, you can easily and quickly get an always up-to-date
Moodle 1.9 stable branch with TinyMCE 3 and PaintWeb
integrated. You can already play with PaintWeb in Moodle.
If you only want the TinyMCE 3 editor you can do:
git checkout -b mdl19-tinymce3 origin/mdl19-tinymce3
The TinyMCE 3 branch holds Moodle 1.9 stable with the latest
TinyMCE 3 integrated. The work I did on this branch is best
explained in a Moodle
forum discussion.
When you want to update your branch simply invoke git
pull
. Please also check the official documentation about
how to use Git.
In related news, Opera Software has published the final part of the
article serie I wrote about
keyboard accessibility in Web applications. This article
details the cross-browser compatibility layer implementation for
keyboard events used by PaintWeb.
Enjoy!
Published in:
git,
gsoc2009,
moodle,
opera,
paintweb,
tinymce,
tutorials.
17 July 2009, 11:05
Hello again!
The Google Summer of Code midterm evaluations passed without any
problems for me, yay!
I have began work on integrating PaintWeb into Moodle. I will integrate my project
into the stable Moodle 1.9 branch and into the upcoming Moodle 2.0
release.
Moodle 1.9 has a very old TinyMCE release (version 2.0)
which is not used by default - the even older HTMLArea is still
used. Both do not work in Opera and Google Chrome. For this reason
Martin Langhoff, my mentor, and other Moodle community members have
worked on patches to switch to the modern TinyMCE 3 editor. A
clean
port of TinyMCE 3 to Moodle 1.9 is available on the Moodle
forums.
The clean port is quite well done, but again, it was "outdated",
being from october 2008.
For PaintWeb I took the work Martin did and updated it to the
latest Moodle 1.9 stable branch, the latest TinyMCE 3 version, and
made additional fixes. One fix was to make the editor show up in
Opera, Safari and Chrome, and another fix was for the script which
converts TinyMCE language files to Moodle language files.
PaintWeb integration into Moodle 1.9 will come as a patch on top of
the TinyMCE 3 patch. Currently I got PaintWeb loading fine in
TinyMCE, inside Moodle. More work is needed to get file save
working. For PaintWeb I did some assorted fixes for the Makefile,
for the overall keyboard accessibility, for multi-language support,
and I did improvements to the TinyMCE plugin.
You can download the updated TinyMCE 3
patch for Moodle 1.9. The package includes usage instructions.
In other related news, Opera Software has published the second part
of the article I wrote about
keyboard accessiblity in Web applications. This article
describes the inner workings of the MouseKeys extension for
PaintWeb. Make sure you checkout the updated and improved
source code of the MouseKeys extension in the PaintWeb code
tree.
Have fun until the next time!
Published in:
gsoc2009,
moodle,
opera,
paintweb,
tinymce,
tutorials.
8 July 2009, 14:03
Hello again!
In the past week there was important progress on PaintWeb. I have published
several wiki pages about PaintWeb on Google Code - this documentation comes
as an overview or a guide to the entire codebase and the API
reference. You can read about how to
integrate PaintWeb into your Web application, how to
extend PaintWeb, how to
package PaintWeb yourself with the Makefile, and how to use
the new TinyMCE plugin.
I have completed a new
TinyMCE plugin which allows you to easily and quickly integrate
PaintWeb. This plugin allows users to click an "Edit" button which
is overlayed on top of the editable images. The plugin also
includes a context menu item (right-click and choose "Edit image"),
and a toolbar button.
I have published a new demo page which shows the latest TinyMCE
and PaintWeb working together. Enjoy!
Moodle integration is currently being planned. I wrote my thoughts
and questions in a Moodle Docs wiki page about the
paint tool integration.
Last, but not least, for the purpose of tracking progress, I have
attached a packaged PaintWeb snapshot to the Moodle tracker
issue associated with my project.
Olli Savolainen has created some
very good mockups as proposals to improve
the PaintWeb user interface. His feedback is very much
appreciated, and I really hope to get to implement his suggestions
as soon as possible. Thanks Olli!
On a related note, for those interested on
how PaintWeb implements keyboard shortcuts, Opera Software has
just published the first part of a series of articles I wrote on
this topic. More articles will be published soon at the Opera Developer community site.
Have fun testing PaintWeb and reading articles about it. Don't
forget that I am always looking forward for feedback!
Published in:
api,
documentation,
gsoc2009,
moodle,
opera,
paintweb,
tinymce,
tutorials.
23 April 2009, 14:58
Hello everyone!
I have great news this time! I have applied to work for the
Moodle project over the summer
within the Google Summer of
Code program. My project
proposal has been accepted. This means that over the summer I
will be working on integrating the PaintWeb project into
Moodle. Part of this work will also include a complete code
reorganization and several important improvements.
Locally I have already started working towards code reorganization
and a complete rework of the keyboard shortcuts support inside
PaintWeb is ready. This work will become public very soon.
I am really glad to be working with one of the best open-source
educational software. The Moodle community has been very nice and
they welcomed me warmly. Congratulations to every student who has
been accepted this year!
On a related note, Opera Software has published a tutorial I wrote
about how you
can start developing your own paint tool. The code presented is
strongly based on my work for PaintWeb. Another new tutorial is now
being prepared for publishing.
Best luck to everybody and stay tuned for more!
Published in:
gsoc2009,
moodle,
opera,
paintweb,
tutorials.
9 January 2009, 12:41
Hello everyone and a happy new year!
Opera Software has just
published my third tutorial: HTML
5 canvas - the basics. Hopefully, I will have more tutorials
coming about canvas and other Web technologies.
With this occasion I have updated my site and I added a new
Tutorials page.
As usual, any feedback is welcome! So, please go ahead and provide
me with critiques, suggestions and anything you deem important.
Published in:
opera,
tutorials.
1 November 2006, 16:27
Hello guys!
Today Opera Software has released a new site: The Opera Developer community site. The
purpose is great, and I like major web browsers having their own
developer community sites.
As the title of this post announces ... the site already had
published my first tutorial :). If you've read my previous blog
posts, it's not a big surprise my first tutorial is about voice
interactivity. Currently, very few know about VoiceXML, and there
are very few tutorials. Most of them reach only the level of "Hello
world". Therefore, my tutorial goes much further, by actually
telling you how to put voice to use in your site. I didn't write
yet-another tutorial about AJAX, XHTML, CSS, DOM, or JavaScript. I
wanted something different.
Go ahead and read the tutorial from dev.opera or from
my own server (mirror).
Thanks very much to TarquinWJ and Jax. The tutorial has reached the
level of maturity you are seeing thanks to both of them. :)
Any suggestions or comments are welcome.
Published in:
opera,
tutorials,
voicexml.