English – LGK Blog

How I hacked Piskel and added a new feature for me

Lars Kliesing — Thu, 14 Apr 2022 11:15:00 +0000

I recently started using Piskel more often, which is a cool web app to create cute pixel graphics and animations. It’s pretty nice to use, but there was a thing I was bothering me. The color picker tool only works in scope of the app. But I wanted to transfer colors from my Affinity project to the Piskel browser app.

My goal was to be able to do this

For each color had to pick the color inside of Affinity Designer, copy the hex code, open the color dialog on Piskel, paste the code and press enter. If you want to transfer a lot of colors, this can get a little bit annoying.

The good thing: Piskel is an Open Source web project. That means with a little effort I could solve this problem for me. Because I know, there is a native color control which has a picker which works across the whole screen (atleast in Chromium browsers):

Great. Now I needed to bring this to the Piskel application and make it overwrite the current color. I tried to find some kind of a state in the JavaScript code I could use. Because Piskel’s source code is on GitHub, I could just clone the project to my machine and search through the code. Because I know from the User Interface that the main color is called “primary color” I was searching for “primary”. And voila, I found an event called "SELECT_PRIMARY_COLOR". Sounds like exactly what I need. Now I needed to know how to trigger this event. So I was searching for where "SELECT_PRIMARY_COLOR" is used in the code and this is what I found:

$.publish(Events.SELECT_PRIMARY_COLOR, [color])

Nice, looks like I could just use something like $.publish("SELECT_PRIMARY_COLOR", "#ff00ff"). I tested it in the browser console and it worked! I now also used the console to put the color input element to the HTML document and passed an event listener when the input is changed:

const colorInput = 
  document.createElement("input")

colorInput.id = "lgkColorInput"
colorInput.className = "tool-icon"
colorInput.title = "Native color picker"
colorInput.type = "color"

// The tools container of Piskel's UI
document.getElementById("tools-container")
  .append(colorInput)

document.getElementById("lgkColorInput")
  .addEventListener(
    "input", 
    ({currentTarget}) => {
      $.publish("SELECT_PRIMARY_COLOR", 
      currentTarget.value)
    }
  )

It looks great, like it was always part of the UI. I found the "tool-icon" class name, because all other tool buttons use it too.

Awesome, but everything I run on the browser console is just temporary, so I needed a way to always execute it when I’m on Piskel. The good thing; there is a browser extension for this: Custom JavaScript for Websites 2
I installed it, pasted my code in and it works!

So if you would like to my new tool aswell, just install the extension and paste in my code and it should work. ^^

The new design for my (this) blog

Lars Kliesing — Wed, 09 Mar 2022 16:08:00 +0000

Well, actually it’s already been a while since I launched this new design (October 2021 ), but without any comment.

But I think it’s not too late to still write a little post about it.

The goal: make the blog look like the rest of lgk.io

The blog runs with WordPress and now with a new child theme of the preinstalled Twenty Twenty-One, I just called „Twenty Twenty-One LGK“. In the past I used a theme I totally created myself, it was called „Winegum“. It’s still available on GitHub (https://github.com/lgkonline/Winegum1), but I really don’t recommend to use it anymore. It’s very outdated not compatible with modern WordPress features and third-party plugins. It might also be better for security reasons to use a theme, which is activity maintained. That’s why I switched to Twenty Twenty-One.

Previous look with Twenty Twenty-One

I used the color customisation options of the theme to make it match better with my portfolio site. That was the first step to the current look of the blog. From there I created my child theme and replaced parts of the theme, most important part is the header.

By the way: my portfolio site and this blog are running on completely different technologies. The blog is a PHP-server-rendered WordPress site and my portfolio is a React Single-Page-Application. So my task was to bring the header of my React app to the WordPress theme and make it look as seamless as possible.

I’m pretty happy with the result. When you switch between „Blog“ and „Start“ for example, you are switching between two totally separated sites, hopefully without mentioning it. The blog uses the same colors and the same font now.

This is how the blog looked like until I switched to Twenty Twenty-One

The new search bar

One thing was still missing on the new theme: a search bar. But hey, better late than never, right? It’s now there too!

The new search component on the start page

Search bar appears when you click on the magnifying glass icon

This was actually a more difficult because I had to use some JavaScript here. I started coding the search bar on my portfolio and then brought it to the blog theme as a small React app only for the search bar. The search bar is just executing a simple WordPress search request (/?s=my+request). Right now, the request only shows results from my blog. It would be awesome, to also show results from my portfolio site. Maybe I will bring that in the future when I have time. ^^

Link: Photopea – Like Photoshop, but free and in your browser

Lars Kliesing — Thu, 25 Nov 2021 16:00:00 +0000

Direct link ➔

With Photopea you can open, edit and save many different formats like .PSD, .AI, .XD and .sketch. Right in your browser, for free. So it might be perfect if Adobe’s subscription model is too expensive for you. With browsers like Chrome or Edge you can even install Photopea as a PWA on your desktop, so it will act like a native app. Then you even have direct access to files on your machine.

Because it’s free, you’ll see some ads on the side. If you want to remove it, you can spend a little money.

Reblog: Dark mode in 5 minutes, with inverted lightness variables

Lars Kliesing — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 15:51:00 +0000

Direct link ➔

To have a dark mode is a more and more common thing. But it can be pretty tricky.

Lea Verou wrote an awesome article how you can handle this task with CSS and custom properties in a pretty nice way:

Dark mode in 5 minutes, with inverted lightness variables – Lea Verou

I already followed that guide for my latest web project.

Updated layout for my website

Lars Kliesing — Fri, 25 Jun 2021 20:54:40 +0000

I just finished some redesigning for my website lgk.io.

Before the update:

After the update:

I now use display: grid; to show the latest blog post link next to my introduction card. This way, I waste less space and the user can see more, the links to the featured apps are visible again on the first view. ^^

I also like the new blog post view, I now show the thumbnail image of the post in the background.

Of course the grid view is designed mobile-first. On mobile, the introduction card and the blog post will be just underneath each other.

The code behind the new SP-Studio

Lars Kliesing — Sun, 20 Dec 2020 15:39:52 +0000

For some months I’m working on a cool project. It’s a web app where users can design their own characters in a South Park style. It’s the new modern version of the SP-Studio.

The older version is already about 19 years old(!) and was running with Adobe Flash. Modern browsers stopped recommending using Flash already since many years, but technically still supported it. But at the end of 2020, Flash will be entirely shut down (R.I.P. ).

Honestly it’s been some years since I visited sp-studio.de the last time, but when I was younger, I was a big fan of it. That’s why it’s a big honor for me, to bring this cool project to a new life by developing this new modern version.

Not only doesn’t this new version depend on Flash anymore, it’s designed mobile-first and works on multiple platforms: smartphones, tables, laptops and desktops. It’s also a Progressive Web App (PWA for short). This means, you can visit it normally with your browser, but are also able to install it on your device, so it will act like an app.

To find out all other things that changed since the older version, please check out this post. On this post, I want to write about the code and the technology behind this new version.

Why React?

I would say I’m already very experienced by using the React library because I already use it for a while for different projects. Compared to them, SP-Studio is actually pretty simple and straightforward to code. For the project I don’t even need any other big libraries like React Router, since we don’t need different pages. I also don’t use complex state mangers like Redux, I just work with props and states to let the different components talk to each other.

The project folder is generated with create-react-app (or “CRA” for short) and the TypeScript template. TypeScript forces me to work less chaotically, that’s why I love it.

Working with the SVG assets

The most important task the app has to do, is to read the different assets the user should be able to add to its character. All assets are prepared by Janina as SVG files. And that’s another benefit from React, because it natively supports components in SVG format and can also manipulate its attributes with code.

The default body asset and its default color tones

This is how the SVG file of the default body asset looks like:

Unfortunately I can’t directly use it like this for the application. It has to be formatted in a JSX format, also it needs to be a real React Component with props, so the values like colors can be changed from outside. That’s why wrote a script, which converts it to this:

import React from "react"
import { AssetSvgProps } from "../../../shared/assets"

export const defaultColors = {
    "col1d": "#6486A6",
    "col1n": "#8FAFCD",
    "col1s": "#49657E"
}

function SkiSki001({ colors = defaultColors, onClick, outerTransform, transform }: AssetSvgProps) {
    return (
        
                
                
                
                
                    
                
            
            
            
            
        
    )
}

export default SkiSki001

But the script does do more than just to convert the asset to a React-friendly format. Actually this part is realized with the library @svgr/core.
My script extracts the primary color tones from the vector graphic and sets them as the default color options. These colors can be overwritten later by the user. The script does also do some more things to make it easier to work with the components from outside.

Workflow with GitHub and Vercel

Vercel deploys and hosts for each change pushed to GitHub

I host and manage all my code repositories on GitHub, so I also do this one. GitHub is awesome for collaborating, and it’s easy for Janina to upload new assets. Even though the productive version wouldn’t be hosted there, we also use Vercel to deploy and host states of the site for testing and debugging. Vercel works seamlessly together with GitHub and automatically deploys when I push new changes, so I can easily show them to Janina or to test them on different devices.

That’s it

for this article. If you would like to know more details about certain things or have any questions, let me know in the comments.

The final version of the app will be launched tomorrow as I write this, so check it out when it’s published: https://sp-studio.de/

The app will evolve with the time. We plan to publish a big update with more features early 2021.