This week I submitted an entry to 10K Apart, a contest sponsored by the fine folks at MIX and An Event Apart challenging web designers and developers to craft an HTML5-based application under 10 kilobytes in total file size (minus a few forgiven resources like jQuery and Typekit). Entries must be compatible with Firefox, either Safari or Chrome, and the Internet Explorer 9 Developer Preview, but thankfully not IE8 or below.

My entry, titled Surf by Osmosis, shows you the latest top content from Digg, Google News, Twitter and YouTube in as little as a minute, allowing you to absorb today’s trends quickly so you can get on with your life. You can view and comment on my entry on its 10K Apart page.

I took this contest as an opportunity to tackle a few challenges I hadn’t yet mastered, specifically:

• Quickly fetching feeds. I already do a lot of JavaScript feed-fetching on Portwiture and TweetPlus, but this one had to get the lead out.
• Time-sensitive events. For some reason, intervals and timeouts have always felt unintuitive for me to develop.
• Drawing with the canvas element.

Originally I struggled with normalizing the way data was retrieved from the four disparate services, until I realized I could use the speedy and versatile Google AJAX Feed API to grab all of them. This minimized my reliance on outside APIs while leveraging Google’s relative lack of down-time to achieve a speedier experience.

Time-sensitive events turned out to be much less frightening than I thought they would be, at least until I combined them with the initially perplexing canvas drawing methods. Thankfully, the Mozilla Developer Community offers an amazingly helpful animated clock demo I was able to reference and simplify.

Surf by Osmosis went through a few design iterations before I settled on the current look. Unlike most of my projects, I didn’t start in a sketchbook or Photoshop. Due to the technical constraints, I felt my usual design tools would only invite more complexity, and thus more file size.

The original layout was inspired by the simplicity of my friend and colleague Chris Kalani, but the open, fluid composition was more complex to style and animate. Additionally, the lack of a container made the transition between each step feel too jarring and dramatic.

The second iteration was at one time considered “finished.” The fixed container made transitions more predictable and defined a focal point for the viewer, and the multi-layered look of it gave me plenty of opportunities to play with CSS3 gradients and shadows. Much to my dismay, the verbose CSS3 gradient syntax (duplicated for both Mozilla and Webkit compatibility) coupled with the extra logic needed to craft a dimensional animated clock pushed the file size a few kilobytes over the limit, forcing me to simplify.

As is often the case, these technical limitations pushed me to focus my design. In lieu of fancy-shmancy effects, I was now forced to rely on color and typography (specifically FF Cocon Web Pro) to inject Osmosis with personality, and I firmly believe that the end product is better for it. Lesson learned!

Voting appears to be closed as of today. I’m honored to have received an average rating of 4.06 (out of 5) stars with a total of 396 votes, my sincerest thanks to everyone who voted. I’ve already received many wonderful suggestions for how I could expand the application once the contest has ended. If you’d like to see Surf by Osmosis revised and built upon, please let me know.

If you’re curious, my favorite competing entries are probably the addictive canvas game Sinuous and the dead-simple-yet-attractive Inspired By.

Icons of the Web is a cool little app that visualizes the web’s top sites via their favicons. The larger the favicon, the more popular the site.

I was delighted to find my Brizzly icon hiding only a little ways into the pixel forest. It’s above and to the right of the MSN butterfly, nestled between SFR and the SparkFun icon. Neat!

CyborgCamp (a brainchild of my favorite cyborg anthropologist) is coming to Portland again this October, and I’m a featured speaker! Given the event’s international scope and amazing past speakers (including Ward Cunningham and Bill DeRouchey), I’m truly honored (and just a little terrified).

For those unfamiliar with the event, CyborgCamp is an unconference exploring the future of humans and computers. It started here in Portland in 2008, but has since extended to Seattle and Brasil as well. I designed the circuit-stalk logo, and was a happy attendee at the inaugural event.

I’ll be speaking about the man/machine conflict in popular culture mirroring a similar dichotomy in real life, especially design. It’ll be a fun discussion with plenty of references to Terminator 2, the first Tubeway Army album and those retired Mac versus PC ads.

The event is at WebTrends on Saturday, October 2, from 9am to 6pm. Tickets are just $10 if you buy before September 24, which is an amazing deal considering you’ll also get breakfast and coffee. For more info, check out the CyborgCamp Portland home page or follow @cyborgcamp on Twitter.