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It was probably either:

* Celestia
* Stellarium

There is also this WebGL Stars demo back from 2012.

Errrm, what does *she* want to do? Make a 3D thingie fly around and shoot hearts at ponies with it? Then Unity 3D is the way to go. Blender will be more useful to her aswell. There are courses for that. Does she want to draw cool graphics? That's easy: Processing. Does she want to build her own robot? Arduino. ... And so on.

Teaching her Eclipse sounds more like torture to me. But then again, maybe you have a fledgling business programmer here - who knows?

At the age of nine focussing on a neat useful interpreted PL probably is the best. Python, C# (Unity 3D) or Processing (Processing and Arduino) are good choices. JavaScript and Chromeexperiments if she's into stuff that comes out of the Intarweb.

I like the fact that your daughter is into this sort of thing. I wish the mother of mine had supported me more/not prevented me in trying to introduce my daughter to programming. All the best to both of you.

The most advanced thing I've run in javascript was Wolf3D.

Did you sleep through the Chrome Experiments? Most of those examples are way more computationally intensive than Wolf3D and Doom. Many use 3D acceleration, some even raytrace. Most run at higher framerates then Wolf3D was even capable of.

Frankly, you're either grossly uneducated, or a troll. Either way you're showing your ignorance.

Just because you might know a little C or ASM does not give you the right to sneer at talented developers who chose different platforms. Go here and tell me these people aren't "real programmers": http://www.chromeexperiments.com/

Guess what: I code in C and asm, I hand solder my own boards. I write cross platform drivers for Windows and Mac. I'm reasonably proficient in probably every language you've ever heard of, from Clipper to RPG (on the AS400) to Java and .Net and I've been doing it for about 17 years now professionally, longer as a hobby. And you know what? I choose to spend 90% of my current development time in Javascript, both in the browser and in NodeJS.

Hopefully one day, if I work really hard and keep trying, maybe I can be considered a "programmer" in your book.

Yes, jokes appart of course the cloud can replace the need for more RAM, just doesnt act as RAM simply reduces the need for it in many cases. Back in the day for you needed extra ram to run a complex program that say, did calculations or transformed a video or image. These days many of these programs are moving to the cloud. You can edit images and videos from your browser and all the hard cpu/ram intensive work gets done on the cloud. Take a look for example at Google's chrome experiment using Google Cloud Compute backends. It does a graphics intensive transformation of any web page, and then lets you 3d-navigate the web page using your phone as a wireless controller. http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/world-wide-maze/

> What is the 3d web going to give me that 2d doesn't?

At the risk of getting down modded: your thinking is the typical two dimensional can't-think-outside-the-proverbial-box. 3D has a time and a place for certain interactive and educational applications.

To put things into perspective.
http://workshop.chromeexperiments.com/stars/

For teaching about the science of waves, caustics, etc.
http://madebyevan.com/webgl-water/

For people to explore creativity without needing an over-priced program
http://derschmale.com/demo/farbe/watercolour/FarbeWaterColour.html

For rapid prototyping and fun playing around with shaders
http://www.iquilezles.org/apps/shadertoy/

Just because _you_ can't see a need or use for it does not imply it is useless for everyone else.

Google docs .... but there's a question whether sticking full featured applications into a web browser

No one is asking that question is any consequential way. They're just doing it.

Goggle has gone way beyond web based office applications. Amazon's best selling laptop is a Chromebook. They've taken over the entire desktop with a browser.

The whole desktop. Unqualified. Everything runs in the browser. You configure hardware components In. The. Browser.

Javascript, executed by very efficient compilers like V8, is sufficient for limited interactivity up to things like powerful email clients and social networking applications. Combined with HTML5 you get media players that equal the native applications of traditional systems.

If you need more than what you can get from Javascript+HTML5 you have Native Client. Now your running optimized machine code in a sandbox. Feel free to make essentially anything right up to a first person shooter, because you can get at the GPU.

I suppose you might say Java pioneered this model. The mind-share has moved on to better platforms, however, and given Sun cum Oracle's chronic neglect it won't return.

But who encourages content developers to write browser-specific code?

In fact $49.

It's called 'impact' and games like this are made with it.

Not the ones I have seen. In Linux, Chrome wipes the floor off of FF as FF is not hardware enabled and uses direct2d and directx for acceleration. I use Chrome over Firefox 4 on my 3.5 year old laptop because sites like msnbc.com have lots of javascripts which make FF 4 unresponsive in comparison.

This demo here is much faster with Chrome. IE 9 wont run it however. Micorosft has their own 3d demo showing IE 9 ahead in their fishtank tool.

IE 9 seems to render html sites with javascript and html the fastest while chrome loads them quicker on my system. Firefox 4 is still quite an improvement over Firefox 3.6 but it is no longer in the lead from what I see. Scrolling on slashdot is the chopiest with it.

micro-games with abysmal graphics

Webgl is real and works today in the latest browsers. Go here (with Chrome 9 or FF4 and a real GPU) to see it right now.

developing for a web browser would [not] be more advantageous

In terms of performance, browsers already provide an environment that has parity with the best stand-alone dynamic languages. Both HTML5 canvas and Webgl are sufficient to solve the rendering problem for a broad class of games. These tools are standards based and free. If you've ever earned a living making games you can't miss the potential.

Large investments into browser development are coming from several competing organizations. Don't be surprised if browsers become superior to traditional techniques.

But the bigger problem is that HTML has effectively been abandoned to four companies: Apple, Google, Opera, and Mozilla. They are deciding the actual fate of HTML, not a truly independent standards process.

This reminds me of something that was promoted in a book I reviewed:

those who ship win

It's that simple. If this armchair talking head who wrote this article chastising the standards process were to magically code up a browser that better empowered me, a software developer, to deploy code to users that ran to my satisfaction then his standards would be realized first. And I might be tempted to use it and ask my users to use it so we can get good functionality.

Duh.

Back when the standards were still in flux (and still are) I was using Google Chrome to enjoy an Arcade Fire experiment that used many HTML5 elements. And guess what? I started using Chrome and the implementation of their perspective of the standards gained just a planck constant more marketshare.

This guy can sit around and complain all he wants but for better or for worse: those who ship win.

Games can be written in HTML5 too. See this:
http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/crystal-galaxy/

Totally totally sucks. The game-play is VERY jerky (as others have also noted), and that's not even full-screen. If anything, that's a great ad for showing why it's better to do games in flash. You get full-screen mode and multi-platform pretty much for free, and nowhere near as jerky for the same amount of effects.

Couple points:

1. You have to get your mind in the 'programming' mindset. Learning programming isn't necessarily purely about being a techie. You need to have solid logic skills. Much of programming is spent just getting logic right. Check out Boolean Logic for an launch point. The knowledge you gain from briefing this area will carryover into many, many programming languages. Programming *is* logic.

2. Learn what you want to program for. Pick a startup project. Is it a website you want to make? HTML & CSS is very different than learning C or C++, likewise, SQL is very different than assembly. Not that certain concepts don't carry over, but much of being a jack of all trades is simply having the ability to have good conditional logic skills, and the ability to Google things quickly and learn to apply them as you go. You don't have to become a master of all languages, or hell, even one language, but if you are truly *interested* (thats the keyword, if your not interested, its just not going to happen), and you have done a little programming in a couple of simple languages, then you will be in a good position to progress to more difficult projects.

3. Learn what you want to program for. Again. Repeated point. There are hundreds of programming languages, platforms, architectures, styles, libraries, etc. Pick something you are interested in, read about it a little bit, and if it looks like the learning curve isn't too ridiculous, start there. Perhaps a simple text based JavaScript browser game. At the end of the day you will know a bit of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript if you put your mind to it. But thats just one example.

4. W3C. This website is a good starting point for all things web.

5. Chrome Experiments If you really like web, check out the future of browser bling. Heavy JavaScript and HTML5

6. Databases. Not the most mentally entertaining, but you will need the knowhow to connect, select, insert, update, and delete data if you are doing anything with data. I am a Microsoft guy, and I can tell you that the Express Editions of Visual Studio are a greating starting point for a newbie, at zero price-point, and bundled with SQL Express, thats a good place to begin.

7. Also, places like CodeProject, StackOverflow, and CodePlex are great tools for questions ranging from the most basic to the most advanced of topics, and downloading sample code and live projects for tinkering around with.

And in addition, to see what other awesomely cool things are possible with HTML5 and Canvas, and hence possible in games, check out http://www.chromeexperiments.com/

FF can ALREADY render pages as fast as my cable will allow,

Javascript performance has (almost) nothing to do with the speed of your cable. So basically, "render as fast as my cable will allow" doesn't make any sense.
You might say something like "the actual gain in performance is negligible for any real site."
As to the race, the idea is that by making the JS faster, your browser can handle more complex sites, and it will use fewer resources on all sites ("faster" = "less CPU time to do the same thing").
So if we are talking about using your computer to look at one webpage at a time, that only uses JS to do some form validation, then yeah, there probably isn't much point in super-optimizing the JS interpreter. But if we are talking about using a destop machine with several substantial programs running, or several tabs, or webpages doing crazy shit in JS, then the optimization of the JS interpreter starts to make a big difference between things being silk smooth and annoyingly laggy or even unusable.

If that was the issue, then it should have been included in the summary. As is, this sounds like just another version of http://www.chromeexperiments.com/, and some people are commenting that the website works with chrome. Does Chrome experiments allows IE9 now that it has the canvas tag native?

canvas can do 3-d models, rotation, etc. check out chrome experiments (not strictly for chrome) for some spectacular demos.

I've been using Chromium on Gentoo for about a week. It's generally stable and definitely feels faster and more responsive than Firefox. The proof-of-concept toys over at Chrome Experiments are worth checking out. A lot of them work in Firefox too, but Chrome's speed advantage is more obvious. It's a shame Chrome can't do for Flash what it does for javascript. I do miss extensions like NoScript, NukeAnything, and VideoDownloader. Chrome is extendable though and I expect to see their equivalents in Chrome pretty soon.

I don't care too much about my own browsing stats being reported to Google, but I am glad that SRWare's Iron browser is available. In fact, as long as the browsers are standards-compliant, the more the better. I'm generally supportive of Google's agenda to make the browser the primary interface for the PC. Of course there are some applications that really should run on a desktop... but the other 99% of what people do with their PCs would be much better served by a standards-compliant web framework.

http://www.chromeexperiments.com/

ChromeOS is a very good move for everyone involved. Remember, this OS and the devices it will run on are not targeting average slashdotters. I can personally vouch that I come across daily contact with people, business people not just teenagers, who don't use anything other than their browser. The worst aspect of a computer for them, is upgrading, updating all applications, viruses, malware, and general maintenance of the system. They nearly all fail in these, and after a year, they think their laptop is not usable anymore and go and buy a new one. They would LOVE this OS, and are they primary targets of it. Also, synchronisation between multiple computers is a bitch, that even they most fail at. And they hate leaving their documents here and there. Files and directories don't work for them, it's a broken metaphor for most people, and as much as love to organise my files in hierarchical directories, they simply don't care. They just want access to their information, when they need, as conveniently as possible.

I hate Web apps as much as the next guy on this forum, and even use my trusty IMAP client for fetching my emails from Gmail. But I can't deny that web apps are the future, specially when HTML 5 comes off age and becomes widespread. If you look back at what the Web looked like 5 years ago and compare it to now, you'll see that it will be irresistible in 5 years time. Have a look at http://www.chromeexperiments.com/ to get a taste of what we are looking at.

On a more general note, anyone who is comparing this to old failed projects based on thin clients, X terminals or net pcs, is missing the point. Yes, the technology behind this might be similar to those, but times are changing. On the one hand, people are getting used to ever-present always-available services. On the other hand, 3G is now widespread, affordable, and provides great utility for many. Laptops and phones are converging. 2007 was the year of netbooks, 2010 might be the year of smartbooks (running ARM processors). Smartphones are morphing into Internet tablets (e.g,, N900). These are very different, and interesting times.

Yes, this is cloud computing, and yes, it raises huge privacy issues. It is up to us the tech savvy crown to raise these issues and address them.

Slashdotters can always run their trusty Debian or Fedora or FreeBSD or on their computer. And they remain great choices. But Google is pushing applications to go online and cross browser. They are pushing for open source drivers. They are pushing for open standards and cooperation with upstream and downstream projects. This is a Good Thing (TM) for all of us, even if we are not the target consumers of this OS.

aside from webgl, there's also canvas. Take a look at some of the google chrome canvas demos sometime.

Finally, SVG support in browsers sucks complete ass. ... Add animation or interactivity too it and you are in for a freaking world of pain.

Eh, it's not that bad for interactivity. Simple things like the FindTheCountry interactive geography quiz done entirely in one SVG file, and interactive map layers work in all good (non-IE) browsers. Animation through SMIL support seems pretty limited, but nowadays people are more likely to modify the SVG directly using DOM calls.

The <canvas> tag gets all the attention and awesome demos, but now there are JavaScript libraries like the Burst framework that can read in SVG elements and render and animate them. So an artist can create and name all the graphic assets in an SVG file, then a programmer pulls them out as needed.

Inkscape's fine for static SVG editing, but there are no good authoring tools for these animation and interactivity tricks. Furthermore many SVG demos on the web still use deprecated syntax to load SVG files.

Might it have had something to do with the Twitter-based HTML demo (http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/08/05/2348219/HTML-5-Canvas-Experiment-Hints-At-Things-To-Come?art_pos=8) that made Slashdot earlier today? The site in question hits Twitter for a large number of tweets, and I imagine a lot of /.'ers were checking it out earlier. I doubt it helped, at the very least...

Good theory, as I have tried to view that demo on multiple browsers from multiple connections, all I ever get is a black page with white text that says "LOADING", and nothing ever happens. I was rather disappointed in the demo, I thought, well I can do that with CSS - there must be more to it considering the kind of demos I have seen: http://www.chromeexperiments.com/ , many of which now work in FF3.5 as well.

Oh check out a recent post there: http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/twitterbrowse/ (could be related too...)

I could not figure out what was the big deal about the black page that says LOADING this morning. I am a fan of plain text presentations but why use HTML5 elements to do it?

Now I get it, the demo was not working due to some unimaginable reason that it depended on Twitter feeds?

Heh, now I cannot find the slashdot article in question... perhaps it has been yanked?

Anyway, the canvas demos on the chrome demo site are pretty cool. This whole black page that says "LOADING" and runs scripts directly from twitter was pretty unimpressive in comparison. AS of this post that demo is still non-functional.

Might it have had something to do with the Twitter-based HTML demo (http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/08/05/2348219/HTML-5-Canvas-Experiment-Hints-At-Things-To-Come?art_pos=8) that made Slashdot earlier today? The site in question hits Twitter for a large number of tweets, and I imagine a lot of /.'ers were checking it out earlier. I doubt it helped, at the very least...

Good theory, as I have tried to view that demo on multiple browsers from multiple connections, all I ever get is a black page with white text that says "LOADING", and nothing ever happens. I was rather disappointed in the demo, I thought, well I can do that with CSS - there must be more to it considering the kind of demos I have seen: http://www.chromeexperiments.com/ , many of which now work in FF3.5 as well.

Oh check out a recent post there: http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/twitterbrowse/ (could be related too...)

I could not figure out what was the big deal about the black page that says LOADING this morning. I am a fan of plain text presentations but why use HTML5 elements to do it?

Now I get it, the demo was not working due to some unimaginable reason that it depended on Twitter feeds?

Heh, now I cannot find the slashdot article in question... perhaps it has been yanked?

Anyway, the canvas demos on the chrome demo site are pretty cool. This whole black page that says "LOADING" and runs scripts directly from twitter was pretty unimpressive in comparison. AS of this post that demo is still non-functional.

I really wish I had more time then I do now... I could write a dissertation on the SVG/Canvas dilemma. Yes, I've used them both for animation. Here goes:

SVG is wonderful to generate on the backend, or with client-side apps. It's the better solution for larger, more complicated vector graphics that don't have to be animated -- maps, charts, graphs, and visual structure representation (including CAD output). In order to animate SVG on a lower-level, you really must write a decent-size JS "library" to deal with all the DOM insertions and modifications. If you have set-pieces which you want to move, for example you have a ready-made SVG of a car and a ready-made SVG of a racetrack, then SVG will be your first choice for turning that into an in-browser game. Whenever you have previously-created vector graphics elements, that need to (primarily) be moved around and slightly modified, then SVG is the better solution.

Canvas is low-level, inherently. That means that the assumption is that in most cases you *don't* have previously-created graphics, and that you're generating everything you're about to display -- on the fly. This includes custom user controls, dynamic visualizations(flow, growth, timeline, mathematical representations, etc.), and elements that are to be generated once and then placed around the site, as part of the usual DOM. One example that comes to mind is the Bespin project, where the entire GUI is one huge canvas element, because everything must be generated in real-time, from scratch. Another advantage that canvas has is speed, as can be seen on the Chrome Experiments page.

If it were up to me, I'd happily use both standards in the browser. But it's not. Currently, both Firefox and Webkit-based browsers (Safari, Chrome) support Canvas, with Opera on the way to completing the spec implementation (I think the latest beta versions may already support it). Effectively, this leaves only IE, in which you can get canvas (partially) using explorercanvas.

It's a matter of adoption. Canvas is way ahead, even though it's a much younger standard. The reason is that SVG is a massive standard, which is especially difficult to implement in a browser.

In that case, Google is completely nuts.

SVG is good for (mostly-)static vector graphics. While it was designed with a DOM and proper handlers in place to facilitate animation, in practice it's A) not fast enough and B) a very, *very* large standard.

If you want to see Canvas used for animation, check out the Chrome Experiments page. Most of the animation there is done using Canvas. It's a smaller standard, and it's very close to already-implemented 2D-model engines, like cairo.

You can write a program that runs in a web browser but does not store its data in the cloud. Use HTML + JavaScript + Google Gears (or HTML5 offline storage), and you essentially have a Desktop app.

Yes, JavaScript is slower, because it is interpreted, not compiled. But the race among web browsers for faster JavaScript has closed the gap. Witness, Chrome Expriments for some fun demos of the surprising things a browser can do.

Yes, JavaScript has been known to be hard to deal with. But that is almost completely because of different implementations by different browsers. Actually, the fault is almost entirely Internet Explorer. The difference between writing JavaScript for Chrome and Safari and Firefox is tiny compared to the difference between them and Internet Explorer. Even IE 7 and 8 continue to botch things that others have down.

But the jQuery library (and others) have smoothed a lot of those inconsistencies and given JavaScript programmers a more uniform API (thank you, those who have worked on these!).

JavaScript as a programming language is actually quite nice and elegant --- the way you write objects and arrays and the dot notation for calling methods and how everything is an object --- it looks a lot like Python.

If the javascript performance were anywhere near chrome's you would be able to tell from running some of the examples here

Yup, I've been following the PPA build too, and I have to say it's come a long way! I've been using it regularly.

It no longer crashes all the time, though still does so once in a while (but hell so does firefox). These are usually repeatable so I'm sure they'll be fixed in the not too distant future.

One thing I've noticed recently is that one of the first things I tried when first installing it was to check whether the Chrome Experiments would work, and unsurprisingly it crashed immediately when I tried to start any of them. However, a few days ago I tried it again and they all worked!

All in all it's definitely usable now (if you're into trying alpha software). I've kept it open for long periods of time and had up to 15 tabs open at a time. It's noticeably faster than Firefox 3.0.1. (This may change with 3.1, which contains the tracemonkey jit engine.. i'm looking forward to making a comparison.)

In cases with extremely JS heavy pages, the browser may not be able to render faster than you can read.

see chrome experiments. While most of the stuff is useless twiddling, some of it, like Canvas3D, may find its way into real websites (in this case, probably facebook) not too long from now.

In cases with extremely JS heavy pages, the browser may not be able to render faster than you can read.

see chrome experiments. While most of the stuff is useless twiddling, some of it, like Canvas3D, may find its way into real websites (in this case, probably facebook) not too long from now.

How long until Google comes out with a JavaScript intensive application that will practically require Chrome to function? It already exists, in the form of http://www.chromeexperiments.com/