Making Software

Have you ever wondered how a touch screen knows you are touching it? Well, it has these layers of transparent metal electrodes embedded in the display. When your finger gets close to the screen it causes a disturbance in the magnetic field that the electrodes sense. FIG_ 002 Because the electrodes are laid out on a grid, they can report back the x and y co-ordinates of the disturbance to the operating system. Pretty neat. Or maybe you’ve wondered why we call it a Gaussian blur? When we blur an image, we look at all the neighbouring pixels and multiply them by a matrix of weights called a kernel. FIG_ 003 The most common type of kernel has a gaussian distribution, meaning it gets stronger towards the middle and weaker at the edges. This produces a more realistic blur without being too computationally expensive. Maybe you’ve always wanted to know how the pen tool works in Figma and what those handles actually do when you move them. t = FIG_ 004 They control the points on a bezier ... Read full article.