Every now and again Google invents a doodle that deserves a life of its own - most are only used for a day. It is especially sad when one of the active JavaScript doodles is lost or relegated to the archive.
If you enjoyed the recent moog synthesizer doodle, the good news is that it has just been open sourced - so you can play and improve it as much as you like.The idea is to provide a complex example of how to use the Web Audio pipeline.
One of the problems of using the latest HTML technology is that it doesn't work with all browsers, and so the original doodle also had a parallel Flash Audio pipeline - which is not being open sourced. This does cause a problem in that there is still an interface layer able to work with either the Web Audio or the Flash Audio pipeline, which is now redundant.
In practice, it is only likely to work with Chrome until other Web audio capable browsers appear.
The JavaScript used is also a little odd, in that it was written to be used with the Closure Compiler and there are some uses of the Closure library code. In other words, this might be more difficult to get into than you would expect.
There is also a note to the effect that the Web Audio standard might have moved on a bit since the original doodle was written, but this is the sort of challenge that open source projects are designed to meet.
Let's hope the idea of open sourcing doodles catches on and spreads to the recent Turing Machine doodle. This is a doodle that has educational potential, if it was developed just a little further.
For anyone who wants to get ahead of the pack, Firefox 21 for Windows, Mac, and Linux can now be downloaded. The official launch will take place shortly and the new version will then be automatically [ ... ]
