Left the snowglobe open for about 10 minutes in a tab and Firefox hit 2GB of memory usage. :-( Not necessarily your fault, but definitely hampers the charm... pretty demo, regardless. Wish I had a device with support for HTML orientation events so I could try it out there.

Ouch. Sorry - that is indeed a problem (not necessarily in this context - this page goes away on monday - but in general)! Strangely, we are reusing our objects, so I don't think it can be the javascript code itself. Could it somehow be Firefox's implementation of canvas?

I will investigate. Thanks!

I didn't leave the page open but I did notice that it pegged a processor [Firefox 4 beta8pre].

Nicely done!

I recently made a snowglobe generator where people can create there own.

http://www.snowglobecreator.com/

It's very basic though and also in Flash so it won't run on iphone etc. =/ Yet it was fun too watch what people did with it so far. Like my friend who did a series of videogame styled globes like this one. http://www.snowglobecreator.com/?uid=52#featured

While the post itself talks briefly about implementing the snow algorithm and the tilting, more advanced people can go directly through the code over at github: https://gist.github.com/716215

Rotation of my iPhone seemed to really throw it off. All the snowflakes suddenly zoomed off to the left, and then there were no flakes left in the globe.

After I returned back to portrait orientation there will still no flakes :(

EDIT: iPhone 4 with iOS 4.2.1

interesting - we tried it out (was it ultra slow for you too?) and while we didn't see the snowflakes zoom to the left, we didn't get orientation events. We didn't have a lot of time so we went with it, but we'll look into the code and see what's up.

This page works great on my N900 :)

Now that is something I honestly didn't expect - but that I like hearing.

Orientation events are new in mobile safari as of iOS 4.2. The orientation works on the iPad, for example.

Yes, but there's been a common workaround using window.orientation for a while:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2313194/can-i-trigger-a-c...

Yes it was kindof slow

Really nice one! Love the "gracefull degrade" implementation where if you dont have tilting device, it uses the mouse instead ;)

Pretty cool ... how about some mobile safari accelerometer support?

https://developer.apple.com/library/safari/#documentation/Sa...

Hmm for some reason on my macbook pro if I tilt to the right the snow goes to the left and vice versa...

very cool! I hope you get good valuable traction with this stylish hack!

Very nice, congrats :)

now thats the kind of stuff I'd expect on hacker news... what is interesting about this? clearly it must be the advanced physics engine.