Chinese stealing my code

By | 2007-10-16

This page was part of my last project which I developed in my company: Buff catalog.

And this page was part of the website of our client’s competitor in China, recently published: KranGear catalog.

The funny thing is that their javascript files even include MY comments, in Spanish.

The idea was to use a thermometer as the scroll bar, reflecting the different temperature protection of every product. The original page was developed around December 2006. I spent a couple of weeks tweaking the details, to get the smoothest result. I think it was an innovation, because the design department wanted to make it with Flash, and I showed them that this can be made with just javascript (including the zoom-in effect when you pass over the designs). And now a Chinese competitor copies me… hence I did a good job (even I could have done far better, but we were in a hurry to publish the website).

This reminds me of another UI effect, made with javascript, which I programmed for the Whisher home page (now they have a new website, but my work can be seen, without images, at webarchive’s capture). The idea was some kind of quick movement between slides, and I spent a couple of days creating the correct framework (divs, css, and javascript) to make it alive. Now it’s a quite common effect, that most javascript libraries have (like this example), but in those days it was new stuff.

Curious, because my most innovative work was in this area (javascript), when my position at the company was more server-side focused (php + mysql, mainly).