Archives for April 2009

WebmasterWorld's Brett Tabke interviews Alex Jones regarding social media and finds out what's new at Pluck.

A great walk-through of advanced tips and practices for Keynote presentations.

"This is basic Keynote blocking and tackling."

"We start with 100% beef jerky, and SEAR your contact information into it with a 150 WATT CO2 LASER."

"It’s a small tool (think Firebug for PHP) to provide profiling and debugging related information to developers without needing them to add a lot of programmatic overhead to their code. Now, we only need to toggle one config setting to true and our reviewers have access to an automated tool to help create a faster and more consistent review experience. Since anyone can use it, PQP also gives the initial developer an idea of where their code stands before the review."

"jQuery makes our lives easier. So much so that it's tempting to use it all the time, inadvertently slowing our page load times (cue YSlow and Hammerhead). Combining, compressing, and delivering scripts at the end of your page helps in the HTTP request department. On the file size front, below are jQuery plugins that give solid bang for your performance buck."

"Learn from Ryan Irelan's vast experience in developing robust websites with ExpressionEngine in an easy-to-follow, easy-to-digest format."

"iPhone toolbar icons are 24-bit PNGs with an alpha channel and dimensions of about 30 × 30 pixels. The icon’s mask (the parts of the image which aren’t fully transparent) is styled to create the normal and active button states. This works the same way for both Toolbar (blue bar, as in Safari) and Tab Bar (black bar, as in the iPod app). Your icons don't need to contain color or have the gradient style applied to them manually — just make them monochromatic and let iPhone take care of the rest."

We invite scientists, engineers, designers, developers, researchers, technologists, and creative thinkers of all kinds to join the lab and help us uncover, together, what is impossible to uncover alone.

"We take a look at your site or application and run it through the typical usability meat grinder. But instead of certain death by bullet point or a short novella, you get a document that’s highly visual, useful and (gasp!) actually fun to read and pass around.

"Design Chat is a weekly real-time twitter-based conversation between creatives."

Some senators like to filibuster and keep the majority from having their way. You might think they’re heroes. Or jackasses. Either way, they’re worth keeping track of.

"Since Braid's release, we've been more than entertained by the creative initiative of fans (in the forms of papercraft and comics, for example). This being Web 2.0 and all, we thought we'd throw some more material out there for people to use as they like. All the graphics on this page were created for Braid; they're the same images you see when you play the game."

"Add the ability to make elements "glow" when you hover over them. For browsers that support the text-shadow CSS property, you can also add a halo."

"Web fonts let you link any TrueType fonts into your web pages using CSS, freeing you from the old limited set of standard fonts. They are supported in all modern (well, future) browsers: Firefox 3.1+, Opera 10+, Safari 3.1+, and also IE4+.

"Page download size is critical as it directly affects the performance experienced by users, and many TTF files are hundreds of kilobytes in size. This web service makes web fonts more efficient, stripping out the thousands of characters that you don't need and leaving only those you want, while preserving the high-quality rendering features that the fonts may include. "

"Nick Finck has created a sweet single page cheat sheet illustrating OmniGraffle's numerous and well hidden keyboard shortcuts. Nick took the multi-page Help file provided by Omni and consolidated all of the tips into a single tabloid poster that you can print and stick on your wall to make life easier"

"coded real-world examples of themeable buttons and toolbars using the jQuery UI CSS framework, a system of classes developed for jQuery UI widgets that can easily be applied to any plugin, and even static content."

"The jStore jQuery Plugin allows users to access a number of different client-side storage engines through a single, convenient interface. jStore can manage a number of different storage engines at once, allowing for the possibility of different storage engines performing different tasks on a single page."

"Can I build my own house? That was the question I asked before I started construction in February of 2007. Nine months later in October of 2008 we were moving into our new house with instant equity. I started this blog to share what I learned during the process. I also created a great tool to help you in just about every step of building your own house. "

"Created to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Arthur Guinness' signing of the lease for his St. James' Gate Brewery in Dublin, this fizzier, maltier version of Guiness is poured at an angle, and packs a stronger alcoholic punch than its sudsy sibling. But don't wait too long: it will only be available for six months."

"A simple presentation I put together with some jQuery plugins to demonstrate the various ways jQuery can interact with type on the web."

Maintains a handy Subversion installer package for OS X.

"A custom URL shortening app for Django, including easy “rev=cannonical“
support."

"presents a thumbnail gallery of page patterns under a blank deliverable, and explanations of page patterns, recipes, and practical tips on the periphery. Even better, visitors to my poster will be able to unhook page pattern cards and actually create the deliverable themselves in real time"

"Build your own searchable list of Twitter accounts for your company, organization, campaign, university, or bird watching club! "

"Here are the basics of the up to $8,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers"

'
The price-gouging premiums of Time Warner Cable's data caps

Time Warner Cable is expanding its test markets for paltry Internet data caps. Ars breaks down the obscene price per gigabyte that the company thinks is "fair."'

"With Quince, the new UX pattern explorer by Infragistics, you can help ensure that your software design is creating the best experiences for your users. Using it, you can explore and find UX design patterns several ways, use the patterns to understand best practices and see examples from disparate sources, share your own thoughts, examples, and even propose new patterns for others in the community."

"the Art of Manliness ventures into the world of scotch, not because we believe you must drink alcohol in order to be a man, but because if you choose to do so, it should be in the tradition of gentlemen, with a clear conscious and a full heart."

"So you’ve heard the news that ExpressionEngine 2.0 is built entirely on CodeIgniter and with EE 2.0’s release slowly creeping up on us it’s time to brush up on the framework. The following is a light introduction to the philosophy of CodeIgniter."

ClickHeat is a visual heatmap of clicks on a HTML page, showing hot and cold click zones.

"a great collection of science and techology adverts from the 50s and 60s, full of wonderful illustration, type treatments, vintage logos and some pretty inspirational layouts. "

This discussion group will serve as an information gathering and sharing point for residents and neighbors to exchange ideas and information about our wonderful neighborhood as well as promote information that doesn't make it into the newsletter.

After its package redesign, sales of the Tropicana Pure Premium line plummeted 20% between Jan. 1 and Feb. 22, costing the brand tens of millions of dollars. On Feb. 23, the company announced it would bow to consumer demand and scrap the new packaging, designed by Peter Arnell. It had been on the market less than two months.

A short article discussing the new Feedblitz service and it's plans to topple Feedburner.