Post Archive

› September 30, 2002

Pop-Up Windows Done Right

Old news to some designers but I often see horrible pop-up code. Youngpup.net has the right way to approach this common design challenge.

Would be nice if someone made a Dreamweaver plugin to do this.

› September 28, 2002

CSS Design: Taming Lists at ALA

Another helpful artilce from A List Apart: CSS Design: Taming Lists.

Back in Blogtown

Thanks to some old fashioned peer pressure (or actually repeated requests) mr. rose is actively posting again. Interestingly the fall season seems to be rejuvinating many folks in the bloglist including: scottandrew, glish, brushtroke, and very soon typographer. A hearty welcome back.

› September 26, 2002

RSS 2.0

Updated syndication of this site to RSS 2.0 in less than 2 seconds thanks to Dive Into Mark's Moveable Type template.

› September 25, 2002

Rendezvous for the Masses

Apple today has open-sourced its Rendezvous technology, which allows for the automatic discovery and connection of devices over any IP network.

Until today, this technology was available only for Macintosh users. By releasing the code to the open-source community, geeks everywhere will be able to network their printers, cameras, phones, and pocket-protectors with their computers running Linux, FreeBSD, and heck, even Windows.

Fluid Thinking

Apart from being the most... er... graceful term in the web's working glossary, "graceful degradation" is a simple but powerful technique. The first step in adapting that technique successfully is fluid thinking: accepting the unpredictability that rules the user interface of the web.

› September 23, 2002

Collaborative Font Design

Typophile | The Smaller Picture explores font design at the community level. The interface asks a simple question to establish how the design evolves. Several letters are coming along nicely you can actually watch the process unfold in an animated history.


› September 22, 2002

OS X Instalation Tips

Kaliber 10000 has posted some helpful Setting Up OSX tips.

› September 20, 2002

GraphicsInfo Bookmarklet

Liorean has taken up the cause of the ImgParse bookmarklet and writen an entirely new one called "GraphicsInfo", find it (and related src files) at Liorean's bookmarklets page. Currently it works on IE6 and Moz on windows, and it parses not just img elements, but all types of things including img form elements, background images, image objects, etc. The number of occurances is listed, along with helpful attributes such as width, height, and alt information. Web developers and designers on the windows platform will be greatly advantaged with this tool. Anyone with the mojo to make this Mac compatible will earn enourmous amounts of gratitude. Any suggestions for improvments, in layout or otherwise can be commented to this post. Big "thank yous" to Liorean for working on this!

› September 19, 2002

CSS Preview

Kirun, an active Mozilla participant, has a Mozilla only CSS Previewer that allows you to modify styles in real time and see the effects. An earlier, less feature rich version, may be used with ie.

› September 16, 2002

Image Parse V2

I'm reviving the old post about an image parsing favelet because I have a slightly modified version and wish to improve it. In a nutshell, it's a bookmark you can use on any page which will parse through and show you all the images used on the page with each width and height and location.



img full path parse

code display fixed 5.22.03 (thanks scriptygoddess)

The bookmarklet above does not add up the file sizes, but it does include the full path of each image from the page.

There are other attributes which can be printed out, such as the following:

  • SRC="location" (included)
  • LOWSRC="location"
  • ALT="alterntiveText"
  • ALIGN="alignment"
  • BORDER="borderWidth"
  • HEIGHT="height" (included)
  • WIDTH="width" (included)
  • HSPACE="horizMargin"
  • VSPACE="verticalMargin"
  • ISMAP
  • USEMAP="#mapName"
  • NAME="imageName" (not filename btw)
  • ONABORT="imgLoadJScode"
  • ONERROR="errorJScode"
  • ONLOAD="imgLoadJScode"
  • SUPPRESS="suppressOrNot"

This could be a set of different favelets depending on how much reporting you desired. If you're just a little bit handy with javascript you can hack the link url in a text editor to get your desired formatting. I'm thinking that "minimal", "standard", and "kitchen sink" versions might be the best way to go - what do you think? Other improvements to be done include slicker formatting, and perhaps someone can provide a version which lists each image once, along with how many times it was used (rather than each instance being listed).

A Web-based Test of Fitts' Law

(via CHI-WEB) Help with some research into Fitts's law with this interactive test (requires Java, so might not work for you Mac users). My best times are 613ms on the 1st test, and 767 on the 2nd. (Tip: write down your time after completing the 1st; it doesn't show it again.)

› September 15, 2002

Fontscape launches

Months ago I waxed lyrical over the online typeface identifier Identifont, which I use regularly and still wows whomever I show it to.

Its creator, David Johnson-Davies, alerted me this week to the launch of Fontscape,

an independent directory of typefaces organized into categories, and a companion to Identifont, our popular font-identification Web site

Fontscape is designed to provide the complementary service of helping you to select a typeface for a particular application or requirement. It classifies typefaces into a wide range of categories, under headings such as: application, mood, period, appearance, dimensions, and simulation.

Within each category there are samples of the typefaces, with links to the publisher or vendor of each typeface so users can order them.

I've had the opportunity to use the beta for some time, and I think it's just as likely to become indispensable. One of my favourite type books has always been David Gates' Type -- A type reference book for visual communicators [...] arranged by style category -- which is simply a catalogue of large font samples grouped by visual similarity. When looking for a typeface, both for purposes of identification or deciding which to use for a job, you usually have a mental picture roughly of what you have in mind, and a book like this simply helps you to home in on the right one. Most type catalogues sort their specimens alphabetically, by foundry or by very broad classifications, and are useless for this purpose.

Fontscape does the same thing as Type, but with much richer categorisation. Furthermore, it does so with the same unfussiness as Identifont. Both have a remarkable "navigationless" architecture that remove the need for persistent navigation by being optimised for only one or two tasks, and providing only what's necessary at each point.

› September 13, 2002

webDAV on os x 10.2

If you do not have a .mac account, but would like to publish iCal based calendars, you'll want to setup webDAV. If you're running Mac OS X 10.2, and want to get webDAV running for this purpose, you'll want a tutorial. (thanks Todd)

Nathan Ashby-Kuhlman

An interesting weblog from another Nathan. I suppose that when I leave comments on other websites I should use my full name to avoid confusion.

› September 12, 2002

RSS Reader for Windows

I know, I know... You're very happy to have moved into a new office (ahem... mooching office space), and it's lots of fun to clickety click on your emac in the high industrial loftish ceilings. Now of course you realize, with your emac at the office, you're back to the ancient windows box at home. It's not the same of course, but you can deal with it... with one major exception. You miss your NetNewsWire Lite, is there a freeware RSS reader for windows that will cut the mustard? You sound just like me, perhaps this will help: Feedreader, it's uncluttered and seems to work well.

› September 10, 2002

Flashstudio

Flashstudio looks to offer some very interesting features in the flash as excecutable arena, all of which are quite easy to review thanks to the sample files. Checkout the browser.. neat. Found within MacroFun's enthusiasm.

Compare Dates from WayBack Machine

The Internet Archive Wayback Machine advanced search now has a feature in beta which allows comparision of 2 versions of a page. See the last option in the "Other Advanced Search Options" box. Interesting way to see how things have changed.

IE image filters

Milo has created a little javascript for IE specific fun. Filters are key-click based and offer image rotation, desaturation, and color inversion. Neato. Goto his homepage to try it out.

› September 9, 2002

Rich Text Editing for Mozilla

Compatible with Movable Type, Radio Userland, and most any blogging tool you might be using, composite.mozdev.org is a add-on that augments Mozilla text areas with a popup Composer window. The latest version is still awaiting mirroring at press time, but you can ge a copy here.To use it, hit ctrl-e in a textarea.

view rest of article

Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful

Ian Hickson, a member of the Mozilla.org Browser Standards Compliance QA team and an invited expert in the W3C CSS Working Group, has written up a rant explaining why, in his opinion, it's not good to send xhtml with the mime type text/html.

"Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful" (.txt)

RSS Tutorial

RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters via semantic weblog

› September 8, 2002

The Flash Usability Guide

Chris MacGregor of flazoom has authored The Flash Usability Guide.

OS X Interface Hall of Shame

This is interesting: Mac OS X Interface Hall of Shame, despite this being a gallery of things that could/should be done better in the OS X interface, one still gets the feeling that other interfaces are only far worse... maybe I'm reading into it. Via milo

Social Design Notes

Can design change the world? Keep track of the answer to this on-going question at John Emerson's weblog Social Design Notes: Design + Activism, John's portfolio of work is also impressive.

Welcome back BrushstrokeTv

Brushstroke TV is back from a summer of travel, welcome back!. In a not very directly related way, I found another color picker to add to the list via Praystation: a 2 frame form n' javascript picker

› September 5, 2002

Re-configuring our approach

This year I started a two person web and print outfit and have been very busy getting it off the ground. Now that we have a head start (although not even a website yet!), we are evaluating our coding pracitices and design approach. We are inspired by the messages and ideals presented by The Web Standards Project. We have given ourselves the task of evaluating one of our first medium size sites which we are completing now. The site will validate, however still uses a bit too much tableage, the code is not as optimized as it could be. Zeldman recently wrote 99% of websites are Obsolete (from his upcoming book) and Table layouts revisited which perscribes a commercially viable method of using minimal table code for structure and advanced CSS for refined style, this seems like a well thought out approach to the goal of standards compliant and clean code. Thanks to the WaSP and particularly Zeldman, my longstanding desire to bring optimized, standardized, and efficient markup proccesses into my commercial work is begining to take shape.

› September 4, 2002

State of the web...

An interview with Steven Champeon and Shirley Kaiser of the web standards project (WaSP).

› September 3, 2002

Media Management

Looking to organize loads of images, maybe put together a web catalog for a client? I've been enjoying iPhoto for this task, but today I needed the same capability with EPS images. The demo of iView came to the rescue and proved itself a worthwhile tool. I managed to catalog a box of CD-ROMS full of large EPS images (40 discs total) in only one day's work. Dragging each CD into the interface couldnt have been easier, and the import filters were rich with options - saving me lots of time. There are many more features than what I used today, but since this worked so reliably I thought I'd share the word. Anyone else have image management apps they are enjoying now?

› September 2, 2002

Re-sizable Pixel Fonts in IE

With the help of a bookmarklet located here you can now resize fonts specified in pixels on IE.