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. "