Tuesday, July 3, 2007
I’ve always wanted to get better at creating a portfolio of good designs that I find. A friend that I used to work with had a file cabinet full of magazine clippings and other things that that they had stored away for inspiration. This was a great resource to spread out on the floor when getting started on a new project. If you are looking for some inspiration, here is a page of business card examples.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
I just said that I’d stop posting constant lists of links… but these are from somebody else, so it’s okay. Chris Pultz (trainer extraordinaire) sent me some great links through del.icio.us that would be useful to anybody getting started in designing with cascading style sheets Keep It Simple, Stupid showcases 49 site designs that are beautiful for what they did not do to their sites more than what they did do.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
I really see my blog as the center of my life on the web. My blog is the first place I search when I want to recall something that I did months or years ago. For this reason, I have often muddied my posts with everything I have been bookmarking and more. Throwing all of this information in one pot can discouraging to those that are looking for some perspective.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
The beginning of this summer has been hectic as I have launched a couple of sites already including the new Lincoln Public Schools web site. The new site is a little wider than the old site, now being 990px wide. We had quite a bit of discussion about this before we went live wondering if it was the right decision to do this. Interestingly, since then Apple has launched their new site and CNN has released the beta of their new site.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
It may not be often that you give your mouse a lot of thought, but I just had one of those moments where I thought “Wow! What a great mouse." I use a Logitech VX when I’m portable and a Logitech MX at my desktop. These are basically the same mouse with some small differences that make each better for the environment they were designed to be used in. The key feature on both is a scroll wheel that is able to work (as many scroll wheels do) in a mode that sort of clicks as you scroll, and a mode that is unique where it is free to spin like the Price-is-right Big Wheel.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Thanks again to those of you that attended my workshop in Columbus on Tuesday. Here are some of the resources that I told you I would post here: Firefox Add-ons Firebug (Firebox-based CSS Inspector) Firefox Web Development Toolbar MeasureIt (screen ruler) ColorZilla (Color grabber) Browser Testing Evolt.org (Browser Archives) Install multiple version of IE on Windows XP Web Sites CSS Zen Garden CSS Beauty: CSS Design Showcase CSS Vault: Inspiring Creativity CSS Hack Glish: CSS Layout Techniques Layout-o-matic A List Apart Digital-Web Magazine Stylegala The Web Standards Project Useful books
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Digital-Web Magazine offers an educational article about PNGs and how to use them in ways that no other web image format can be used.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
I’m not sure how long Contribute 4 has been out, but it has not been a long time. Six months? I was surprised to see, during the Adobe CS3 launch event yesterday, that a new version of Contribute (Contribute CS3) was being bundled with the web studios. I wanted to give Adobe the benefit of the doubt and assume that they were just renaming the product, but after a visit to their web site it is clear that this is considered a full upgrade and an owner of version 4 has to pay the same to upgrade to this new version as an owner of any previous version.
Monday, March 19, 2007
I guess this is Apollo day. Learn more about Apollo from these videos created at Adobe’s ApolloCamp. See ‘em here
Monday, March 19, 2007
I had forgotten about this supported feature in Firefox 2 - microsummaries. It allows people to create bookmarks of your page that you can later change the titles of - live. Christian Cantrell: Firefox 2 Live Titles
Monday, March 19, 2007
Mike Chambers has a set of training/introduction videos up on Lynda. Apollo Alpha Preview - lynda.com Online Training Library ™
Monday, March 19, 2007
Adobe has released a public alpha of it’s upcoming Apollo development software / runtime. This looks to be an incredible technology with wild possibilities. With Apollo, HTML and Flex developers (among others) can write code as they usually do, but then have it compiled into a distributable application that people can run on their computers outside of a web browser. I really expect many cross-platform applications that are generally written in Java or even REALBasic to begin showing up in this environment instead.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Looking for some ideas for that next site navigation you need to build. This article from Smashing Magazine displays a whole bunch of good-looking ones. CSS-Based Navigation Menus: Modern Solutions | Smashing Magazine
Monday, February 19, 2007
Chris Pultz hit me with this incredible list of 53 CSS techniques. A couple of the methods listed here are duds, but most of them are fantastic. If you don’t do CSS yet, you should look through these to see what you’re missing. If you are on CSS, then get to using them! powered by performancing firefox
Tuesday, February 6, 2007
Mike Potter from Adobe demonstrates Apollo at FlashInTO.
Monday, February 5, 2007
Macintosh users can now download the “WPF/E” beta from microsoft. This allows Macintosh users to play files created by Microsoft’s new “Flash Killer” application Sparkle. Once you have installed it, the plugin works with both Safari and Firefox. You can see examples of it’s use here (note the first video in the second example where they talk about the number of Macs that have been appearing in Redmond). This is exciting only because it offers hope that whatever development platform content developers use in the future, the mac should be able to display them all.
Monday, January 29, 2007
I’m working today on designs for the next www.lps.org and this morning trying to establish a target width. To get started, I’m examining some of the best sites on the web to see what width they are using. Here’s what I’m finding. * ESPN, MLB, NFL: 990px * New York Times: 973px * ABC News: 770px * ABC: 803px * Cnet (including drop-shadow): 990px * Washington Times: 980px * Apple: 781px * UNL (including drop-shadow): 1000px * NBC: 971px * CBS: 977px
Friday, January 12, 2007
Chris Pederick has updated the invaluable web developer toolbar for Firefox and Flock to version 1.1.
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
I've been working today on building a new LPS WWW box that will use ColdFusion as it's primary scripting language since the NetCloak that we have used for around 10 years has been discontinued. Here are some quick notes of things that I have either learned or been reminded of today. ColdFusion MX7 and lower do not work with Java 1.5 http://www.talkingtree.com/blog/index.cfm/2006/5/17/CFMX-MacOSX-JVM142 Getting ColdFusion to process html files is not hard, but was tricky to find
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
One of the greatest things about CSS is the ability to create styles for non-screen delivery. Digital-Web features has a new article called “CSS Styling for Print and Other Media”.
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Google’s code search allows visitors to search publicly accessible code for answers. It now includes ColdFusion. technorati tags:coldfusion, google
Monday, November 20, 2006
Adobe has launched a new design center on their web site specifically for Fireworks. If you are looking to get the most out of Fireworks, this will be the place to stay tuned to. There’s already some neat articles up there including one on how to “Create a night scene with Fireworks” and “Creating lens flares using Fireworks”. Interested in participating in the Fireworks 9 beta? You can sign up for that also.
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Adobe put out the first non-beta release of the Flash 9 player with full-screen video this week. Brightcove is already utilizing it. Try it out here… technorati tags:flash, brightcove, adobe
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Ryan Stewart uses Google Trends to compare Rich Internet Application technologies and shows that Adobe Flex is ranking best compared to other environments like OpenLaszlo. I ran his query then added AJAX and they were blown out of the water - basically flatlined at the bottom of the graph. technorati tags:flex, apollo, ajax, openlaszlo
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
I attended a session today covering the use of HTML and Javascript with Adobe’s upcoming Apollo product. Among many other things, Apollo will allow web applications to be deployed as desktop applications. For this to happen, Apollo must have its own HTML rendering engine. To my great surprise, that chosen HTML renderer is WebKit (the same used in Apple’s Safari). Want to make a web application apollo-ready? Design for Safari. Cool.
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
I nuked my MacBook last week and this morning reinstalled ColdFusion using these instructions that I found earlier. I also installed the latest MySQL 5.1 which required some extra work detailed here. technorati tags:coldfusion, mysql
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Mozilla has made release candidate 3 of the upcoming Firefox 2 browser available. technorati tags:firefox, mozilla
Thursday, October 5, 2006
A newly available flash plugin supports full-screen video. You can download the plugin here, then try out some samples here. It looks great and is very welcome on the Macintosh where full-screen video is hard to come by. Quicktime doesn’t support running embedded movies as full screen. Real does, but few use it anymore and DivX also supports it but again is rarely utilitzed. Prepare to see it everywhere. technorati tags:flash
Wednesday, October 4, 2006
Today is the deadline for presentation submissions for the National Educational Computing Conference occuring in Atlanta next summer. I got mine in last night. I proposed a three hour workshop covering the creation of web pages using web standards (xhtml, css, xml, etc.). I’m not real hopeful as it sounds dull and I was tired when I wrote the submission so I may have not sold the idea real well. Sometime in December I’ll learn whether I’m in.
Sunday, September 17, 2006
Adobe Labs has posted new information regarding Apollo â?? their upcoming build-an-application-out-of-html-css-javascript-and-flash development environment. technorati tags:apollo, adobe