Design in Ajax

Taking the Guesswork Out of Design

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 08:44:32 GMT

Clients, like other humans, often fear what they don't understand. Daniel Ritzenthaler explains how sound goal-setting, documentation, and communication strategies can bridge the gap between a designer's intuition and a client's need for proof.

RSS Management

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 22:12:40 GMT

Sponsored Links:

Diabetes Diet	Custom Wedding Bands		Green Interior Design
Executive Recruiter Consulting Toronto	Janitorial Services Fredericksburg	Static Electricity Control	Legal Information

** Follow Fwicki on Twitter

In Defense of Eye Candy

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 08:44:32 GMT

Research proves attractive things work better. How we think cannot be separated from how we feel. The next time a boss, client, or co-worker scoffs at the notion that beauty is an important aspect of interface design, point their peepers here.

Real Fonts on the Web: An Interview with The Font Bureau?s David Berlow

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 08:44:32 GMT

Is there life after Georgia? We ask David Berlow, co-founder of The Font Bureau, Inc, and the ?rst TrueType type designer, how type designers and web designers can work together to resolve licensing and technology issues that stand between us and real fonts on the web.

Machsend: P2P file sharing via Browser Plus

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 10:52:52 GMT

Alex MacCaw has released Machsend, a Yahoo! Browser Plus plugin that enables P2P file transfers from inside the browser. It showcases what can be done with a BP plugin, leaving you wish cross browser functionality. I guess it is kinda fun to hack the browser :)

It?s Friday. Play some drums?. HTML5 style

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:11:53 GMT

Brian Arnold created a fun sample drum machine simulator using HTML5 <audio>. PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT: function playBeat() { if (isPlaying) { var nextBeat = 60000 / curTempo / 4; // Turn off all lights on the tracker's row [...]

GeoMaker - geo locations as microformats or a map from texts or URLs

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 08:02:33 GMT

As preparation for an upcoming tech talk about Placemaker I thought it would be good to take a bit of the pain out of the geolocation service by making an interface for it. Placemaker works the following way: you post some content or a URL to it, it goes through the content or gets the [...]

Modernizr: HTML5 and CSS3 detection

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 04:29:40 GMT

Modernizr is a new library that detects various HTML5 and CSS3 features and lets you know so you can use them: Writing conditional CSS with Modernizr Now, once your page loads, Modernizr will run and go through all of its tests. It will automatically add all the classes to the <body> element of the page, and these [...]

GChart 2.5: Faster, sharper, canvas-rendered, pie, line, and area charts

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:44:30 GMT

John Gunther has released GChart 2.5, a client-side library that adds a new canvas-rendering option for sharper, better looking, alpha-transparent, pie, line, and area charts. John told us: Canvas-rendering corrects GChart’s most serious visual quality limitations (including the most often mentioned problem by its users: the banded-filled pie slice). Coupled with its existing feature set and ease of [...]

More than you ever want to see about encoding

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:03:19 GMT

Paul Baukaus linked to jsescape, a little form that shows escaping and unescaping across a number of encodings. Andrea Giammarchi had his own post on encodings in a different way…. as he talked about en-code which you can check out in action here on the page that lets you do simple encodings, especially for source code, in [...]

A whole lot of testing for JavaScript implementations

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:42:14 GMT

A couple of releases related to unit testing and JavaScript came out on the same day. First, the JScript team posted a set of ECMAScript 5 tests.... 900 to be exact, and the focus on features that are new to ECMAScript 5. All of the tests are released under New BSD. Then, the V8 team announced Sputnik, a [...]

Firefox 3.5: The fastest fox has landed

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:35:07 GMT

It is great to feel the good vibes at Mozilla HQ today as we launch Firefox 3.5! It is always an interesting ride to see a browser develop, and realize how complex and large the work is. Congrats to the browser developers out there who are working hard to make the Web better. With final [...]

LABjs: Simple abstraction for loading dependencies correctly

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 11:16:24 GMT

Kyle Simpson has developed LABjs, a library that lets you define your JavaScript file dependencies, and then loads them as efficiently as possible. Kyle told us: This project is a simple little tool (1.6k compressed!) for being able to load javascript files dynamically. It's like a lot of similar projects where the goal is to improve the [...]

New Sessions at The Ajax Experience 2009

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:25:09 GMT

Summer is right around the corner - so before you make any vacation plans here’s one quick action item to cross off your to-do list: Register now to lock in exclusive $300 savings for The Ajax Experience conference, September 14-16 in Boston, MA. It’s only been?two weeks?since we announced open registration for The Ajax Experience with [...]

MySpace open sources advanced browser performance tool for IE

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:21:18 GMT

Developers tend to tease MySpace for its look, but the insiders are incredibly impressed by some of the engineering behind the scenes (e.g. their internal monitoring tools are said to be second to none). They have surprised us again with their new tool MSFast which is “a browser plugin that help developers to improve their code [...]

Scripty2 has landed

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 05:14:51 GMT

Thomas Fuchs has been working in the open on scripty2 for a bit, and now the website has launched. It even comes with nice documentation and fun demos: What’s new in scripty2? It is a complete rewrite, and comes packaged in three parts: scripty2 core contains the main namespace and an area for extensions to be added. It [...]

Fun with text-shadow

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:26:24 GMT

Zach Johnson is at it again, this time giving us a fun Friday treat with CSS text shadow, all via: PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT: document.getElementById('text-shadow-box').onmousemove = function(e) { var xm = e.clientX - 300; var ym = e.clientY - 175; var d = Math.sqrt(xm*xm + ym*ym); text.style.textShadow = -xm + 'px ' + -ym + [...]

Creating Intrinsic Ratios for Video

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:25:39 GMT

Have you ever wanted to resize a video on the fly, scaling it as you would an image? Using intrinsic ratios for video and some padding property magic, you can. Thierry Koblentz shows us how.

Burnout

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:25:39 GMT

Does every day feel like a bad day? Blurry boundaries between work and home, and the ?always on? demands of the web can lead to depression and burnout. Learn the signs of burnout and how to maintain your bliss.

First beta of YUI 3.0 released

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:52:47 GMT

Congrats to the YUI team for releasing their first beta of YUI 3: We?ve spent a lot of time in this release cycle refining the core elements of YUI 3 ? YUI, Node, and Event ? to ensure that we have the right API going forward. Performance is improved, and we?ve refined our module/submodule structure. In [...]

JavaScript sandbox using Web Workers

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:17:45 GMT

We have been sandboxing JavaScript in iframes for a long time. The Web Worker API has the nice property that it doesn't have access to objects like document and the like, and just runs code that you can pass over to it. With this, Elijah Grey has created an experimental jsandbox API that gives you an [...]

iPhone 3GS runs faster than claims, if you go by SunSpider

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 20:03:36 GMT

Rana Sobhany of Medialets has posted on Sun Spider benchmarks of the iPhone 3GS as well as other devices which shows off the performance angle of 3GS: The WebKit Open Source Project provides a JavaScript test Suite dubbed SunSpider. According to the description on the SunSpider home page, ?this benchmark tests the core JavaScript language only, [...]

Managing Werewolves

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:14:55 GMT

While you?re always optimistic when leading a team, you know that not everyone?s got your back. Liars and poor communicators can wipe out good work faster than a 404 error. Learn how to think critically about verbal and non-verbal behavior and to separate office politics from truth, so you don?t let the Werewolves win.

Indexing the Web—It?s Not Just Google?s Business

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:14:55 GMT

Interface responsiveness is one of many details web developers must consider in their quest to deliver a good user experience. An application that responds quickly enhances the user?s sense of control. In working to maximize application speed, though, one often-overlooked element can affect performance more than almost anything else: database design.

MooTools: Saving the dollars, replacing document.write

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 11:28:13 GMT

The religion behind a simple $ has been fierce in the Web world. MooTools has decided to make the Dollar Safe Mode which is similar to cousins such as jQuery.noConflict (in MooTools case it just looks for the $ function). Now you can just use document.id if you want to play in the wild, or [...]

Sprite Me! Helping you sprite up, but maybe you shouldn?t?

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 05:01:00 GMT

There have been many tools to help make image spriting easier, by packaging up your images into one large image and splitting it up again via CSS. Steve Souders just showed off a new little tool he created, Sprite Me at the Velocity conference that kicked off today. He has made it easier to work with [...]

ProtoFish: advanced hover menu

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:05:01 GMT

ProtoFish is an advanced hover menu based on Prototype, written by Peter Slagter. You can easily add a delay to your menu (on mouseout) and choose your own hover class. All ProtoFish menu's will respond to users who use the TAB-key to navigate through your page. It is trivial to use. Once you load up [...]

Visual Decision Making

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:40:57 GMT

If it takes only 50 milliseconds for users to form an aesthetic opinion of your site?s credibility and trustworthiness, are designers who create visually compelling sites simply wasting time and treasure on graphic indulgences? Patrick Lynch doesn't think so.

Introduction to RDFa

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:40:57 GMT

In part one of a two-part primer on RDFa, learn how semantic features normally confined to the head of an HTML document can be used to add semantic richness to the elements of the body. Mark Birbeck shows us how.

HTML 5 and the Wizard of Oz

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:05:47 GMT

Kyle Weems, the CSS Squirrel and author of the occasional and bizarre comic of the same name, targets his latest rendering at Ian Hickson: Click-through to see the full comic. The related blog entry fleshes out the basic complaint some more: Why is it that the person who is the center of this process is allowed to [...]