web design and development
I’m a big fan of the Filament Group’s UI work. They put a lot of thought into their work, and ensure everything they make is not only beautiful, but as accessible and as semantic as possible. One of my favorite pieces of work by the Filament Group is
How-to
As a Mac user, one of the more annoying issues I frequently encounter is funky PDF handling in Firefox and Safari. For instance: * Adobe doesn’t make a version of Adobe Reader that’s compatible with Firefox on Mac OS X * Adobe Reader is only supported in 32-bit versions of
Apple Mac Mini Server
In my last post, I explained my frustration with web hosting services and how this frustration led me to purchase my own server. In this post, I will briefly touch on some of the ups and downs I’ve experienced with the Mac Mini Server and its Snow Leopard Server
How-to
Someone recently posted a blog entry ranting about the use of the term “best practices” in our industry. I understand the frustration with thoughtless pronouncements about best practices, especially coming from people who may not know any better; it will often sound a lot like how mom used to say
Adobe Captivate
This post has been updated to reflect changes to the CaptivateController since its initial release It took me much much longer than I anticipated, but I am happy to announce the new CaptivateController utility. The CaptivateController is a JavaScript utility that helps you control Captivate SWFs as well as get/
JavaScript
Update (August 2010): I have published a new list of Captivate variables that are specific to Adobe Captivate 5. Check it out. The folks at Adobe recently published a list of Captivate 4 variables. While it’s a solid list, it’s not really a complete list. Here is a
best practices
Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is at Release Candidate 1, which means it will be released very shortly. IE8 is a brand-new browser and will represent a considerable shift from IE7/IE6; it will follow standards more closely and will offer much improved CSS 2.1 support. However, because of some
excanvas
excanvas.js is a script that enables developers to use the canvas element in Internet Explorer; since IE doesn’t support canvas or the canvas API, the excanvas script converts (most) canvas commands to Vector Markup Language (VML), the only vector rendering language supported natively in Internet Explorer. excanvas is
@font-face
Like many other web professionals, I’m tired of the limited font set we have to work with. Gee, should I use Verdana on this site or Georgia? Maybe Arial? Meh. Bor-ing. The merits and legal implications of CSS3’s proposed @font-face are being hotly debated, which means the proposal
canvas
As part of my ongoing experiments with <canvas>, I decided to convert an image-based progress bar to an image-free canvas-based system. I just finished whipping up a proof-of-concept; it uses MooTools to generate the canvas and CSS code. No images were harmed in the making of this progress
canvas
In my previous post Fun with canvas and MooTools: a Rectangle class, I explained that I wanted to make a modal window for a project at my workplace. I was interested in using MochaUI, but felt it was a bit heavy for my needs. I started playing with the canvas
backtick
For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of encountering the Hawaiian language, it’s a very simple but elegant language. The written form is largely phonetic (cooked up by American missionaries in the 1800s) and makes use of two diacritical marks: the ‘okina, and the macron (also