Author Archive
Transparent PNG support for IE 6, 5.5
Tired of compromising your beautiful designs or being forced to find work-arounds that don’t work when using transparent PNGs? There is a way… By invoking the CSS behavior found in this script you can add decent PNG support to IE5.5+ on Windows with no changes to your website HTML source code. And since this method uses CSS “behaviors,” a custom Microsoft extension to CSS, it will not affect any other browsers like Mozilla and Opera which already implement good PNG support.
Firefox 3 to ship Tuesday, June 17
Firefox 3 will be released on Tuesday, June 17, 2008, and you’re invited to the party! From the Mozilla Developer News blog: ‘After more than 34 months of active development, and with the contributions of thousands, we’re proud to announce that we’re ready. It is our expectation to ship Firefox 3 this upcoming Tuesday, June 17th. Put on your party hats and get ready to download Firefox 3 — the best web browser, period.’”
Flash? We don’t need no stinkin’ Flash…
John Resig, creator of the JavaScript library jQuery, today released a new library: Processing.js. A port of the Processing visualization language to JavaScript, one application of this library is to provide an alternate to Flash for animation and interactive graphics content. Among the drawbacks are browser support (the library is specifically targeted to the latest beta versions of Firefox and Opera) and the inefficient nature of JS engines (which are not designed to process this type of data), but it’s pretty cool, anyway. Be sure to view your CPU’s performance as evidence of the latter when viewing any of the numerous demos available on Resig’s blog.
“Get Out of Jail Free” Twitter
When James Karl Buck was detained at an anti-government rally in Mahalla, Egypt, he got the diplomatic cogs turning with a simple message via his cell phone to Twitter: “Arrested.”
Over the next several hours, Buck was able to update friends and family using the micro-blogging site, some of whom then transposed his messages to other blogs of their own. Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, told CNN that there have been more and more stories of people using the service during natural disasters. In Buck’s case, the speed at which news of his situation was disseminated led to his school hiring a lawyer on his behalf. Less than 24 hours after his arrest, he left the station with another one word blog entry: “Free.”
Read the whole story at CNN.com.
Photoshop Express
Adobe launched the Web-based Photoshop Express on Thursday, March 27. Available for free with 2 gigabytes of storage space, the online image editor is targeted towards consumers that want a simple way to touch up, share, organize and store photos without the cost attached to Photoshop or Photoshop LE.
The application, which needs Flash Player 9 to run, pushes the limits of browser-based applications and will likely ratchet up the competition on the dozens of free and online photo-editing products available now. Check out the full review at webware.com and screenshots of the app at CNET News.com.
Can a .edu act like a .com?
Note: I would have liked to have posted this earlier today, but after having to rush of to the airport, wade through the security mire, and travel for seven hours, I’m just now getting to it.
So on our last morning in Austin, Billy and I both opted to attend this core conversation (as led by Richard Wood, Admissions and Student Orientation Coordinator at the University of Nevada, Reno) that explored issues that we in the higher education web world deal with on a daily basis: How to achieve some order, branding, or any common elements to establish a cohesive look and feel across a multitude of disparate sites with different audiences, messages and goals? There were about 35 people attending this discussion, most from higher-education with a few consulting groups who specialize in helping academic institutions redefine their Web presence.
Monday, Monday (So good to me)
So I left off Sunday evening, getting ready to attend the 11th annual SXSW Web Awards. Eugene Mirman was quite the card, and made no attempt to hide the fact that he had no idea what any of the categories meant (“CSS? I don’t even know what that means”). Not sure who’s idea it was, but accepting the award for absentee winners was a ninja who seemed to be channeling Will Ferrell’s Robert Goulet. There were a lot of great nominees, some of whom I’d seen, some new, and you can find links to them all on the SXSW Web site. Enough about that; Monday provided another day of panels that made for some pretty hard decisions…
A weekend at SXSW
So we made it to Austin; traveling down here ended up taking the better part of the day Friday, but we were still able to check in to the conference and get our badges and schwag. After checking into the Austin Motel, Billy was kind enough to give me a guided tour of his old stomping grounds. Dinner at El Sol y La Luna, moonlight towers, and live music at Jovitas (Reid Wilson and His So-called Friends). But that’s not why you’re reading, is it?
