Jay Robinson

uxuiuxui:

NeXT was acquired by Apple in February of 1997. It took him one year to go from that to this.

If you’re going to use advanced CSS3 properties, it only makes sense to use them correctly: write them alphabetically and write as if they’ll be adopted.

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This virtual party flier, an invitation for an event at SXSW 2010, should keep your Firebug finger busy for a while. The word-art effect, the buildings, the trees, are done entirely in CSS. The only images are avatars and sponsor logos at the bottom. @Font-face fonts provided by Typekit.

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Speaking of one-stop CSS web apps, Jacob Bijani created his own for generating border-radius rules. Using border-radius can get tricky if all four corners are not the same, as Mozilla is the only browser that breaks the recommended spec.

Find this helpful tool at one of four domains: http://border-radius.com/, http://borderradius.com/, http://css-border-radius.com/ or http://cssborderradius.com/.

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Primer is a useful web app that allows you to paste in HTML and get the appropriate CSS selectors. My workflow looks like this:

1. Design in PhotoShop.
2. Write semantic HTML.
3. Copy and paste HTML into Primer.
4. Get CSS selectors and begin styling.

Check out PrimerCSS.com.

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2105:

A List Apart: Articles: Flash and Standards: The Cold War of the Web

Dan Mall continues to probe the debate between web standards, HTML5 apps and Flash. Good article; rad illustration. Go GloomyBear!

"Those compact discs sound amazing, but they won’t fit in my tape deck."

— Trent Walton thinks that mandating cross-browser compatability is holding us back from incredible technical achievements and I think he’s right.

A conversation I have every month or so

Dan Wineman:

Me: (tries to visit a local restaurant’s website via iPhone)
Restaurant website: I require Flash. Fuck off.
Me: I just want to know how late you’re open.
Website: Nope.
Me: But I’m on my phone. Don’t you have a little “HTML Version” link up in the corner or something?
Website: I’m ignoring you.
Me: What if I’m on my phone because I’m out, looking for a place to eat? Didn’t that ever occur to you?
Website: Fuck entirely off.
Me: (gives up, switches to computer)
Website: Oh! Hi! What can I help you with today?
Me: What are your —
Website: Hang on, I’m loading the music.
Me: Really.
Website: You’ll love it. It’s “Girl from Ipanema” arranged for steel drum and keytar.
Me: No, you don’t have to —
Website: Loading…
Me: All I want is —
Website: I SAID DOT DOT DOT.
Me: (drums fingers on desk)
Website: There we go. Isn’t that nice? It’s… what’s the word. Ethnicky.
Me: What are your hours?
Website: Take a look at our menu! It’s a PDF of a screenshot of a scan of a Word document printed on a dishtowel. With fonts!
Me: I don’t care. What are your hours?
Website: Don’t worry, the menu loads in a new window so the music won’t stop. Can I show you some broken images?
Me: What. Are. Your. Hou. Rs.
Website: I… I don’t know.
Me: (goes to Denny’s)

Reblogged in entirety.

iTunes 9 and the Future of WebKit →

At a Special Media Event on Wednesday morning, Apple unveiled the latest iPods along with a new version of iTunes, version 9.

Apple revitalizes their iPods every year, so this was not unexpected. However, what surprised me was what I first attributed to idle commentary: the redesigned iTunes Store and new iTunes LPs render in WebKit.

Some may overlook this detail, but keep in mind Apple has always used iPods+iTunes to push their digital agenda. And the push for WebKit will be no different.

The first iPod and iTunes combination on Windows opened up QuickTime for millions of users. Now it is a healthy competitor for web media, right up there with Flash. (Remember when music and videos on the Web would occasionally pop up in Windows Media format? Yuck.)

Today, MobileSafari on iPhone provides users with a WebKit-powered “killer app” that makes people actually want to browse the web with their smartphones. Apple’s iPhone OS accounts for an astounding two-thirds of mobile web traffic. And the competition has taken notice: in August RIM acquired Torch Mobile, hoping to bring the WebKit experience to BlackBerries.

The possibilities with iTunes LP are really terrific. The announcement led Engadget frontman Joshua Topolsky to proclaim “Apple has officially reinvented the 12-inch.” Apple is constantly setting design trends and iTunes LPs will be no different. I can already imagine a swarm of imitations from devoted music fans flooding the net with intricate tributes to their favorite artists that render best in WebKit browsers. Not to mention what iTunes LPs may look like on your 50″ (Apple) HDTV.

While most PC users may have never heard of Safari for Windows, iTunes will soon establish a record amount of computers on which WebKit is the conveyor of premium web experience.

It won’t be long until WebKit rules the PC world too.

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Short URL: http://jwr.cc/x/2

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Today I built my own Coda interface on our Fasturtle development server.

It still needs a few things:

• dynamic screenshots script (perhaps webkit2png)
• dynamic resizing of thumbnails with slider
• page curl effect?

Setting Up Your Mac For Local Development Using Coda, WordPress & MAMP →

WordPress is not just for blogs. WordPress is a highly sophisticated content management system that you can use to develop and manage your client’s professional websites. Best of all, it’s entirely free. To get started it helps to experiment without the hassle of publishing files to the Internet. With a Mac, you already have the basics for an excellent local development environment.

In this tutorial, I will describe setting up a folder on your Mac that you can use to practice building websites with PHP and a MySQL database. Before we begin you will need

1. a Mac
2. a text editor
3. a web browser

Let’s get started.

1) Download WordPress from WordPress.org. Unzip it to find a folder called “wordpress”. Rename it YOUR_PROJECT_NAME (Mine will be called “jay”). Drag it to the Sites folder in your Home directory. For easy access, I’ve added the Sites folder to my Finder window sidebar.

2) Download the free MAMP software from Mamp.info and install. MAMP stands for Mac, Apache, MySQL and PHP. This app helps manage our MySQL databases in a straight forward way.

Open the app and click “Preferences…”, then select the “Apache” tab to select our Document Root. We want to select the Sites folder located in your Home folder. The path should read /Users/YOUR_MAC_OS_X_USER_SHORTNAME/Sites.

Once you activate MAMP and get the green lights, test if it is working by opening your browser and going to http://localhost:8888/ You should see the contents of your ~/Sites directory. Remember, we’re preparing a local development environment. “Localhost” means your computer, so no one else in the world will be able to see these files in their web browser.

Okay, MAMP is working, and the MySQL is just waiting for us to give it some database tables. Go to http://localhost:8888/MAMP (must be all uppercase) and click “phpMyAdmin”. Once there, “Create new database” with YOUR_PROJECT_NAME. My database name will be “jay” to match my project.

3) Now we just have to match WordPress with the database. Access the YOUR_PROJECT_NAME folder in ~/Sites and rename the wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php. Open the file to edit the content. DB_NAME means database name, so enter YOUR_PROJECT_NAME. The DB_USER and DB_PASSWORD are both “root”. Leave “localhost” as the server, as the server is our local computer.

4) Visit http://localhost:8888/YOUR_PROJECT_NAME and you will see the famous five minute WordPress install. Set up the blog name and email, and you will be given a password. (I copy and paste this generated password to get into WordPress, then change it to something easy to remember right away. I use the same simple password for all my WordPress development sites, since they are not live on the Internet.)

WordPress is now configured to work on your computer, but will only be accessible locally. The final step is to set up Coda to access the directory.

5) Go to Coda, enter Sites view (Command 1) and “Add Site…”

Nickname

YOUR_PROJECT_NAME

Root URL & Local URL

When developing locally, this will simply be used to generate a thumbnail for you to see your project in Coda. These can be the same URL, e.g. http://localhost:8888/YOUR_PROJECT_NAME

Remote Root

None

Local Root

You may use the “Set…” file browser to find your project folder in the Sites folder, or copy and paste this template: /Users/YOUR_MAC_OS_X_USER_SHORTNAME/Sites/YOUR_PROJECT_NAME/

Connecting, Terminal and Source Control

Do not worry about these. You do not have to configure them for local development.

Safari/Webkit CSS3 Snippets for TextMate →

WebKitBits:

Wishing Line has released an open-source TextMate bundle which assists in writing WebKit specific CSS3 properties:

The bundle, which currently contains nearly every new -webkit-prefixed property currently listed in Apple’s Safari/Webkit documentation along with a few snippets of code related to creating and using offline SQLite databases in Webkit is available via the project’s Google Code repository…

Anybody know how to make this for Coda?