Archive for January, 2007
Freshly Minted
Shaun Inman has once again outdone himself by launching two new websites and an updated version of Mint on one day, and a Monday at that! I'm quite fond of the new shauninman.com design with a duotone palette and a date-based background color.
Screenshot of the shauninman.com pre-launch intro page
More important however is the new version of Shaun's website analytics tool Mint. For those who don't know Mint, its simple yet powerful interface features an overview of visits, referrers, popular pages and searches which can all be taken in at a glance on Mint's flexible dashboard. And with the help of third party Pepper — little extensions for the dashboard — Mint is even more powerful.
Speaking of Pepper (yes, that's both the singular and plural form), the second website launched by Shaun today is the Peppermill, the new place to download the Mint software, official Pepper, widgets and third party Pepper. This ensures, that Pepper developed by others can all be found in one single place, somewhat reminiscent of the Mozilla Extension room. As Shaun puts it:
Until today tracking down third-party Pepper involved checking the Pepper Development forum religiously or subscribing to Sam Brown’s Peppermint Tea. And there was always the chance that a developer’s site and Pepper would disappear.
In case you aren't convinced yet, there are some nice screencasts, screenshots and even a live demo on Shauns website. And what's best, Shaun somehow tricked inflation. The price for Mint 2 is still at the same US $30 (€ 23,-) it was before. And existing Mint licenses can be upgraded for only US $19 (€ 15,-). That's less than the price for two drinks around here, and believe me, it's worth those two drinks.
If you don't have your site Minted yet, you should definitely do so now — just take a look at the feature highlights. And if you already use Mint, did I tell you that Mint 2 is out? Because Mint 2 is out, you dinosaurs, you!
Tagged as addon, ajax, analytics, extension, mint, pepper, relaunch, shauninman, software, statistics, tools, travel+ Categorized as Uncategorized
Architectural Design
St. Petersburg, Russia's cultural center for more than 200 years, is located on the delta of the Neva River in northwestern Russia. The majestic and impressive city center has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the whole city radiates a unique ambiance which is somewhat reminiscent of Venice. St. Petersburg's haunting magnificence is achieved through hundreds of architectural details: decorative monuments, sculptures, vast gardens and beautiful boulevards lie alongside the Neva River with its beautiful canals and its granite embankments and over 300 bridges.
Daniel Libeskind's conceptual design for the main building of Gazprom City.
Tagged as architecture, cities, design, gazprom, russia, st.petersburg, travel+ Categorized as Uncategorized
Has Environmental Abuse Finally Gone too Far?
The winter around here started quite normally. It got cold in November and we expected the first snow. Which didn't come.
We hoped for snow in January. It didn't come.
"Last december and this January appears unusually mild to many people of the northern hemisphere. There are not only reports of higher temperatures, trees and flowers started to bloom in winter, ice bears dropped hibernation and migratory birds decided to stay home in their summer habitat."
Tagged as austria, environment, outdoor, private, snow+ Categorized as Uncategorized
ColorZilla now working on Intel Macs!
I've just received word from Alex Sirota, that his great Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Suite extension, ColorZilla, is now working on Intel Macs.
Its task is to assist professional web developers and designers with color related tasks. The feature most of us have used though, was the color picker, which unfortunately stopped working on Intel Macs.
ColorZilla allows you to get a color reading from any pixel in your web browser. You can do all sorts of things, like adjusting the sampled colors and copying them to the clipboard, but those are just two of the color related tasks ColorZilla performs.
Tagged as addon, browser, color, colorzilla, design, extension, firefox, free, mozilla, software, tools, webdesign+ Categorized as Uncategorized
Apply CSS to IE7 only
CSS hacks for browsers typically either exploit a flawed implementation or the complete lack of an implementation of a certain feature in the rendering engine. Most webdesigners know about the relatively poor level of web standards support in Internet Explorer and have tried for years to find workarounds for the most grievous bugs. However, exploiting software bugs to create a hack is quite dangerous because software gets updated and old flaws are fixed.
When Microsoft introduced conditional comments with Internet Explorer 5, a lot of problems were fixed. One could use constructs such as
<!--[if IE]>
<style type="text/css" media="screen">
#myID {
background-color: red;
}
</style>
<![endif]-->
to tailor CSS styles to Internet Explorer only. No other browser would parse anything in those conditional comments.
Conditional comments have a lot of drawbacks, though. Most problematically, they require changes to the actual HTML source since there is no equivalent to conditional comments in CSS. They also don't work well with XSL as Dave Shea has pointed out. This is why most web developers turned to the less reliable technique – the exploitation of browser bugs – to target specific browsers in their stylesheets.
Tagged as css, design, hacks, html, ie7, internetexplorer, xhtml+ Categorized as Uncategorized
Adobe CSS Advisor
While the CS3 Beta was the hype of the last week and was announced with much fanfare, Adobe quietly released another product in public beta: The Adobe CSS Advisor.
The CSS Advisor is a new service that lets you easily find solutions to CSS problems and allows you to file through various lists of browser compatibility issues. It got mentioned briefly during the presentation of Dreamweaver 9/CS3 but apparently it has been released earlier and I just stumbled across the page by accident.
From the website:
- Find solutions to CSS and browser compatibility issues
- Share solutions and workarounds you've discovered with the community
- Comment on and improve existing solutions
At the moment it's still quite empty but it's a social site which allows you to post your own issues (requires you to sign up for a free Adobe ID) in a "Problem - Solution" style. And there's even a RSS Feed for your syndication goodness.
Apparently, the Advisor will be linked with Dreamweaver 9, probably much like the sidebar help in existing Dreamweaver versions.
Tagged as adobe, beta, cs3, css, design, dreamweaver, dw9, photoshop+ Categorized as Uncategorized