Sprite Cow →
I rarely find work that’s as tedious as determining proper CSS from sprite sheets. Sprite Cow makes the process far more easy: Upload a sample sheet and click directly on individual sprites to get their proper CSS coordinates.
I rarely find work that’s as tedious as determining proper CSS from sprite sheets. Sprite Cow makes the process far more easy: Upload a sample sheet and click directly on individual sprites to get their proper CSS coordinates.
I’ve used a lot of Flash blocking extensions, but this elegant solution suggested over at The Verge forums by user David Pierce is the best I’ve found. Simple, native and smart.
Developer/Karbon founder Garrett Murray:
The app landscape will improve with time, but the internet is a different story.
Going forward, hopefully, most thoughtful folks will make new websites Retina-ready from the start. When I created the site for Scratch, I did just that, and it looks amazing on this new rMBP. But for the most part the internet will look relatively crummy on Retina displays for quite a while.
Very true. In short, there’s no magic bullet yet for effective, responsive images that scale to both retina level and “standard def” displays. Fascinating to see how this will all play out in the web dev and design community over the next few months.
Web sites depend on a lot of images, and with higher resolution displays, their size will only increase. Yet website performance is critical as well; you want a great looking image in as small a file size as possible.
That’s where TinyPNG comes in handy. Cut your png of choice and use the site’s drag and drop uploader. TinyPNG will strip colors and compress pngs down to 8 bits while still retaining 100% transparency. I’ve used it on a few recent projects, and every thing I send to it reduces the file size by at least 50% with no noticeable image degradation.
I love keyboard shortcuts but adding them to web sites and web apps can be painful. Different browsers handle slightly different syntax, and the process of looking up key codes can require some trial and error. Enter Mousetrap, a tiny (3kb minified) Javascript library where you invoke natural syntax (e.g. ‘4’,’command+k’) for keyboard bindings. No external library dependencies either.
Nice article over at Webdesigner Depot that presents the a common design debate for a potential client: do you go with an entirely separate mobile and desktop site or a responsive design with a single combined view?
I enjoy the style used here: lots of mini interviews with developers across multi web agencies across the country. There’s not a clear consensus among those interviewed, and I tend to agree. You can’t be black and white about responsive design, much as there’s no silver bullet design solution for any one client.
Gimme Bar takes various media you find online – photos, audio, video, text – and saves it to a cloud based library. Yes, been there, done that to some extent (e.g. ZooTool). But Gimme Bar has a few interesting tricks up its sleeve. First, it’s more inherently private than public. The last major bookmarking/tagging app I’ve seen do that is Pinboard, which I love.
Then there’s the extra features: a full API, optional auto backup of items to a Dropbox folder. The interface looks nice as well.
It’s free right now in beta. I plan on giving it a proper spin over the next few weeks.
We’re a few weeks past the Google I/O talks, but Google has since posted all of their developer conference talks on Youtube. The full schedule is easy to navigate.
It’s not just for hard core Chrome and Android developers either; there’s a lot of what appear to be solid talks that I’ll check out this week: using new HTML5 elements, tools and frameworks for speedy web development, cross device web design, and advanced design for engineers.
Over the weekend I added a major update to Bare Tumblr, a simple, stripped down template for creating new Tumblr themes. It’s got the HTML 5 Boilerplate at its core, in addition to calls to Modernizr and built in sections for media queries.
This latest update bumps the HTML and CSS to version 3 of the HTML 5 Boilerplate, in addition to a bunch of small semantic fixes on the HTML side. If you dig building Tumblr sites or themes and want a solid vanilla place to start, check out the code on Github.
Dave Methvin:
jQuery was conceived specifically to address the differences in browsers, so we’re not going to abandon the essence of our philosophy and simply disregard the millions of active Internet users who (for whatever reasons) still use oldIE. Yet we also want to move ahead and take advantage of modern browsers, especially the growing mobile market.
This is huge news. Great move by the jQuery team here.