Sam’s random musings

Styling File Inputs with CSS and the DOM:

Nifty CSS and JavaScript library from Shaun Inman for styling file inputs in web forms.

 ★ 

Ok now these look ‘nice’

(Via Daring Fireball.)

★ The Ringtones Racket:

The whole ringtones racket is predicated on the notion that ringtones are something different than songs. This notion is bullshit. You don’t turn songs into ringtones; you treat them as ringtones. They’re not even a different file format. It’s just a different context for playing the same song on the same device.

confused about the whole ringtone dealio, this is a great read to get why (or WHY) do we pay twice. or three times or ….

(Via Daring Fireball.)

lifehack::

13 tricks to motivate yourself. Some days, a regular routine is great … other days, it grates like fingers down a chalkboard. A day of unscheduled interruptions can be terribly frustrating, or immensely liberating. You never know. These tips may help make productivity more consistent and enjoyable.

(Via Dangerousmeta.)

Navigating the HTML email jungle:

We’re ramping up our emailing efforts and decided to start sending out HTML newsletters to customers. (We’ve always sent out plain-text emails but figured some minimal styling would help liven things up a bit.) So we designed a nice, simple email using clean code. The first one is this brief Basecamp Newsletter.

It took a while to get to this version though. First, we ran our simply styled email through Mailchimp Inbox Inspector (demo), a useful tool you can use to view HTML newsletters in a variety of email apps.

It came up perfect everywhere except Outlook 2007, Windows Live Mail, and Lotus Notes. Strangely, it looked fine in Outlook 2006 but busted in Outlook 2007.

The reason? As Campaign Monitor put it, Microsoft decided to take email design back 5 years.

If you do find yourself inclineded to do html email generation it does behoove you too check out the mailchimp inspector and take the time to read some of these links…

(Via Signal vs. Noise.)

jMaki 1.0 Final Release: Ajax for Java and PHP:

Greg Murray has put the stake in the ground and released jMaki 1.0. The release comes with “bundles” for PHP and Java which you can choose on the download area.

Included in the bundles:

• The core jMaki framework.
• Sample applications.
• Ant task for creating applications and adding widgets and necessary dependencies to those applications.
• All the scripts and widget libraries.

To see more, check out the jMaki Samples.

(Via Ajaxian Blog.)

CSSVista: Tweak CSS and see it in IE and Firefox at the same time:

CSSVista is a free Windows application for web developers which lets you edit your CSS code live in both Internet Explorer and Firefox simultaneously.

The software is brought to us by the authors of Litmus, a tool that tests your websites on a set of browsers.

cool tool for windows web developers, I won’t use it for a couple of reasons, I’m a mac-a-holic and too much of an engineer to worry about pixel perfection…

(Via Ajaxian Blog.)

Jonathan Street’s Blog: Lightning Fast Sites & Better Benchmarks:

Jonathan Street has a few tips for developers out there looking to speed things up on their site - seven tips towards “lightning fast sites”.

Some small things to look at but if you do them a lot, it might pay to change your ways… don't forget to read the fine print

(Via PHPDeveloper.org.)

If I Told You You Had a Beautiful Figure…:

…. would you hold it against Aaron Gustafson? Aaron has written about “laying out images consistently within a design is difficult; especially when you hand the keys over to someone else to fill in the content.”

ACtually a nice tech to get visual control over images and associated metadata in a nice controlled, consistent way

(Via Ajaxian Blog.)