Sam’s random musings

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.)

FancyForm - Pretty checkboxes and radios:

Styling form controls has always been limited with HTML and CSS. Not anymore. FancyForm provides the solution by letting you style checkboxes and radio buttons as you would any other elements, while degrading gracefully on older and non-graphical browsers.

Here’s an example of what’s possible with the script:

Click through to see the demo (worked in most of the browsers I tried, safari, camino, firefox…

(Via Vacuous Virtuoso.)

Reflex: Cover flow for your soul:

Christian Effenberger, Canvas Library Creator Extraordinarie, has created Reflex.js 1.1, which allows you to add a Cover Flow effect (including reflection) to images on your web pages.

It works in all the major browsers - Mozilla Firefox 1.5+, Opera 9+, IE6+ (tilting missing) and Safari. On older browsers, it’ll degrade and your visitors won’t notice a thing.

As per usual, usage is via a simple microformat using CSS classes such as reflex iopacity75.

Click through to have a look it is really well done

(Via Ajaxian Blog.)

Proto.Menu: Prototype-based Context Menu Solution:

Description

Proto.Menu is a simple and lightweight prototype-based solution for context menu functionality on your page
Features:

• Lightweight: ~2 KB (~1.5 KB minified)
• Unobtrusive: Plays nice with JS turned off, uses its own namespace
• Cross-browser: Full A-Graded browsers support (Opera is supported through Ctrl + Left Click)
• Fully customizable: Menu styling can (and is intended to) be easily defined in external stylesheet
• Fast: Menu container is rendered on page load, and only changes position on click

Nice clean and looks pretty simple to use.

(Via Ajaxian Blog.)

Cory Miller: The First 5 Essential Tweaks He Does in a WordPress Blog Installation. Moltn: Six Tips On Writing Content For Search Engines. If that doesn’t work, use lots of dirty words

(Via Freelance Switch.)

FLVIX is a free online video converter. It converts video into formats like .AVI, .MOV, .3GP, .MP4, .MP4 for free, online.

(Via Ajax Blog.)

Fake Name Generator believes in supporting the development community. To achieve this goal, we provide free bulk generated identity files. Please use the form below to place your order.

What’s YSlow?:

It’s an extension to Firebug (yes, correct, Firebug, not Firefox) that helps with performance optimization efforts. It scores your page on the scale A to F, based on compliance with Yahoo’s performance rules. It’s a tool that has been used internally at Yahoo and is now released to the world.

(Via Ajaxian Blog.)

Ajax, DTrace and Where They Meet

The article walks you through setting up dtrace on an an Ajax tracing example and then goes into detail on tracing Ajax and Java call flow where they are tracing the call flow of the JavaScript functions and the Java servlet methods, which responds to the Ajax calls using the script:

(Via Ajaxian Blog.)

The Discovery Channel is using Sharkrunners, an online game, to teach people what it’s like to be a marine biologist who is tracking sharks. The game play is easy to play, but original

(Via O’Reilly Radar.)

Feature: 5 Ways to Optimize AJAX in Ruby on Rails

(Via Vitamin.)

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blockquote> Squish allows to create tests for GUI and Web applications by recording or manually writing test scripts. Squish supports popular scripting languages for the test scripts and gives access to additional APIs. This way QA engineers can easily create powerful and robust tests to enhance and keep up the quality of the tested application. Different editions of Squish are available for testing applications based on the following technologies: Qt®, Java™, Mac, Web, 4Js, Tk, XView

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DatePicker using Prototype and ScriptaculousYou’ll find here the code and instructions for a datepicker widget using Prototype and Scriptaculous librairies.

How well do you know Prototype?:

Here, I’ve collected most common use cases that do NOT use all of prototype’s capabilities and their simple solutions. I hope this will be a basic checklist to go through when developing for your next project.

this is a great little set of tricks and tune ups see if you are missing some of the elegance you can get from Prototype.js

(Via TruerWords.)

Feature Richness and User Engagement:

Summary: The more engaged users are, the more features an application can sustain. But most users have low commitment — especially to websites, which must focus on simplicity, rather than features.

Face is right, it is worth reading to the end. I got more out of it the second read…

(Via Mind-NOX.)

Timeplot: Canvas-based Specialized Charting Tool:

On July 1st and July 7th, we posted about Timeline from the Simile project.

We’re pleased to post about another related project: Timeplot, which is

Follow the link; the screen shot doesn’t do it justice. While you’re there, don’t miss the comprehensive tutorial, which shows how easy it is to create these charts.

Doesn’t work in safari yet but still cool

(Via Ajaxian Blog.)