by Adam Maras on October 20, 2008 at 02:00 PM

I had the most interesting conversation with one of my friends the other day. Adam: "Whew... finally finished with my latest web project!" Friend (in awe): "Whoa! That's awesome! How did you make that?" Now, of course, this project of mine was a full-fledged ASP.NET web application; a simple question like "how did you make that" could easily end up with me not only explaining what I did, but how ...
by Christina Warren on October 17, 2008 at 01:00 PM

Over at TUAW, I listed Coda as one of my favorite applications, and indeed, it is a central part of my web development toolbox. When it comes to straight CSS editing, however, my favorite app is CSSEdit. CSSEdit by MacRabbit is the best CSS editor I have ever used. In fact, before CSSEdit, I was against the entire idea of a CSS editor -- isn't Notepad or TextEdit enough? Sure, but I like to save ...
by Brad Linder on October 9, 2008 at 02:00 PM

RealNetworks executivies may have thought that the company was releasing a lawsuit-proof DVD ripper when it decided to add mandatory DRM to its RealDVD application launched last month. After all, while the software lets you rip DVD movies and save the video on your hard drive, it makes it extraordinarily difficult to share the media with other users, or even to watch it on a portable device or ...
by Brad Linder on September 30, 2008 at 12:30 PM

Say you're a major multimedia software company and you've just released a product that you absolutely know is going to tick off copyright holders, like say, major movie studios. You could wait around and for someone to file a lawsuit saying that your software, like say, a DVD ripper, violates their copyrights. Or you could try to resolve the issue before it gets to that point and file your own ...
by Christina Warren on August 26, 2008 at 09:30 PM

Panic Inc.'s Coda, the one-window web development wonder for Mac OS X, has just been updated to version 1.5. Coda is a great program, designed to put source editing, FTP, CSS and command line access all in one application. It's a great, great application for developers and is definitely one of my most-used applications. With version 1.5, Coda adds Subversion to its tool-belt, which is sure to make ...
by Jay Hathaway on July 8, 2008 at 08:30 AM

A lot of OS X users are familiar with Growl, a customizable notification system with all kinds of uses. New e-mail, iTunes track changes, new instant messages -- Growl handles all of this stuff. Now there's a Growl-like jQuery plugin called jGrowl that lets you apply the same sort of notification in your browser window. jGrowl supports different animation settings, as well as sticky messages that ...
by Jay Hathaway on July 2, 2008 at 03:00 PM

Barack Obama's design team has garnered a lot of praise for their work on his campaign materials, including the official website. Heck, there have been entire articles devoted to praising their choice of typefaces. One of the cooler elements the Obama team has cooked up for their website is a slideshow-like animated list for front page navigation. If you're a fan of this slideshow, and you ...
by Patrick Beeson on June 11, 2008 at 08:00 AM

Most Web designers make liberal use of CSS selectors, but that spec's sibling, descendant and child selectors can cause what designer/developer Shaun Innman calls a "significant, negative impact on page rendering." This is confirmed in tests done by UI Specialist Jon Sykes that are published on his blog.
Fortunately for most designers, the performance impact is only in extreme situations. But ...
by Patrick Beeson on May 29, 2008 at 02:30 PM

Web developer Aza Raskin knows we visit Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit and Facebook without even having to ask.
No, he isn't employing privacy violating hackery, but he is exploiting a "cute" information leak in CSS that traditionally displays visited links differently than those that have yet to be visited. By loading in an iframe a list of social site URLs to see which are purple (visited) and blue ...
by Jay Hathaway on May 22, 2008 at 11:00 AM

Now that a lot of people are spending as much time looking at their RSS readers as their web browsers or email clients, it's probably a good idea to give your reader an appearance you can live with. If you happen to use NetNewsWire, one of the most popular RSS apps for OS X, you've got plenty of stylesheets to choose from. NetNewsWire supports CSS styles, so it's not too difficult to code your own ...
by Todd Ritter on February 6, 2008 at 09:00 AM

htmlPlayground is a helpful reference for web developers of any skill level. It provides an easy way to generate, test, and learn about HTML and CSS syntax. Simply select your reference (HTML tags, attributes, or CSS properties), and then select an item like "blockquote." htmlPlayground will then display a description of the item (to explain what it's used for), an example code snippet that is ...
by Todd Ritter on January 25, 2008 at 01:30 PM

Schnippselchen is a source code management app that lets software developers manage multiple types of code that may need to be reused. The program has a sidebar with a "Categories" section (helpful for separating code by language) and a "Snippets" section for the actual titles of your code snippets. So you could have a PHP category with five snippets of PHP code that run your LOLcats ...
by Todd Ritter on December 27, 2007 at 09:00 AM

Serving as a webmaster's Swiss Army knife, Test Everything! allows you to run a bunch of different tests on your website and domain name, ranging from Alexa traffic details to CSS validation. To use, simply type in your website's URL, select a category, and check the boxes next to the tests you want to run. When you've selected all of your tests, click the "Test website!" button and wait for your ...
by Ian Smith on November 8, 2007 at 12:00 PM
![Douglas Crockford: The State of Ajax]()
It isn't every day that Douglas Crockford (the father of JSON and JSLint) pops up with a new tech talk. In this one he discusses the current state of Ajax development, why mashups are inherently insecure, why the standards process is broken, and how our best hope for a newer better platform may be mobile. Say what? Basically he proposes the idea that because the replacement rate on mobile phones ...
by Chris Gilmer on October 11, 2007 at 08:00 AM

There are easy ways to create webpage layouts, and there are hard ways. Spiffy Box is one of the easy ways to add a little spice to your website using CSS. Spiffy Box was originally created as Spiffy Corners, a web based way to easily create and grab custom CSS and HTML code for rounded corner web content boxes without using images or JavaScript. It eventually moved on to its current user friendly ...