A huge thank you to Derek Perez, who has taken over development of the jQuery PageSlide plug-in. He’s done a major overhaul and brought it up to version 1.1 with the following new features:
Very cool. GitHub now offering private installs of their software within a company’s own network. If I had a business that was large enough to warrant this type of setup, I’d be all over it. But, alas, my new projects are weenie small, so I’ll stick to the regular ol’ GitHub product in the foreseeable future.
This weekend, I started to play around with Jetpack from Mozilla Labs. If you haven’t already heard of Jetpack, it’s a Labs experiment that looks at making the creation of web browser extensions easier. As someone who’s previously tried to make a Firefox extension, I can say wholeheartedly that this was a much, much, much more pleasant experience.
The widget that I created–TinyFinder–looks for rev=canonical links in a webpage, and displays them in the statusbar of the browser window. Rev=canonical links are meta tags that are used when a website wants to suggest a preferred tiny url to use. For example, the Flickr page (http://www.flickr.com/photos/srobbin/3533142101/) can also be accessed by Flickr’s own tiny url (http://flic.kr/p/6odh48). Of course, you could always use one of many url shortening services, but Flickr’s custom URL suggests what you’ll see on the other side of the redirect: a photo/movie. Several services are starting to employ their own custom tiny urls: Dopplr, Threadless, Songza, and many more.
If the web page you are looking at does not provide its own tiny, custom URL, you can always click on the statusbar widget; one will be created for you and automagically copied to your clipboard.
Leah Buley’s ‘Being a UX Team of One’ presentation at SXSW was really inspiring. Since having seen it, I’ve been making more hand-drawn sketches as a starting point for projects, and it’s been refreshing.
Balsamiq’s Mockups is a great tool for designers/developers who lack good drawing skills, but still want to pencil-out their ideas (*blushes*). Additionally, it provides all the convenient features of application–drag, drop and undo–for those who could otherwise take pen to paper.
Steve Souders is one of the brightest people I know. And, on top of that, he has an uncanny ability to convey complex topics in an easy-to-understand manner. If you haven’t already ready his book, High Performance Web Sites, I suggest you do so. Here’s his latest article about the performance impact of using @import or <link> when including stylesheets.
Lately, I’ve been learning Python and applying it to the redesign of some older projects. A few weeks ago, I stumbled across NodeBox: “a Mac OS X application that lets you create 2D visuals (static, animated or interactive) using Python programming code and export them as a PDF or a QuickTime movie” It’s been a fun app to play with, work on my Py-skills and create some interesting patterns.
