Today’s Readings

SpriteRight seems like a good technology, taking in either a batch of images from Finder (yeah, Mac-only, it seems) or importing images from an existing stylesheet (nice touch!), but I have always found these types of tools to do a less-than-optimum job of organizing the “bits”, especially when it comes to background gradients and repeating images. Anyone have any experience with this one? Recommend it?

Anyone ready to “engage” from the comfort of their very own living room? And how long until the entire fleet is available?

Remy you’re nuts! Remote-Tilt is brilliant, I only wish I were developing something for which I could use it! :-) Thanks for the pointer, Dan!

I’ve been planning a Post on Responsive Design for some time, likely past the need for it now, but Smashing Magazine just did a re(sponsive )design, and it’s fantastic!! Be sure to take it wide, then slowly take it small… I love the switch to side navs when you are really wide, but then it becomes a drop-down for small screens, pretty great idea!

Been a while since I had to worry about cross-browser, but seeing Visual Scout from Sauce Labs brought it all back to me… Unless you’re still catering to IE6/7, I don’t feel like there’s really all that much to worry about these days, but it can never hurt to have another place to test.

Contents looks like some really good reading, I just wish I had the time to read more right now… Anyone care to volunteer and offer their opinion?

This seems important, but maybe you “designy” people will have the patience to read it…

Then there’s this list for us “developy” people… Actually some good ones in there, I personally want to dig more into:

  • Layers Style: BADA$$! Gives you a PhotoShop-like GUI, with preview object, then click the tiny “CSS” box in the bottom-left, and it generates all the tasty CSS for you… I LOVE not having to code all that crap!
  • Mobile Boilerplate: As in love as I am with HTML5 Boilerplate (yes, I am going to update my WP Theme & Plug-in one of these days, I promise…), how had I not heard about the mobile version? Is there yet another Theme in the making, or should this just become part of the existing one?
  • Holmes: Highlights bad HTML using just a little CSS. I ran my site through this and had to look at another tab while the testing was being done, for fear of having an epileptic seizure, but after the 469 tests were done, I had a nice little list fo things I could do to improve the performance of my CSS. Thanks, Holmes!
  • CSS Stress Testing and Performance Profiling: JavaScript Performance Testing we hear about every day, right? But CSS can harm performance too.
  • CSSPrefixer: Pointed this out earlier, but seems worth showing again… Type the W3C-version, click Process, and CSSPrefixer makes all the various prefixed versions you need…
  • Modernizr 2: Another one I’ve been using for some time, but you cannot talk about this one enough! Build a custom version of Modernizr so you only push to your users the code you need to make your site work. When will jQuery have one of these?
  • jQuery Plugin Boilerplate: Ever write a jQuery plugin? I have not, but if/when I do, I will gladly use this as a template from which to start…

Which are your faves?

And finally, from the annals of time, how many of these do you recognize? I’m only good for maybe 7 or 8…

Happy reading,
Atg

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