development

Mozilla Jetpack

10.06.2009

development

Jetpack

Jetpack

Um, awesome! Mozilla is working on a sweet tool called Jetpack, that will make it easy for people to build Firefox add-ons to customize how you see websites. You can edit out adds or make Helvetica display as a different font on your pc… woop!

I love how excited and geeky the guy in the tutorial video sounds too.

Development/Design Aids

25.03.2009

development

/

There are so many useful things for developing… here are some of my favourites:

  • Notepad++  is awesome, what would we do without syntax highlighting?
  • Firebug for Firefox is part of me now, I feel handicapped with out it.
  • CakePHP, haven’t learned it to well yet, but my co-workers love it.
  • jQuery, the magic wand of javascript.
  • Better Font Stacks, a great article about… well, font stacks.
  • w3schools, a goto, the bible of code

And design aids:

  • Typechart, great previews of what is capable with web fonts.
  • ColorSchemer is full of pretty and useful schemes and great palette software.
  • A List Apart kind of applies to both categories, heaps of good articles

Bad Things on Websites

22.01.2009

development

Here are some things that drive me kind of crazy on websites:

  • When the hover state of a text link changes the font weight, it looks bad and can mess with the layout
  • When body copy is composed of images of text. It is just plain bad. Spiders can’t read it, site readers can read it, it is tedious to update. I am a font junky as much as the next person but is having everything in Mrs.Eaves instead of Georgia that horrible?
  • Three column layouts almost never look good.
  • Having to still design some sites at 770px wide, if someone doesn’t have a better graphics card/monitor, too bad for them. Same for hacking sites for IE6. *Angrily shakes fist at IE*
  • All the coding support forums that have excellent content but ugly layouts.
  • Flash sites with excessive loading times and non-intuitive UI.

That is all… for now.

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