Seriously though, It’s a nice departure from the obvious duplication between cssremix, cssbeauty, cssmania, and the other 394 style galleries, not to mention *these galleries must APPROVE your submission, pfft. How many times have you seen a design on CSSRemix and gone, “That made it!?”

Here’s some things I like: 1. The entire site I’m viewing could be terrible, but it might do one thing right, I can capture and post just that. (Note: extremely valuable) 2. People take scrnshots of their desktops, and there’s always some real cool wallpaper or app I’d never seen before, which translates to getting more cool stuff. 3. I have comment battles with other design bums about very granular things, like a style of button, or a usability approach to forms. etc.

The scrnshots team just released a bunch of sweet tools to quickly snap screenshots and upload, or even upload an entire local folder of screens. The app interaction is quiet, simple, and unobtrusive hanging out in the menubar for Mac, and system tray for windoze.

Go team, can’t wait for more cool stuff.

Oh PS. If the scrnshot guys are reading this: When’s the design upgrade coming? Rectangles went out of style shortly after web 4.0 last week.

The past few months have been really fascinating to watch. My first little application Doomi has been passed around dozens of blogs, favorited, bookmarked, twittered, screencasted, and pretty much made the webernet rounds. Here’s some statistics. In the past 3 months, Doomi has been installed over 2500 times, it’s single page has been hit over 13,000 times, and the app has been blogged and reviewed on dozens of tech sites.

I’ve received a ton of feedback on the app, everything has been logged, and Doomi has officially worked it’s way back into development. Here’s what I want to see in the next versions:

- Constantly be syncing with data in the cloud, if a connection is present sync it, if it’s not, store it locally.
- Drag and Drop re-organization of to-do items.
- Simple skinning using tints with transparent png’s.
- Remember the Milk API support, and Ta-da-List.
- Minimize, and possible live in the task bar for Windows guys.
- Vertical and horizontal re-sizing.
- Custom remind times.

My first step is take a look back at the code I wrote a few months back and start to refactor how everything works together. The goal will be to really separate everything as much as possible, and just clean up the application so its easy to add features and integrate changes.

So look forward to some buzz on doominow.com, I’ll probably setup a wordpress blog in the coming weeks, and get a little more vocal about what’s going on. Thanks for everybody’s feedback, support, smart remarks, and blogging.

P.S. The last months lack of blog posts comes from being tottaly swamped graduation and the new job. The good news is, things have settled down a little bit and I can’t wait to share with you guys what I’ve been working on. Stay tuned.

What day is it?
What’s the date?
Is this calendar I’m looking at the right month?
Is this week view?
Is this month view?
Is this yearly view?
What start time is this event?
What time does it end?
Do I even know what time it ends?

Here’s what grinds my gears, I know exactly when I want to input the event, and usually what time it starts. So why should I have to know the answer to 10 other questions, just to input a simple event. Can’t my app just figure it out for me?

Hmm.

The first thing I tried was opening iCal, and just searching for May 3rd in hopes that it would just jump to May 3rd, I could put my event in, and be gone. Nope, it legitimately searches all events for the text May 3rd, cool. So I said uh, I should write an applescript that does this. But then I remembered something…

Quicksilver.

I goto plugins find the iCal plugin, activate it, and invoke it. I hit period to type plain text, here’s what I wrote. “May 3rd 12:00 car install at audiomotion” hit tab, scroll down and find a “Create iCal Event…” and hit enter.

I open up iCal, half believing it would actually parse the info, and sure enough my event had been input at 12:00PM on May 3rd, without evening opening the app!. So using quicksilver you can input events without even opening iCal, just by knowing what time and day it is. How awesome is that?

I did note that Quicksilver parses the time in 24 hour time so sharpen up your math skills and add 12.

ps. If your a Windows guy reading this, then take all this in as an oppurtunity, can someone make something as extensible as this for windows? I would pay big bucks for this kind of tool, QS just happens to be free.

Congrats to Sharon and BowWow Meow, the site is live as of last week. All creative, information design, art direction, front-end, back-end, and even some photography, were done by moi.  Link

A little going away present to BK! Many thanks to them for letting me hang out, screw up, and help out the last 6 weeks. Cupcake creds to the amazingly talented Liza for turning my idea into reality. Word on the street is these cupcakes used two full bottles of Burnkit red food coloring, and the papers were hand colored pinstripe red and white by other anonymous cupcake fairies. Thanks BK!

The note reads:

A little tid-bit of side info, “ACTIVE_PATIENTS” is the mother folder of anything and everything Burnkit is working on, so losing this is heart attack worthy, hence me saying it’s baleted.

Besides the fear of my two bosses firing me on the spot, it was pretty funny to see people come in shaking their heads muttering…. “you little bastard” hahaha. Next year will be big and over the top and I’ll be prepared, thanks to iCal.

Internet Exporer 6 gets absolute positioning all wrong.

If your using an element as a hook for another elements positioning. IE6 0,0 point doesn’t care about padding, so if you have an element styled like so:

#container {
position:relative;
padding-left:20px;
}

#container #positioned {
position:absolute;
left:100px;
}

Firefox, Safari, and Opera’s 0,0 point will be affected by the 20px padding, IE6 will completely ignore it and place it’s 0,0 point at the most left point of the element. So to cater to IE6 use margin instead, this can be annoying, but it works.

Internet Explorer 6 doubles your margins on both sides, just for fun.

If you have an element where the margin and float are set in the same direction, IE6 will think your awesome and play a joke on you by doubling your margins. For example, if you have an element floated left, and margin-left set to 15px. Firefox, Safari, and Opera place it a nice exact 15px away, but Internet explorer gets trigger happy and sets it 30px left. The solution is thankfully, a simple one, just change the floated elements display to “inline” and all is fine and dandy.

Internet Explorer 6 sucks at clearing floats.

I got stuck up on some floating issues this weekend that took me a while to fix. Here’s an example of the markup:

<div>

<div class=”float-left”></div>
<div class=”float-left”></div>

<div class=”clear-floats”></div>

</div>

For some reason, IE will add about 15 extra pixels beneath the two divs, again, Safari, Firefox, and Opera render it properly. It turns out that if two elements are floating, and an element that is clearing them is directly below or “touching” them IE6 will add in extra space, why? Because Microsoft is so great. The solution is this:

<div>

<div class=”float-left”></div>
<div class=”float-left”></div>

</div>

<div class=”clear-floats”></div>

Yep, that’s it. IE6 sucks away the extra height and all is magical in the browser kingdom.

Managing your time effectively.

The dynamics of working with a team totally change the game. Everything is set in motion by how fast each person can execute tasks, everything has an estimation of time, and things are set sequentially based off of each others estimate. If you go over the time you said it would take, everybody gets pushed back. I’ve started timing everything I do while at work, just to get a more precise idea of how long things take me to do.

Quality assurance is everything.

My time allotted to QA has literally tripled, people are depending on your work, and these tasks are for high budget projects that have no toleration for errors. Making mistakes with code, links, spelling, reporting, saving, organizing make you look bad and force your project managers to constantly be watching your every move. Sort of, kind of, and partially doing QA is useless, if one thing is wrong, it looks like you didn’t even bother. Before submitting or passing off anything, make sure it’s perfect.

Comment, and log everything.

Everything I’ve modified, revised, coded has been commented to death. I want the next developer that reads through my code to know exactly what’s going on, and where. I have clear cut comments for everything, my CSS has a hierarchy, all changes and revisions are logged by line number, and what was changed. There’s nothing worse then picking up some old code and having zero comments. It can sometimes take up to 20 minutes to do a 2 minute job, just because of the time it takes to decipher what’s going on. Also, saving versions of files, if I’m producing a mockup and I make an evolutionary change, I save it as a version. At the end of each mockup I usually end up with about 6 psd’s with appended versions at the end.

Navigating through endless file structures.

It feels as if I spend half of everyday just navigating through folders, saving, opening, copying, and pasting over and over again. This is kind of common sense but I’ll say it anyway, if your working on a new project, stick an alias or shortcut to it in your sidebar. If anyone has a way of getting to files quicker in OS X, or ways to be more efficient, I’d be interested to hear about it, its become a huge time waster for me.

Free Tips

Download Firefox 2 Beta 4
Do twitter mash-ups.
Sign-up for Friendfeed
Read my coffee blog

Until next week.

JG

1. Launch Script Editor using quicksilver and copy and paste this code:

tell application "Finder"
set sel to the selection as text
set the clipboard to POSIX path of sel
end tell

2. Save the script in your Library/Scripts folder, name it whatever you like.

3. Open up your Quicksilver preferences and goto Triggers, hit the “+” at the bottom and choose Hotkey. When the dialog appears hold down “/” to get to your root, then go into Library/Scripts/ and select the script you just made. Create a trigger to invoke the script.

When you want the path of a folder or file, select it, then invoke your script using your trigger and the path automagically gets copied to your clipboard. Nice.

Update: I hadn’t originally planned to sell or distribute these but seeing as I’ve got a few requests, let me know your size ( American Apparel ), and what tee you fancy. The cost is 35ish each, leave a comment and I’ll follow up with an email.

When most of us started this program we were Front-pager, Gimp hobbling n00bs, with little to no skills what-so-ever. Before I started at Cap, I didn’t even know CSS/XHTML, yes, I know, it’s sad. But a lot has changed since 2 years ago. We’ve logged dozens of all-nighters, 100’s of litres of monster ( yes, really ), 1000’s and 1000’s lines of code, and way too much caf chicken nuggets.

Coming from a zero skillset, here’s just some of the things our class has come up with:

- MoStep by Curtis Dodd, a dance dance revolution for Mobile written in Flash lite.
- A network driven MP3 player by Sean Patterson written entirely in AS3.
- Interactive Wireframes by Jeremy Butler written entirely in Flash.
- Murray, a Band management tool in the works by Derek Kehler, written in Rails.
- Doomi, my to-do list application written in javascript and compiled in Adobe AIR.

There’s plenty more I’ve missed, but the point is we’ve come from having zero knowledge of the web, to building complex web applications with robust software.

So to all my INTE comrades, it’s been a pleasure working beside you guys for the past two years, good luck in the real world.

See you at the grad show,

JG