Saturday Link Roundup 2
Again, my apologies for not blogging lately but I’ve been rather busy with this and that and haven’t really found the time to blog. Once this layout is finished I’ll get back to a more regular schedule. And yes, a new layout is coming and no, I don’t know when it’s going to make its debut. The sketch for the header is sitting in Photoshop waiting to be cleaned up, I put it aside in favor of putting together this weeks roundup. A partial preview (lolz not really much of a preview) is available on the main page, you’ve probably noticed that I did away with the oversized footer a few days ago. The design is still in its infant stages, no colour scheme or graphics to be had, but the basics have been laid out and I quite like the way it’s coming.
As always take caution as there are quite a few images beneath the cut, enjoy this weeks roundup!
Firefox
Firefox 3.1 (Shiretoko) planned features draft – As Firefox 3 approaches its grand debut this next Tuesday, for Mozilla developers it means the end of a development cycle and the start of another. Firefox 3.next is the tentative name for the next relatively minor update to the Firefox 3 branch, which is most likely to become Firefox 3.1.
A very early draft of planned features reveals that as expected, this release will be mainly about landing stuff that didn’t make it on time for the Firefox 3, along with the usual performance, stability and security bug fixes.
How to move the bookmarks in Firefox 3 – Firefox 3 changed the way bookmarks are stored on the computer. Before they were simply saved in a bookmarks.html file in the user’s profile folder and it was easy to add the browser.bookmarks.file parameter in about:config to change the location manually. The new Firefox introduces a database driven design and bookmarks are now stored in the places.sqlite file in the profile folder.
Speed Testing the Latest Web Browsers – Read the hype on every new web browser released or due out this year, and you’ll see claims that every one of them is “faster” than all the others. You could compare super-specific tests and decipher all the code-brain terminology, and you’d still be left wondering which browser starts quicker, uses less memory, and slides through dynamic interfaces like Gmail the fastest. Since our squadron of independent analysts had the week off, we ran the latest editions of Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera 9.5, and Safari for Windows through some unscientific but highly geeky tests ourselves on a plain old Windows computer. Take a look at the full (and somewhat unexpected) results after the jump.
Firefox 3 When Add-ons Do Not Work – I finally upgraded from Firefox 2 to the latest release candidate of Firefox 3 and immediately ran into a problem. My RSS feeds were not showing up at all in the Bookmarks and they only did so after importing an old bookmarks.html file from the Firefox profile folder which in turn duplicated every other bookmark. Took a while to remove the duplicates again but I now have my RSS Feeds in the Bookmarks Folder as well.
All you need to know about the Firefox 3 Location Bar – The location bar (or address bar, awesome bar, smart bar) has one main function and that is to provide the user with a sophisticated tool to load a website. In old times the location bar was used to enter local or remote addresses but nothing else which changed slightly in Firefox 2 which included a history search, internal configurations and keywords that could be used to shortcut searches or open websites faster.
Fix Excessive Firefox 3 CPU and Hard Disk Usage – I switched from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3 a few days ago and love the speed of the new version of Firefox. It’s not a speed gain that’s only appearing in benchmarks but one that every user will recognize as well. There was one minor incident though after upgrading to Firefox 3 that turned out to become a huge problem. Firefox 3 was frantically writing on my hard drive and raising cpu usage periodically which brought the browser to an complete halt in that time.
iBreadCrumbs – iBreadCrumbs.com is a recording toolbar for your web browser. Similar to what a DVR does for tv, iBreadCrumbs.com records all the web pages you visit while you research. Save, review, and share your research with friends or colleagues. Not yet available for Firefox 3
FormTextResizer – FormTextResizer is a bookmarklet that allows you to resize any textarea or text input on any webpage. This way, you won’t be confined to a teensy little comment box or e-mail field. Just activate the bookmarklet, then click-drag on the textarea or text field that you want to resize. Simple!
Coding and Design
2008 Design Trends – About a year ago, I compiled a huge list of artistic sites. It seems like the trend has carried on in 2008 and is growing stronger (thank God the glossy style is gone).
5 Great Website Traffic Monitoring Methods – Having a portfolio website is an essential aspect of many designers lives, and optimizing and monitoring your site will benefit you in many ways. If you are seeking freelance work and more recognition then yo will need a to use one or several of these website traffic monitoring methods.
These program will allow you to monitor many different stats such as total visitors, unique visitors, page views, browsers used, location of users, keywords used to find your site, sites that linked to you and much, much more.
Want to know how to design? Learn The Basics. – Want to know how to design? Then you should learn the basics of design. The basic elements of design include colour, line, shape, scale, space, texture and value and these are the fundamental pieces that make up any piece of work. If you ever start a design course this will be the very first thing that you are taught, guaranteed.
Block Quotes and Pull Quotes: Examples and Good Practices – Quotes are used to emphasize excerpts of text. Since users almost never read but scan we need to provide them with some focus anchors to fix their attention to the most important parts of our articles. Furthermore, quotes are always used for testimonials and sometimes for blog comments. They can be styled using graphics, CSS and a little bit of JavaScript. Sometimes, creative dynamic solutions can be applied as well.
How I Format My CSS Files – I’ve read about a dozen articles on CSS file formatting and management. I must say, I don’t agree completely with any of them. Not to say that the way they do things is “wrong”, but I don’t subscribe to their way of CSS file formatting. Here’s how I do it.
40 Excellent Web Based Tools to Help You Design from Anywhere – In today’s busy world it can be hard to be tied down to one computer. With web based applications becoming so advanced it is now possible to still get work done anywhere there is a computer without installing any software. From image editing to Word documents, you can do it all online.
Saving the Spark: Developing Creative Ideas – Ideas. They’re at the heart of every creative process. However, almost no really good ideas are flashes of inspiration. They may start that way—a single glimmer of something special—but in order to work, they need to be honed. Like a really good cheese, they need to mature. Indeed, the “flash of inspiration” idea—the Eureka moment—is only part of a longer process that, if ignored, will see most ideas simply fizzle out.
13+ Fantastic Tools For Knowing How They’re Doing It – Sometimes, (if not most of the time) you want to know exactly what your competitors are doing and how do they excel in doing it right. Today we wanted to share with you a comprehensive list of more than 13 online tools that can help you figure out why some of your competitors are ranking better than you.
Design is about constraints – I wrote in last week’s Friday Focus post at Devlounge that “restraint is more powerful than the lack of it, especially in design”. The restraint I referred to was the strength and beauty of minimalism compared to the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink technique, but there’s more to it.
Why is the new Google favicon so ugly? – When I first saw the new lowercase “g” favicon for Google, I thought it was a glitch. The blue of the icon was a bit too bright for my taste, and the “Web 2.0? spin on it (shiny, rounded-corner button) was not characteristic of Google at all. A few hours later I saw that people started to talk, nay, complain about it. And then I realized it was a tiny Google redesign, after all.
Food
Candied Apples – This recipe uses black currant syrup, the type used to flavor drinks, to give the candied apples a beautiful red candy coating.
Chocolate Malt Memories – Because I didn’t have enough fun making an opera cake for Daring Bakers, I went for another layered, multi-component cake last week. Sometimes I like to go for simple, breezy creations and other times I just feel like challenging my skills. Making layer cakes is always an exercise that keeps me on my pastry toes. Also, it was my sister’s birthday, and she is an unabashed lover of all things chocolate.
s’more pie – A year ago, I made s’mores from scratch and brought them to the Memorial Day barbecue on my friend Jocelyn’s roof, celebrating the thousands of other hottie uniformed types that had sailed in for Fleet Week. [I just spelled that “Weak.” It’s all so telling, innit?]
Photoshop and Fireworks
Saving Images for the Web – When saving for the web, it’s always important to consider the quality of the image, and the size of the image in order to provide visual clarity without slowing performance. This tutorial will teach you what you need to know about saving images for the web.
Digital Adjustments & Development – Back in the old days with 35mm film the photographer had his darkroom where he developed the film, in our day and age the computer has taken over the role. This article will deal with some of the adjustments you can use to develop your photographs in the digital darkroom.
The software I have used in this article is Photoshop CS3 (on a Mac) but most of these features are available in any decent photo-editing software.
Draw in Photoshop Using a Tablet – In this Photoshop tutorial, you’ll learn how to set up Photoshop so that it can use the tablets input, create an outline from a photo, color and shade all using the tablet. The tutorial includes a time lapse of the process I took to creating the final product.
Healing With Pressure – If you’re using a Wacom tablet and wireless pen with Photoshop, you’ve probably already uncovered the secret hiding place where Adobe tucked the pressure sensitivity controls…
Say Goodby to Gradient Banding – If you’ve printed an image with a gradient in it, you’re probably familiar with banding (a visible line where one color ends and the next starts, like bands of color…
Sharpening Your Images Like A Pro – Just about every image that is brought into Photoshop, whether from a scanner, digital camera, CD-ROM, etc., needs to be sharpened…
The Quick and Easy Guide to Color Correction Part 1 – This guide will serve as an introduction to people who are not familiar with how to color balance their photos as well as serve as a refresher for those who are. Part 2 will feature more advanced techniques and methods to take your great looking photo and make it look incredible.
131 Web 2.0 Layer Styles for Fireworks – Here are the 131 Web 2.0 Layer Styles for Fireworks 8 & CS3 [initial release contains 48 styles].
200+ Textures, Brushes, and Fonts: Ultimate Grunge Roundup – Grunge style is rough, rugged, torn, worn, and tattered. To most, these adjectives would describe something less than appealing, but in the hands of a talented web designer, elements possessing these qualities can be used to turn a web site into a work of art. So, if you are just getting started in grunge design or if you are already a pro, you should find the grunge freebies in this article to be very useful.
DIY
How To: Finger Knit – Finger knitting is the art of knitting without needles. It is relaxing and easy to do. You can make scarves, toy snakes, gift wrap decorations, headbands, and more with these knit ropes.
Beat the Heat for Cheap: Reflective panels for your windows – Over the past seven summers I’ve spent working in great part from my fourth-floor walkup, I’ve learned that it’s not the heat; it’s the sunshine. On hot but cloudy days, my apartment remains reasonably comfortable because the sun is not heating the building’s brickwork facade. But on hot and clear days, my east and south-southeast exposures are killers: not only does my own place get the radiated results of all that sunlight, but so do the three units below me — and as we all know from high school physics, heat rises.
To pin or not to pin – Can you count the number of times you’ve sewn for example a collar to a neckline and had the experience that the one side will set just fine but the other side is either too large or too small? Or what of joining one front side seam to a back side seam and ending up with disparity? While it can be due to inaccurate patterns, it’s just as likely due to the practice of pinning. I’ve created a test project that I’ll show you, illustrating why pinning can create problems where there were none.
I.D. and O.D. – This is a continuation of To pin or not to pin so you should read that first if you haven’t already. I.D. and O.D. refers to Inner Diameter and Outer Diameter. This is a common concept in every field of engineering of which sewing is one. However, it’s only in sewing that people assume that two lengths that will be joined must be identical in length. In any other field, one would be laughed out of the room for believing this. I.D is necessarily smaller than O.D., one tucks inside the other. That’s just one reason that sleeves for example should not be larger than the armhole to which they are sewn. Sleeves are I.D. tubes sewn into a still larger armhole tube (O.D.).
Homemade Air Conditioner Version 4 – I recently completed my latest creation. It’s a very different design from what I had previously. This version attempts to deal with the small issue I encountered with my last design with regards to condensation buildup in the heat exchanger.
Free Software
AMP Font Viewer An Advanced Font Manager – The font viewer that I have written earlier today is nice if you want to get a quick overview over all installed fonts on the system. If you want an advanced font manager that can install and uninstall fonts among other things you might be interested in the software AMP Font Viewer.
How to Recover Deleted Files with Free Software – Ack! The computer ate my term paper! We’ve all been there at some point. You delete an important file, somehow it skips your Recycle Bin altogether, and for all practical purposes, it’s disappeared into the ether. But before you hit the big red panic button, there’s a very good chance that your file is still alive and kicking somewhere on your hard drive—you just need to know how to find it. With the right tools, finding and recovering that deleted file can be as simple as a few clicks of your mouse.
Free Software For Novel Writer – yWriter – If you are a novel writer (novelist), this freeware will be useful for you. yWriter designed especially for novel writer. It build by a programmer who a novel writer too. With this software you can yWriter comes with lots of useful features that designed for novelist. You can add chapter, and you can write your novel by chapter. You can add multiple scenes within chapters. I think it will really useful for novel writer.
Open Office Extensions – Open Office recently pushed 3.0 as a beta release.
It’s a bit slower the 2.4, it’s got a nice new start centre, an icon refresh, a zoom control on the status bar and is now capable of supporting extensions to increase functionality.
Zip Repair – The Zip format is probably still the most used and known format to pack files. Corrupt zip files cannot be extracted usually displaying the message that the file is not a valid archive. Most corrupt files can be repaired if the corruption was caused by an interrupted download or incomplete upload. Those are probably the most likely cases for zip file corruption with hard disk errors as a third possibility.
Miscellaneous
3 Smart Things About Music – 1 The pitches in musical scales are likely derived from language. Turns out, aspects of spoken English and Mandarin correlate to the intervals between notes in a chromatic scale (the black and white piano keys in an octave).
Five Best Photo Sharing Web Sites – The first consumer-priced, one-megapixel digital cameras hit the streets just over 10 years ago, and today digital cameras are everywhere—hell, one megapixel is tiny for even our cell phone cameras. As a result, we snap picture after picture without giving a thought to the price of film, which means you’ve got hundreds of pictures to share with friends and family. On Tuesday we asked you to tell us your favorite photo sharing web site, and today we’re back with the five most popular answers.
Passive Aggressive Anger Release Machine – Insert a coin and wait until your selected piece of China will fall into the bottom of the machine… breaking.
Fashion trends and weight fluctuation – An article by Francesca Gavin in yesterday’s UK Times online had me thinking. She maintains that the voluminous fashion trend was the real culprit to her gradual weight gain because it was easy to hide extra pounds in sack dresses, bubble skirts, A-line tunics, stretch jeans and smocks.
alt=“HOWTO: Packing”:http://www.dressaday.com/2008/06/howto-packing.html – First off, a disclaimer. There is, of course, more than one way to pack for a trip, and more than one kind of trip. These instructions will be of no use to you if you are planning a six-month scientific expedition to the Arctic or the Amazon, have to attend four black-tie balls in five days, or have a lady’s maid or valet. (if you have a lady’s maid and are packing your own suitcase/valise/trunk … why do you have a lady’s maid?). These instructions are really only good for fairly boring businessy-type trips, or short vacationy-type trips. But, that said…
10 Tips For Mastering A Messy Home – Living a clutter free and bare-bones minimized possessions lifestyle would be great and easy to manage in single or adult couple homes–but here are 10 practical tips for mess-free family sized living:
8 Things You Should Include In Your Terms of Service Agreement – If you’ve been a solo freelancer for any significant stretch of time, you’ve probably learned the hard way that a work project can go horribly wrong. They turn out to be life lessons in the long run, but there are ways to protect yourself.
Pricing Guideline Resources for Designers – One of the major dilemma any designer is faced with is deciding how much to charge for any given project. Unfortunately there is no one right answer. The number of variables is too great to create a basic price list for design services. Lucky for us, the internet is a wealth of knowledge and many designers have decided to share their thoughts and ideas on this subject
Tags: for-you, resources, saturday-link-roundup
I loved your last bunch of links, Becky and found heaps of awesome things. This time was pretty much the same. I especially love how varied your links are. It’s not just how to design article one, how to design article two etc. I mean, THERE’S FOOD. I’m seriously going to try that layer cake for my own birthday!
Thanks! :D
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Hi I'm Becky, often referred to as The Knitting Hillbilly and Pussybear, owner of this site and general nuisance. I'm a knitter, serial complainer, known whistle blower and I run the ever popular
Cool links! I shall be back to look at more, later. But, oh my, I had no clue you could knit with your fingers! That’s awesome! And possibly a better solution for me given my clumsiness with needles. :P
#1 Aisling Jun 14, 07:58 Permalink