• TextFlow Online Word Processing

  Pretty interesting looking online flash-based word processor.

• RegExhibit OSX Regular Expression Editor

  The OSX Regular Expression editor and debugger I’ve been looking for.

• Housing Works Beautiful design

  The design for this website is stunning. I love large background websites.

• s3slider jQuery Sliding Image Captions

  A very cool solution for image captions that lay over an image and animate in.

• Ronald Jenkees Electronic music

  One of the most original sounding solo electronic artists out there. Check out “Stay Crunchy”. I can’t wait for his new album!

• Inovat Sweet Looking Portfolio

  Incredibly simple, yet sweet looking portfolio web design.

• Enable path view in OSX Finder

  Haven’t you always wanted to display the full path to the current folder in your Finder window? In terminal, enter the following command:

  defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES

  Next, enter the following code to restart your Finder:

  killall Finder

• Creative and Live Tight Minimal Design

  Really clean and tight minimal design. I love the logo and subtlety.

• Space Collective Dark Simple Design

  Beautiful dark website design. I love the typography, color scheme and the block-like grid.

• Carbonica Stunning hand-drawn style

  This site has taken hand-drawn to a new level, complete with hand-drawn icons, headings, navigation and a cool illustrative style.

• Weightbot Website Dark, smooth and metallic

  Weightbot for the iPhone/iPod was cool and so is it’s site. I love the dark, metallic, apple-like style. Gorgeous work by Mark Jardine.

• I AM SECOND Amazing, heart-felt stories

  I absolutely love real stories about what God has done in people’s lives. This site is awesome.

• jQuery Fling Subscribe/Publish event model

  Collin Allen has written a sweet jQuery plug-in that makes it easy to code JavaScript events using a publisher/subscriber model very similar to Flash.

• jCrop jQuery Image Cropping

  Very smooth jQuery image cropping plugin.

• Smooth CSS Image Resizing in IE

  I can’t believe that I’ve never seen this until now. Finally, bicubic interpolation for Internet Explorer with only one CSS rule:

  img {
-ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic;
}

  Preview:

  

• Dropbox/Leap Scrapbooking Killer online scrapbooking

  Jon Hicks has come up with a very sweet way of scrapbooking all of those screenshots that you’ve been compiling over the times. I think I’ll actually use this one.

I know this much. Lists like this really help me. I’m typically an out-of-the-loop sort of fella, so by the time I find cool stuff, it’s years later than the crowd. So, maybe, just maybe this will help you stay in the loop:

• The Importance of Icon Metaphors

  I’m already a huge fan of Louie Mantia’s work, but I found this blog article particularly interesting. Learn how it’s not only important for your icons to look good, but speak in a language your user knows.

• LG Streaming Blu-ray Player Ohhh my awesome!

  Blu-ray with no discs? Wha!?!? Unlimited Blu-ray quality movies from Netflix? Wha?!?! Hello, dream-machine.

• URL Shortening Widget & Website For all you social-medians

  URL-shortening for all you Twitter and micro-blogging addicts.

• jQuery Time Pickr

  An incredibly intuitive and clever form time picker jQuery plugin.

• CSS3 Transitions/Animations by John Resig

  A word on CSS3 Transitions/Animations from the JavaScript genius, John Resig.

• Wall Swaps Clever business schwag

  Check this site out, not only for the cool marketing schwag, but a really clever implementation of a corkboard.

• CSS Zen Garden – Under the Sea Hott CSS Zen Garden submission

  This has to be one of the most beautiful CSS Zen Garden submissions I’ve ever seen.

• Make em Proud Runner-up CSS Zen Garden submission

  If under the sea is one of the most hot CSS Zen Garden submissions, this is the runner-up

• @-moz-document

  Style different pages on your domain with @-moz-document. CSS is gonna get sweet if this works cross-browswer.

• FancyBox OSX Content Zooming

  OSX-like zooming for your website for not only images, but iFrame and video content too!

• Google Voice/Video Chat

  Google adds what we’ve all been waiting for. Just click on the new “Video & more” menu in a Gmail chat window and select “Start video chat” or “Start voice chat.”

• Pixelmator Flippin’ beautiful and vibrant!

  I noticed this site a while back and ran across it a few days ago. What a beautiful site, full of vibrance and killer icons.

• Checkout App Clean site

  Another site I’ve ran across many times. This site also has some great icons and is extremely clean and smooth. Obviously it’s an OSX application. Gorgeous.

• TapTapTap Innovative iPhone design

  I love this site. There’s something about a concept taken to it fullness – in this case, a sushi table. From the chopsticks and tuna to the wasabi and soy sauce to the cutting board, this site rocks. One page, simple, with sweet javascript transitions. Add to that the fact that they are making some of the sweetest iPhone apps out there. In the words of @ridlo, this is the swisstastic hotness.

• Interview with Jonathan Snook The Snook

  Cool interview with the man, Snook himself. Learn about how the masta does it.

• G-Speak Operating System Minority Report is real!

  Thought that OS that Tom Cruise used in Minority Report was impossible and amazing? Check it out for realz.

• Digitally Imported Electronic Internet Radio

  Rather, refound, I used to listen to Digitally Imported internet radio all the time in my college years. I recently rediscovered my love for it while telling a friend about it. In case you didn’t know, I <3 all music electronica.

• TiltViewer Flash Image Viewer

  The first time I saw this viewer, it was over at Signal Noise and I thought it was pretty cool. I used to love flash and flash image galleries, but since, my love for flash has faded. Nevertheless, this is still a rockin’-cool looking flash image viewer.

• Buero Ink

  Markus Shaefer’s logo work is stunning as well as his minimalist site. Even though my work doesn’t reflect it, I love minimalism and simple, monotone forms.

• display:inline-block;

  During my day job at Dealerspan as a UI designer, our target broswer is Firefox 3+. This means I get to use display:inline-block; all day long and it is such a time saver. No more floating!

• :hover:focus

  If you ever want to simulate an “onpress” selector in CSS, this is handy. Use a:hover:focus.

• “Star Wars” – an a capella tribute to John Williams

  This a capella video is amazing. From Star Wars to Jaws to Jurassic Park, I nerded out!

  I suggest a new strategy: let the Wookie win…

• Wilson Miner’s Website

  I love Wilson Miner’s minimalist site. Wait…he did the redesign for Apple.com? No wonder I like his style.

• Apple Keyboard

  After asking a ton of people on twitter, I broke down and bought the new apple keyboard. I love it. It so totally rocks compared to the plastic breadbox I was using before.

• Cold Calling Monetizing for n00bs

  A legit way to monetize your blog or vlog. Just call the company and ask them!

• Coda updated to 1.6 Plugins Available

  Of the myriads of updates and new feautres that Panic packs into every update, one feature stands out from the crowd: Plugins. That’s right – you can develop your own plugins for Coda. That’s freaktastically rad.

That’s it for today peeps. Let me know if you like this and want me to keep it up. Cheers!

“If Internet Explorer was human, I’d drop kick it in the go-nads.” – Me

Peace out.

I’ve also seen some crazy technique using bitwise & operators, which is hardly readable for common folk, but I do admit is probably blazing fast. Only issue there, once again, you are maintaining a counter variable and incrementing it. Blegh.

I do not claim for this method to be better. I simply claim that this is my method and I use it. Take it as you will. When in Rome…

First, lets set up a style

<style>
tr.alt td{
background-color:#D5E0E1;
}
</style>
Done…

Next, the PHP code intermingled with some HTML

<?php
for($i = 0; $i < 10; ++$i){
$row_class = empty($row_class)? "alt" : "";
echo("
<tr class=\"$row_class\">
<td>
data 1
</td>
<td>
data 2
</td>
<td>
data 3
</td>
</tr>");
}
?>

The key for the alternating row classes of course, lies in one line of PHP code:
$row_class = empty($row_class)? "alt" : "";

Basically, I’m using PHP shorthand to do an if statement and check if the variable $row_class is empty or a blank string (“”). If it is then I set it to “alt”. As you can imagine, next row, the same statement is ran. This time, it’s not empty, so it gets set to empty, thus alternating between the “alt” class and empty.

Done…Seacrest out.

Although horridly untested, I may have come up with a solution:

Actionscript: Check this before you wreck it.

fileExists = new Sound();
fileExists.loadSound('http://www.komodomedia.com/pathto/myfile.htm', true);
fileExists.setVolume(0);
fileExists.onLoad = function( success ){
if( success ){
trace("Loaded");
delete this;
}else{
trace("Failure");
}
}


The basic concept here is that Flash has this class called sound that is used to Stream MP3’s. By loading any file, turning off the sound, and telling it to stream it, we don’t have to load the whole file. Then, as soon as some data hits the Sound via the onLoad function, we know it exists. If not, then it doesn’t exist.

I’ve done minimal testing with this and it seems to work well.

Peace.

So, I’ve come up with this simple technique that will help you in your sushi-bar “I can’t eat Wasabi because it burns me” conundrum. Here it is:

1. Eat the Wasabi, don’t get too carried away though
2. Do NOT exhale out of your nose!
3. Continue to inhale deeply through your nose
4. Exhale out of your mouth only
5. Go back to step 2

Repeat steps 1-5 until you are in the safe!

Typically, I would love to come up with lengthy tips or tutorials as these people do, but often I end up with a wealth of drafts for ideas, but never get any real helpful content out to my readers. What I need is something more like a Tumblelog, which is more of a quick and dirty (not like that) stream of consciousness as a blog entry.

So, here I go, entry #1.

Dodging Cache Issues

I swear every time there is an issue with a client project or user on a website, it is a cache issue. You’ve seen it before. You are using the same image name or same stylesheet name and a users computer is caching it and causing issues with your new content.

A simple solution is just to rename the file. Thats easy right? Sometime yes. Sometimes it isn’t. We all may need to keep the same file names for a myriad of different reasons. Ok. Here’s mine.

Episode #1

I have a flash file that I update every couple of months. I don’t want to deal with renaming it, but I don’t want it to serve up the old version as cache. The solution is simple:

My code previously:

<embed....src="myfile.swf"....>

My NO-cache code:

<embed....src="myfile.swf?v1"....>

Basically, I’m appending a query string to the file as if I am passing in variables. Since webservers see this as a different file, it will cache it as a new file name, specifically “myfile.swf?v1″. Also, this makes it easy for versions. Next time you export your file, it will be v2, v3, v4… and so on.

Episode #2

I have a webcam that transfers a camera shot via ftp to my webserver. But, it FTP’s the image to the same directory with the same filename every time. Yeah, I could write a PHP script to get the picture and serve it up as a different file name every time, but that’s way too hard for a simple issue.

Also, I used to use a META REFRESH to refresh the page to serve up a new image, but that is frowned upon and refreshes the entire page. So, naturally I am thinkin’ JavaScript.

So, I get this rad script all hooked up to call a function every couple of seconds to refresh the image…here she be:

function refreshImage(){
if( document.getElementById('webcam-image') ){
setInterval(
function(){
var img = document.getElementById('webcam-image');
img.src = img.src;
},
4000
);
}
}

I’ve wrote some code to run this function on page load. Basically, this code just resets the src attribute of the image every 4 seconds. However, because the image is cached, I have issues. The code works fine, but keeps serving up the same image, so the user doesn’t see a change.

So, to employ my NO-cache technique, I whip up the following code:

function refreshImage(){
if( document.getElementById('webcam-image') ){
setInterval(
function(){
var img = document.getElementById('webcam-image');
if( !img.origSrc ) img.origSrc = img.src;
img.src = img.origSrc + "?" + (Math.random()).toString();
},
4000
);
}
}

Here, I save the original src attribute in a variable called origSrc and then every 4 seconds (4000 ms), I set the src attribute back to it’s original url. However, the magic comes in the querystring. I didn’t want to mess with an incrementing number, so I am just using a random number, but that’s all I need. So, when this function is called the first time, lets say the random number is 0.30301759604092937 (a decimal number between 0 and 1), the image’s src attribute becomes src="live.jpg?0.30301759604092937. Four seconds later, the code is ran again and the source attribute becomes src="live.jpg?0.0826765920752568, thus always rendering a new NON-cached version of the image. Voila!

P.S. If this technique is way too obvious or if you already knew it, please feel free to say “I agree.” Comments that insult should be reserved for an infinite amount of time.