Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Eclipse

Eclipse is an open source community, whose projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle. The Eclipse Foundation is a not-for-profit, member supported corporation that hosts the Eclipse projects and helps cultivate both an open source community and an ecosystem of complementary products and services. [Detail]

TortoiseSVN

TortoiseSVN is a really easy to use Revision control / version control / source control software for Windows. It is based on Subversion. TortoiseSVN provides a nice and easy user interface for Subversion.
It is developed under the GPL. Which means it is completely free, including the source code. But just in case you don't know the GPL too well: you can use TortoiseSVN to develop commercial applications or just use it in your company without any restrictions. [Detail]

MySQL

The MySQL® database has become the world's most popular open source database because of its consistent fast performance, high reliability and ease of use. It's used on every continent -- Yes, even Antarctica! -- by individual Web developers as well as many of the world's largest and fastest-growing organizations to save time and money powering their high-volume Web sites, business-critical systems and packaged software -- including industry leaders such as Yahoo!, Alcatel-Lucent, Google, Nokia, YouTube, and Zappos.com. [Detail]

NetBeans IDE

A free, open-source Integrated Development Environment for software developers. You get all the tools you need to create professional desktop, enterprise, web, and mobile applications with the Java language, C/C++, and even dynamic languages such as PHP, JavaScript, Groovy, and Ruby. The NetBeans IDE is easy to install and use straight out of the box and runs on many platforms including Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris. [Detail]

OpenOffice.org The Free and Open Productivity Suite

OpenOffice.org is the open source project through which Sun Microsystems has released the technology for the popular StarOffice[tm] Productivity Suite. All of the source code is available under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). Sun is participating as a member of the OpenOffice.org community. OpenOffice.org is being hosted by CollabNet. [Detail]

VirtualBox is a powerful x86 virtualization product for enterprise

irtualBox is a powerful x86 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). [Detail]

Dell developing handheld Internet device

Dell engineers are developing prototype devices that resemble Apple's iPod Touch but are slightly larger and lack cellular capabilities, according to the news report, citing unnamed sources. Dell will begin selling the Internet access device later this year, though the plan could be scrapped. [Detail]

Mozilla sets Firefox 3.5 final release for Tuesday (30th June 2009)

Mozilla will ship Firefox 3.5 on Tuesday (30th June 2009), bringing the long-awaited upgrade in under its own deadline wire, the company announced last Friday. [Detail]

15 Must Read Articles for CSS Beginners

Are you new to CSS? The initial process of learning this nifty language can be a little daunting, there’s so much to learn it can sometimes be difficult to figure out where to start. Luckily there’s plenty of valuable information and resources out there on the web that covers everything from the basics through to advanced topics. This collection of 15 articles pulls together some of the best must read blog posts for anyone looking to get started with CSS styling. [Detail]

30 Exceptional Web Designs

List of 30 exceptional web page designs for your inspiration. Most of these are relatively new; so they'll hopefully give you some ideas for your next project! Enjoy! [Detail]

45 Incredibly Useful Web Design Checklists and Questionnaires

Designing websites can be a long and complicated process. Dealing with clients, designing prototypes, coding, programming, and testing – there’s a lot to keep track of and a lot to make sure gets done. That’s where checklists can make your life a whole lot easier. With lists of points covering multiple areas from content to usability to accessibility to standards, you’re a lot less likely to overlook important parts of a site. [Detail]

Monday, June 29, 2009

Microsoft details free Windows 7 upgrade deal

Called the "Windows 7 Upgrade Option Program," the deal provides free or nearly-free upgrades to Windows 7 for people who purchase a new Vista PC between June 26, 2009, and Jan. 31, 2010. [Detail]

50 Free Resources That Will Improve Your Writing Skills

Effective writing skills are to a writer what petrol is to a car. Like the petrol and car relationship, without solid skills writers cannot move ahead. These skills don’t come overnight, and they require patience and determination. You have to work smart and hard to acquire them. Only with experience, you can enter the realm of effective, always-in-demand writers. [Detail]

35 CSS-Lifesavers For Efficient Web Design

CSS-design is not easy. We need to find workaround across browser inconsistencies, not that easy CSS-concepts and quite counterintuitive CSS-solutions. [Detail]

Friday, June 26, 2009

A new search experience with Bing's

Bing’s new features help you find what you’re looking for more quickly and easily. Plus, its eye-catching visual imagery and more intuitive layout make the search experience as a whole more enjoyable. Click here

Ubuntu

Ubuntu is a community developed, Linux-based operating system that is perfect for laptops, desktops and servers. It contains all the applications you need - a web browser, presentation, document and spreadsheet software, instant messaging and much more. [Detail]

Comparison of relational database management systems

This article is not all-inclusive or necessarily up-to-date. Unless otherwise specified in footnotes, comparisons are based on the stable versions without any add-ons, extensions or external programs. [Detail]

Beware of XHTML

If you're a web developer, you've probably worked a lot with XHTML, the markup language developed in 1999 to implement HTML as an XML format. Most people who use and promote XHTML do so because they think it's the “next version” of HTML, and they may have heard of some benefits here and there. But there is a lot more to it than you may realize, and if you're using it on your website, even if it validates, you are probably using it incorrectly. [Detail]

5 CSS3 Techniques For Major Browsers using the Power of jQuery

Many exciting new functions and features are being thought up for CSS3: text-shadow, box-sizing, opacity, multiple backgrounds, border-radius, border-image, etc… [Detail]

Dynamically Loading ASP.NET User Controls with jQuery

ASP.NET User Controls are pretty useful. They allow functional modules of code and markup to be encapsulated in such a way that reuse is convenient and easy, without sacrificing the power or integration of the ASP.NET model. As we move into an era of AJAX-driven websites, this modularity is still very important. Can the user controls that we all know and (mostly) love still help with this encapsulation, despite being engineered before AJAX techniques emerged? I think they can. But at this point in the ASP.NET timeline, user controls are in need of some help. [Detail]

Use jQuery and ASP.NET AJAX to build a client side Repeater

By sending only data to the client, you can profoundly reduce the size of what you send and see a substantial increase in performance. You also allow yourself the ability to easily add features like light-weight sorting and paging on the client. This can not only improve your users’ experience, but reduce server load and bandwidth requirements. [Detail]

Using jQuery to Consume ASP.NET JSON Web Services

In response to many of the articles here, I receive feedback asking how to achieve the same results without using ASP.NET AJAX. As much as I’m a fan of ASP.NET AJAX, I must agree that its JavaScript payload can certainly be a drawback in some situations. [Detail]

An introduction to jQuery

Part 1: The Client Side
Part 2: Making Ajax Callbacks to the Server

Simple jQuery Asp.net Ajax Example

The objective here is to have a wcf ajax service that returns an object and a simple ui that is controlled by jquery code and to illustrate: [Detail]

Using jQuery with ASP.NET - A Beginner's Guide

Did you hear about jQuery.. NO...? It’s fantastic!! Well if you have been hearing those words more too often from your colleagues but haven’t had the chance to explore jQuery yet, then here’s this beginner guide for you to get started with jQuery and ASP.NET. [Detail]

Using jQuery with ASP .NET

jQuery is the star among the growing list of JavaScript libraries. A few of its characteristics are light-weight, cross-browser compatibility and simplicity. A common task that sometimes takes 10 lines of code with traditional JavaScript can be accomplished with jQuery in just one line of code. For example, if you want to dress up a table with an ID mytable with alternative color for every other row, you can simple do this in jQuery. [Detail]

Consuming a Web Service from an HTML Page

Web services are commonly consumed from server-side web applications using sophisticated languages such as VB.NET, C#, and Java. Rajesh Toleti demonstrates that Web services may also be consumed from client-side HTML pages with the help of JavaScript. [Detail]

Using the WebService Behavior

This article explains how to use the WebService behavior to call remote methods from Web Services. The WebService behavior is implemented with an HTML Component (HTC) file as an attached behavior, so it can be used in Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 and later versions. Most of this article focuses on how to use the WebService behavior, but it also touches briefly on Web Services that are used by the WebService behavior. The About the WebService Behavior provides additional discussion and information on the main benefits and features of the WebService behavior; it also provides numerous links to related Web sites. [Detail]

Creating and Consuming .NET Web Services in 5 Easy Steps

The Internet has a new player on the scene. It’s been surrounded by a great deal of hype -- and even some television commercials! Apparently, this new, "next generation technology" will change the way business is done on the Web. It seems that soon, companies, their applications or software, and any Internet-enabled devices will easily be able to communicate with, and provide services to, one another regardless of platform or language. Sounds revolutionary! [Detail]

Tutorial of this simple and universal data exchange format

JSON is a part of the ECMAScript standard since ECMA has defined in 1999 the eval() function that parses the format.
It has been popularized with the success of Ajax. [Detail]

.NET 3.5: JSON Serialization using the DataContractJsonSerializer

In ASP.NET AJAX Extensions v1.0 for ASP.NET 2.0 there is the JavaScriptSerializer class that provides JSON serialization and deserialization functionality. However, in .NET 3.5 the JavaScriptSerializer has been marked obsolete. The new object to use for JSON serialization in .NET 3.5 is the DataContractJsonSerliaizer object. I'm still new to the DataContractJsonSerializer, but here's a summary of what I've learned so far... [Detail]

Json.NET

The Json.NET library makes working with JavaScript and JSON formatted data in .NET simple. Quickly read and write JSON using the JsonReader and JsonWriter or serialize your .NET objects with a single method call using the JsonSerializer. [Detail]

An Introduction to JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) in JavaScript and .NET

This article discusses JavaScript Object Notation (or JSON), an open and text-based data exchange format, that provides a standardized data exchange format better suited for Ajax-style web applications. [Detail]

VBScript Language Reference

VBScript Language Reference

Calling Cross Domain Web Services in AJAX

One of the current vogues in web applications is the creation of mashups. This involves the marrying of content and/or functionality from two different sources. Over the last few years, the opening up of formerly proprietary APIs from the likes of Google, Yahoo, Last.fm, Flickr, YouTube and Amazon has allowed developers to implement in their own applications, with simple one line calls to the requisite APIs, features such as adding photos, maps, booklists, videos and playlists. [Detail]

Using POST method in XMLHTTPRequest(Ajax)

Usually only the GET method is used while creating Ajax apps. But there are several occasions when POST is necessary when creating a ajax request. This could be for several reasons. For example, POST request are considered more secure than GET request as creating a POST request is relatively harder than creating a GET request. [Detail]

adaptive path » ajax: a new approach to web applications

Ajax isn’t a technology. It’s really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways. [Detail]

Ajax Tutorial

Ajax, XMLHttpRequest, JavaScript, dynamic, client-side, asynchronous [Detail]

AJAX : The Official Microsoft ASP.NET Site

ASP.NET AJAX is the free Microsoft AJAX framework for building highly interactive and responsive web applications that work across all popular browsers. The ASP.NET AJAX framework includes Server-Side ASP.NET AJAX, Client-Side ASP.NET AJAX, the AJAX Control Toolkit, and the jQuery library. ASP.NET AJAX enables developers to choose their preferred method of AJAX development, whether it is server-side programming, client-side programming, or a combination of both. [Detail]

W3Schools Online Web Tutorials

THE LARGEST WEB DEVELOPER SITE ON THE NET
Full Web Building Tutorials [Detail]

Thursday, June 25, 2009

10 Ways To Make Your Site Accessible Using Web Standards

Without argument, one of the most important things to consider when creating a website is that it be accessible to everyone who wants to view it. Does your website play nice with screen readers? Can a user override your style sheet with a more accessible one and still see everything your website has to offer? Would another Web developer be embarrassed if they saw your code? If your website is standards-compliant, you could more confidently answer these questions. [Detail]

Take Your Design To The Next Level With CSS3

Cascading Style Sheets were introduced 13 years ago, and the widely adopted CSS 2.1 standard has existed for 11 years now. When we look at websites that were created 11 years ago, it’s clear that we are a thousand miles away from that era. It is quite remarkable how much Web development has evolved over the years, in a way we would never have imagined then. [Detail]

Adaptive CSS-Layouts: New Era In Fluid Layouts?

Fluid web designs have many benefits, but only if implemented correctly. With proper technique, a design can be seen correctly on large screens, small screens and even tiny PDA screens. With bad coding structure, however, a fluid layout can be disastrous. Because of this, we need to find ways to work around most, if not all, of the cons of fluid design. [Detail]

Fixed vs. Fluid vs. Elastic Layout: What’s The Right One For You?

The problem has boggled the minds of Web designers for years: fixed, fluid, elastic or a hybrid layout design? Each option has its benefits and disadvantages. But the final decision depends so much on usability that it is not one to be made lightly. So, with all the confusion, is there a right decision? By considering a few factors and properly setting up the final design, you can end up with a successful layout design that reaps all the benefits. [Detail]

6 Free PSD/(X)HTML-Templates

We love our readers. We respect the hard work of designers and developers across the globe. And we do our best to make the web design community stronger and the Web a little bit prettier. Therefore we ask talented artists and creative professionals to showcase their skills and release something unique and beautiful as a gift to the community. And when designers agree, truly impressive works see the light of day. [Detail]

Business Card Design: Better Than A Plain Ol’ Business Card

Going to web conferences is a great opportunity to make new contacts and exchange business cards. Unfortunately, we have an industry filled with creative people who have no creative marketing for themselves. Sure, many have business cards, but one in a hundred have something really cool. These unique treasures, cards, items etc. get kept, talked about and usually photographed and shared. This post is an inspiration for all you creatives to step up your game, either by getting things made or by making them yourselves. [Detail]

25+ Magento Templates For Your E-Commerce Business

Magento is a popular open source e-commerce software platform that has a modular architecture and is extremely flexible. It comes with a number of online shop maintenance capabilities. It is also simple to configure and easy to customize. And despite the fact that it was launched just last year, it has been gaining more and more popularity among Web designers and e-business owners. [Detail]

40 Stunning and Creative Graffiti Artworks

Graffiti represents an art form that is unrestricted, one that rebels against conventional forms of artwork. Graffiti is intertwined into human history, dating back to the Roman Empires where they were plastered onto walls to make political statements and satirize current events. [Detail]

35 Examples Of Masterful Lighting Effects In Web Design

Using a light source the right way can add dimension and beauty to a website design. Strong light sources create a stark contrast between light areas and shadows in a design, making the elements look more realistic and dimensional and less flat. Some websites opt instead for a dim light source to create a soft glow around particular areas of the website, to attract the eye more subtly. [Detail]

Showcase Of Elegant And Original Blog Designs

When visiting a blog for the first time, you get an instant and strong impression from the design and layout. Cluttered and confusing blog layouts can be an instant turn-off, while sleek and elegant designs immediately captivate the audience. [Detail]

30 Beautiful Real Estate Websites

Real estate is a valuable and often expensive purchase. Copious research is done by home buyers before venturing out to acquire real estate. In this day and age, gathering information about a property is typically done online, and an effective and captivating website design can make or break a home sale. [Detail]

35 Beautiful Commercial And Free Joomla Templates

Joomla is one of the most powerful, robust and feature-rich content management systems out there. Besides being open-source, Joomla is capable of some really stunning designs through the use of modules and built-in display customizations. Below, we present a list of 20 35 of the coolest, slickest, most eye-catching Joomla template designs. [Detail]

40 Beautiful Skateboard Designs

The skateboard has been a favorite medium of artists for decades. Not only does it provide a sturdy surface to paint on, but it offers a great way to have your artwork be seen in the community. Skateboarding culture, which was once looked on as a short-term fad for rebellious teens, has established itself in society. [Detail]

100% Google AdSense: Tools, Tips and Resources

Google AdSense is a simple and low-risk way for publishers to quickly monetize their content. The pay-per-click ad system has created an opportunity for anyone to instantly have advertising on their website, without the hassle of having to actively sell ad space. AdSense makes up a good portion of the advertising revenue for many websites, and other websites may use AdSense to earn the bulk of their revenues. Either way, AdSense is an excellent system for monetizing your content. [Detail]

Beautiful Pictures For Spring Inspiration

Inspiration is all around us: you can derive new ideas from people you meet, places you visit and observations you make. Sometimes it is enough just to take a look around and observe the beauty of nature surrounding us everywhere. For instance, spring is often considered the most beautiful and inspirational period of the year, with its refreshing, colorful, vivid imagery and structures. And this post hopes to prove just that. [Detail]

40 Useful JavaScript Libraries

Popular JavaScript libraries such as jQuery, MooTools, Prototype, Dojo and YUI can be great for accomplishing common JavaScript tasks. These libraries provide many functions, whether the matter is related to events or effects or AJAX. And if one of these libraries can’t do the job, a plug-in probably exists that can. [Detail]

9 Common Usability Mistakes In Web Design

By now, all good designers and developers realize the importance of usability for their work. Usable websites offer great user experiences, and great user experiences lead to happy customers. Delight and satisfy your visitors, rather than frustrate and annoy them, with smart design decisions. Here are 9 usability problems that websites commonly face, and some recommended solutions for each of them. [Detail]

50 Wonderful, Inspiring Photoblogs

A photoblog is a very specific type of blog. Its focus is photography, and there are typically few words beyond a caption and comments. Photoblogs are easy to set up and maintain, and they make great photo galleries for photographers who are put off by the complexity of HTML coding or installing a CMS such as WordPress. [Detail]

35 Beautiful Examples Of Animals Photography

Animal photography is probably one of the most dangerous types of photography. The outcome totally depends on the skills of photographer and the time when the shot is taken. A photographer who uses good exposure, color and blur settings along with appropriate shutter speed and focusing techniques can produce stunning photographs. [Detail]

100 Beautiful Free Textures

Use of texture in Web design is extremely common. Part of the reason textures are so useful to designers is the relative ease of the integrating one into a design if a high-quality textured image already exists, not to mention the endless possibilities. Fortunately, plenty of photographers and designers are willing to share their work with the rest of us so that we can use them in a number of different ways. [Detail]

404 Error Pages, One More Time

The design of 404 error pages is often overlooked and underestimated. However, designed carefully, these pages can make a random visitor stay on your website, take a look around and eventually find the information he or she was looking for in the first place. Effective 404 error pages communicate why a particular page couldn’t be displayed and what users can do next. A search box and list of useful resources (possibly related to the missing page) could be helpful in this case. [Detail]

35 Examples Of Beautiful City Photography

More people across the world are living in cities than ever before. Cities are both places of historical significance and the engines of the world’s economy. They’re also home to some of the greatest treasures and buildings that mankind has created. Cities are wonderful subjects for photography. They offer a variety of subjects suitable for both straight and HDR photography, including architectural, street and night photography. The structure, angles and texture you get with architectural photography make it unique and very engaging. [Detail]

8 Inspiring Stories Of ASCII Art

Labels are fragile: text and pictures have always been closely connected. From the dawn of written language to the era of microcomputers, much of human creation has explored the relationship between the literal and the figurative, the form and the function. Within this is the future site of retro, ASCII art. It’s often used as a catch-all term for “text-based art,” regardless of the actual character set being used. [Detail]

35 Free High-Quality E-Commerce Templates

For website owners who are evaluating e-commerce solutions, there are several good options for powering websites and shopping carts. Regardless of which option you chose, deciding on a design brings with it even more decisions to make. Of course, a custom design is always an option, but for those who want to keep costs down, templates are a popular choice. Premium e-commerce themes are easy to find, but they can be expensive. Free e-commerce templates are difficult to find, and quality free templates are even harder to find. [Detail]

Colors In Corporate Branding And Design

Color is a major consideration in any Web design. Whether for an individual, small company, or major corporation, color scheme is one of the most significant factors in the overall look and appearance of a website. In some cases, the designer may have the sole discretion in making color choices, but many times a color scheme has already been established and needs to be followed. In situations where a company already has a strong brand, color usage for the website can either build or take away from this. [Detail]

The Beauty Of Urban Decay

The city is a fantastic source of beauty and inspiration, with all the glitz and glamour glistening beneath the city lights. But there is another side of the city altogether, one rife with its own kind of allure. Across the tracks, away from the dazzle of downtown, lies a darker imagination, this one looking to grunge-ridden, dilapidated architecture for inspiration. There is a beauty that pervades this kind of urban decay and captured wonderfully through a photographer’s well-trained eye. These industrial city scenes are wonderfully dark and offer a glimpse of the weathered face beneath the city facade. [Detail]

More Web Design Trends For 2009

This post is the second part of our review. It presents design trends for 2009 in terms of layouts, visual approaches and design elements. Please notice that this post showcases trends and developments that were extensively covered in our previous articles (e.g. handwriting, retro and vintage etc.) and therefore weren’t covered in this post (they are all linked in the overview, so feel free to explore these single posts as well). [Detail]

40 Incredible Near-Infrared Photos

One of the most charming contrasting color effects you can get in photography is by using infrared. An easy way to understand near-infrared light is to think of it as the color of the rainbow next to red, a color that is invisible to the human eye. But near-infrared is not the same as thermal imaging. [Detail]

Push Your Web Design Into The Future With CSS3

There are exciting new features in the pipeline for Cascading Style Sheets that will allow for an explosion of creativity in Web design. These features include CSS styling rules that are being released with the upcoming CSS3 specification. Realistically, you won’t be able to use these on your everyday client projects for another few years, but for design blogs and websites aimed at the Web design community, these features can help you push the boundaries of modern Web design today, adding that extra spice to your design and helping the industry move forward. [Detail]

70 Beautiful Dual-Screen Desktop Wallpapers

Dual displays come in handy when you are working on several projects at the same time. They allow you to separate everything, organize and work efficiently. Dual displays are highly suitable for Web designers, Web developers and graphic designers and they are rapidly gaining on popularity in last years. [Detail]

100 Free High-Quality XHTML/CSS Templates

If you haven’t taken a look at the (X)HTML/CSS templates that are available for free from a variety of sources, you may be surprised by the quality you can find. WordPress themes tend to get a lot of exposure and attention in the design community right now, but there is also a wide variety of high-quality (X)HTML/CSS templates that are free of charge. [Detail]

50 Beautiful And Creative Portfolio Designs

Design portfolios come in various forms. Traditionally, they have been print-based and something you would carry to a client pitch or meeting to showcase what you’ve done and how you did it. Today, many designers take advantage of the Internet to publish and showcase their work via their online portfolios. Having your work displayed online removes the geographical restraints that traditional portfolios impose on you. [Detail]

50 Beautiful Winter Wonderland Photos

As winter approaches in the northern hemisphere and the nights draw in, our thoughts turn to the beauty of ice and snow. Winter photography, especially in the colder parts of the world, is a specialized niche. Photographers have to take care of their cameras and guard against frostbite and hypothermia. They often venture into remote wilderness searching for the perfect winter landscape. Their reward is stunning imagery. [Detail]

50 Beautiful Examples Of Tilt-Shift Photography

Tilt-shift photography is a creative and unique type of photography in which the camera is manipulated so that a life-sized location or subject looks like a miniature-scale model. Below we present 50 beautiful examples of tilt-shift photography. All examples are linked to their sources. We strongly encourage you to explore other works of the photographers we’ve featured in this post. [Detail]

60 Beautiful Examples Of Night Photography

Low light levels make night photography a challenging yet rewarding subject. The best results require specialized equipment, like SLR cameras, tripods, cable releases and flashguns. After sunset, the everyday world is magically transformed, and city buildings, fireworks, thunderstorms and the northern lights all become popular subjects. [Detail]

50 Beautiful Blog Designs

There are things one can do a number of times without worrying about becoming boring. For instance, collecting and showcasing excellent blog designs. In this post we do it already the fifth time. Why? Web design lives in blogs; new developments appear there, that’s where the music plays. And that’s where you need to look for in order to keep up with current trends and developments. [Detail]

Pricing Tables: Examples And Best Practices

Pricing tables play an important role for every company that offers products or services. They are a challenge from both a design and usability standpoint. They must be simple but at the same time clearly differentiate between features and prices of different products and services. [Detail]

75 (Really) Useful JavaScript Techniques

Developers and designers are using more and more JavaScript in modern designs. Sometimes this can be a hindrance to the user and take away from the simplicity of the design, and other times it can add greatly to the user’s experience. The key is a) adding the right amount of JavaScript, and b) using the right JavaScript techniques. We have already collected various JavaScript techniques in the past – now it’s time for a new portion of JavaScript. [Detail]

40 Creative Design Layouts: Getting Out Of The Box

We strongly encourage designers to break out of the usual boxed layout conventions, experiment with new approaches and risk crazy ideas. Show what you are capable of! [Detail]

35 Beautiful Examples Of Rain Photography

Most photographers do not feel comfortable in taking photographs in bad weather. Yet bad weather sometimes presents the perfect opportunity to get most out of our skills. In particular, in the beginning of autumn rain can provide the perfect opportunity to capture wonderful photos. [Detail]

45 Beautiful Motion Blur Photos

Photos taken with a camera do not represent a single moment of time. Due to technological constraints these shots stand for some scene over a brief period of time. This time frame depends on the camera’s shutter speed. In motion blur, any object moving with respect to the camera will look blurred or smeared along the direction of relative motion. [Detail]

7 Principles Of Clean And Optimized CSS Code

Some of you may remember the days when 30KB was the recommended maximum size of a web page, a value which included HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, and images. I find with every new project with even the slightest bit of complexity, it’s not long before that 30 KB ideal is well out of my reach. With the popularity of CSS layouts and JavaScript-enriched web page experiences, it’s not uncommon, particularly for large sites, for the CSS files alone to jump well beyond that 30KB ceiling. [Detail]

Top 10 CSS Table Designs

Tables have got to be one of the most difficult objects to style in the Web, thanks to the cryptic markup, the amount of detail we have to take care of, and lack of browser compatibility. A lot of time could be wasted on a single table although it’s just a simple one. This is where this article comes in handy. It will show you ten most easily implemented CSS table designs so you can style your tables in a zap! [Detail]

55 Free High Quality Icon Sets

We love free icons. We love to smash things. And we respect hard-working designers. Therefore we are regularly looking for talented artists and creative designers and we are glad to support them by showcasing their work in our magazine. If you are going to create an icon set and experience any problems releasing it or spreading the word — let us know, we may figure something out. [Detail]

Table of Contents: Creative Examples

Table of contents is often considered to be one of the most unspectacular design elements ever invented. Because of its simple, usual form, table of contents is often not given the attention it may deserve — after all, it is just a list of the parts of a book or document organized in the order in which the parts appear. But why not use exactly that and surprise the reader of a booklet, brochure, annual report or a book with some beautiful and original table of contents? In fact, many creative approaches are possible. And this post attempts to prove exactly that. [Detail]

Free Credit Card Icons For Online-Shops

Credit card icons are an essential part of every online-shop. They are often used to indicate available payment conditions and purchasing options. The clearer they are presented in the online-shop, the easier it is for potential customers to figure out if they actually can pay online in this shop. Therefore when it comes to the design of an online-shop there is no way to get around using some credit card icons. [Detail]

Online Calendars and Date Pickers

Calendars always come in handy. Whether you are planning a schedule for your next project, manage your appointments or simply want to keep track on events you are going to take part in — to get things done in time you need a clear, simple and user-friendly time line. The more flexible your calendars are, the more effectively you can work with them. E.g. setting up your milestones, defining your deadlines and shifting your time line once unexpected problems occur. Besides, if you can get notified once the deadline is coming up or update the data once you stuck in the traffic then your calendar can turn out to be a real life-saver and boost your effectiveness. [Detail]

170+ Expert Ideas From World’s Leading Developers

An overview of the most important ideas and suggestions you should be aware of if you’d like to become or remain a professional. [Detail]

80 Beautiful Typefaces For Professional Design

Every now and again designers stumble upon the very same problem: the choice of a unique and beautiful typeface which manages to fulfill three basic tasks. Support the corporate identity, enrich the visual appearance and is compatible with the overall design. However, usually there are simply too many options you can consider, which is why you need time to find the option you are most comfortable with. Although the choice usually depends on clients’ requirements, it is necessary to have some pretty starting points for your font decision. [Detail]

Copyright Explained: I May Copy It, Right?

With blogging comes great responsibilty. You define the content of your weblog and you carry the full responsibility for every word you’ve published online. More than that, you are responsible for comments in your posts. To make sure you fulfill your legal obligations, it’s important to know, what you, as blogger, may or should do; and you have to know, how to achieve this. After all, the ignorance of the law does not make one exempt from compliance thereof. [Detail]

40+ Tooltips Scripts With AJAX, JavaScript & CSS

Web users love informative clues. Whatever questions and misunderstandings might occur - delivering precise answers immediately is the primary task a responsive user interface should be able to cope with. To do that, developers have to consider subtle and well-thought tooltips - used correctly, they can greatly improve user experience and help users to get things done. [Detail]

Inspiration Package: 60+ Usable & Elegant Designs

We all love beautiful, usable and impressive web designs. To achieve them, web developers need to focus on many aspects, but basically it all boils down to the question, how well the content is presented and how easily the information can be perceived. Harmonic color schemes are as important as solid and consistent typography. Precise visual structure and intuitive navigation are essential for both usability and accessibility. In fact, mostly it’s a keen attention to small details which gives web-sites a profound and enduring nature. [Detail]

70 Expert Ideas For Better CSS Coding

CSS isn’t always easy to deal with. Depending on your skills and your experience, CSS coding can sometimes become a nightmare, particularly if you aren’t sure which selectors are actually being applied to document elements. An easy way to minimize the complexity of the code is as useful as not-so-well-known CSS attributes and properties you can use to create a semantically correct markup. [Detail]

11 Almost Perfect Business Layouts

Business companies tend to impress visitors with solid site structures, precise navigation and the credibility of presented content. Therefore business layouts are usually quite unspectacular, mostly informative, but not attractive. It’s an appropriate approach if you want to inform your visitors, but what should you do if you want to attract users’ attention? How to combine serious tone with attractive design? We’ve decided to figure it out. And selected 11 almost perfect business designs / layouts used by companies from different countries of the world. [Detail]

Complete List of Best SEO-Tools

What are the best ways to boost your position in search engines? What keywords should you use on your web-pages? And which tools should you use to improve the quality of backlinks, link popularity and Google Pagerank? We deliver answers. Here is the list of the most useful SEO-tools you might be willing to use, [Detail]

10 Smart Javascript Techniques to Improve Your UI

Javascript can add a lot of special effects that can really improve the user's experience. Here are 10 simple and clever Javascript techniques that add an extra dose of usability to any webpage.

Javascript is typically used as an aesthetic language in web development. This means that web developers should almost always be using Javascript for one thing only: Improving the visitor's experience. There are many clever and useful ways to improve a site from the user interface perspective. A developer can find nearly any snippet of Javascript to achieve what he or she wants to accomplish. [Detail]

Are You Making These 10 CSS Mistakes?

Working with CSS can seem like a constant battle. Browsers are always changing they way they read the code (*cough* Internet Explorer *cough*), and it seems that there are lots of tiny little CSS "gotchas". While it's an incredibly powerful language, it can easily be used incorrectly, which will doom your development to a lifetime of imperfections. [Detail]

Top 10 Web Dev Blunders of 2008

It's inevitable: We're all going to screw up at least once when it comes to the highly volatile world of web development. Downtime, stupid UI mistakes, miscues on communication, bad product launches... they happen to the best of us. Literally. Over the past year, many of the top websites in the world have committed serious development no-no's. It's almost comforting to know that the best development teams in the world aren't perfect either.

Instead of viewing this article as a way to bring down the big guys a peg or two, let's look upon it as a teaching tool. Learning is all about making mistakes and finding ways to correct them. It's nice when we can occasionally learn from other's mistakes, instead of screwing up ourselves.

Here's a list of the 10 biggest "Whoops!" moments of 2008 in web development. [Detail]

10 Principles of the UI Design Masters

Breathtaking and useful designs happen because the UI has been worked on tirelessly. It takes a real UI Master to understand how to make a terrific user experience on a website. Here are 10 extremely useful principles from some of the brightest minds in the User Interface field. [Detail]

5 Techniques to Acquaint You With CSS 3

CSS is a well-known, widely used language to style websites. With version three in the works, many time-saving features will be implemented. Although only the most modern browsers currently support these effects, it's still fun to see what's around the corner! In this tutorial I'll show you five techniques. [Detail]

The 20 Most Practical and Creative Uses of jQuery

There have been plenty of posts on the number of awesome jQuery plugins and where to find them. However, sometimes it is best not to rely on third party plugins and resources. Do it yourself the old fashioned way! Today, we will have a look at 20+ creative uses of jQuery in modern day websites and applications; sure to inspire you for your next project. [Detail]

15+ Tips to Speed Up Your Website, and Optimize Your Code!

Once you've been coding for a while, you begin to take something for granted. You forget just how smart you really are. How many hundreds of keyboard shortcuts have we memorized? How many languages have we learned? How many frameworks? How many hacks? To say that web design/development is an extremely tough industry is putting it lightly. Next, add in the fact that much of what you know today will be considered obsolete in a few years.

Today, we'll be looking at a crop of tips and tricks that will help beginners speed up their development time, and code more efficiently. You'll see a mix of quick time savings tips, as well as specific coding tricks to increase your web application's efficiency. [Detail]

5 Ways to Instantly Write Better CSS

Sure, anyone can write CSS. Even programs are doing it for you now. But is the CSS any good? Here are 5 tips to start improving yours. [Detail]

10 Reasons Why Your Code Won’t Validate (and How to Fix it)

W3C validation isn't very forgiving at times, but it allows you to see errors that are generated by your markup. Lots of errors and warnings thrown by the validator are a good indicator that your XHTML isn't in very good shape, and might not look consistent across different browsers. Here are 10 sneaky validation problems that trip developers up, and how to avoid them. [Detail]

How to Add Variables to Your CSS Files

Any designer who has worked with large CSS files will agree that its major weakness is its inability to use variables. [Detail]

10 Rare HTML Tags You Really Should Know

Web developers these days are often expected to know and work in multiple languages. As a result, it’s tricky to learn everything a language has to offer and easy to find yourself not utilizing the full potential of some more specialized but very useful tags.

Unfortunately we haven’t been tapping into the full potential of these more obscure HTML tags as of late. But it’s never too late to get back into the game and start writing code that taps into the power of some under-used tags.

Here are ten of some of the most underused and misunderstood tags in HTML. While they might be less familiar, they’re still quite useful in certain situations. [Detail]

22 Neat Code Editors for Windows

Code editors for Windows are numerous, but it seems that only a few of them are really worth using. After all, it can take a while to really get into the groove of an editor and tweak all the settings to your tastes, so you’d better find one you like! [Detail]

20 Tools to Make the Life of a Web Developer Easier

Developing a well-rounded aesthetically pleasing website can be a daunting task even for the most seasoned web developer. You must identify current trends and standards and determine ways to incorporate them into your designs. Luckily, there are many free tools which are available that can help you speed up your efforts and work in a more efficient manner. Below are 20 tools which are sure to benefit all developers. [Detail]

Module Tabs in Web Design: Best Practices and Solutions

A module tab is a User Interface (UI) design pattern where content is separated into different panes, and each pane is viewable one at a time. The user requests content to be displayed by clicking (or in some instances hovering over) the content’s corresponding tab control. [Detail]

30 HTML Best Practices for Beginners

http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/html-css-techniques/30-html-best-practices-for-beginners/

24 JavaScript Best Practices for Beginners

24 JavaScript Best Practices for Beginners [Detail]

10 Reasons Why You Should Be Using Firebug

Firebug is one of the most popular tools used by web developers. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at ten of its most attractive features. [Detail]

10 Ways to Instantly Increase Your jQuery Performance

This article will present ten easy steps that will instantly improve your script’s performance. Don’t worry; there isn’t anything too difficult here. [Detail]

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Appeal from Mufti Muhammad Rafi Usmani

SQL Server Learning

Top 10 steps to optimize data access in SQL Server
- Part I [link]
- Part II [link]
- Part III [link]
- Part IV [link]

Web Browsers

Mozilla Firefox [link]
Internet Explorer [link]
Opera [link]
Safari [link]
Lynx (Text based browser) [link]

Web Development Helpers

Typetester [link]
The Typetester is an online application for comparison of the fonts for the screen. Its primary role is to make web designer’s life easier. As the new fonts are bundled into operating systems, the list of the common fonts will be updated.

Quartz Icon Set [link]
You can use the set for all of your projects for free and without any restrictions. You can freely use it for both your private and commercial projects, including software, online services, templates and themes.

HTML Entity Character Lookup [link]
Using HTML entities is the right way to ensure all the characters on your page are validated. However, often finding the right entity code requires scanning through 250 rows of characters.

Em Calculator [link]
Em Calculator is a small JavaScript tool which helps making scalable and accessible CSS design. It converts size in pixels to relative em units, which are based on a text size.

Browsershots [link]
Browsershots makes screenshots of your web design in different browsers. It is a free open-source online service created by Johann C. Rocholl. When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue. A number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser. Then they will make screenshots and upload them to the central server here.

Icon Finder [link]

Cute Free Twitter Icons For Your Blog [link]

JavaScript Learning

24 JavaScript Best Practices for Beginners [link]
JavaScript tests & Compatibility tables [link]

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)

Comparison of layout engines (Cascading Style Sheets) [link]

Web Development Tips

10 Ways To Make Your Site Accessible Using Web Standards [link]
Take Your Design To The Next Level With CSS3 [link]


JavaScript Tools

Firebug [Add-ons for Mozilla Firefox]
Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page

JSON Formatter and Validator [live]
The JSON Formatter was created to help with debugging. As data expressed as JSON is often written without line breaks to save space, it became extremely difficult to actually read it. This tool hopes to solve the problem by formatting the JSON into data that is easily readable by human beings.

Page Speed [link]
Page Speed is an open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on. Webmasters and web developers can use Page Speed to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.

JavaScript Libraries

JQuery [http://jquery.com]