Linkdump 10 - Art, Design, Programming, UX, Web Development, ...

It has been a few months since my previous linkdump. As a result I have accumulated quite a few links. This is going to be the biggest linkdump so far. I've split up the links a bit to make it easier for you to find your favorites.

Art

• The Schweizer Guide to Spotting Tangents - Read this if you want to improve your compositions.
• Step by Step Reprise and Video - See the magnificent Nathan Fowkes at work.
• Marshall Vandruff's Animal Anatomy - Some info on Marshall's new video on comparative animal anatomy

Computer Graphics

• Learning Modern 3D Graphics Programming - A free book!
• Procedural Textures in HTML5 Canvas - Some golden oldies ported to Canvas.

CSS

• DON'T READ this Less CSS tutorial (highly addictive) - Don't read this. Just avoid.
• Things It Might Be Fun/Useful to Try the Universal (*) Selector On - Esp. the box model point seems interesting. By default it's a bit weird. Why not to set it to use more intuitive "border-box" model by default?
• Star Ratings with Very Little CSS - Common problem, simple solution.
• (Better) Tabs with Round Out Borders - Another one of those little tweaks that make the difference.
• Public Service Announcement: Watch Your @font-face font-weight - Check this out if you use web fonts.

Design

• Adding Depth with Pixel Perfect Line Work - It's those small touches that make the difference between a good and an excellent design.
• 12 Must See Presentations on Interaction Design - Just slides but still interesting to browse.
• How to Create a Unique Selling Point for Your Home Page - Nice tips on effective site design.
• 6 Tips to Help You Build a Great Web Application - Pro tip: use the thing between your ears. That helps too.
• 25 Useful and Free Fonts to Download - Nice ones there.

Programming

• Seven habits of effective text editing - Insightful article by Bram Moolenaar of Vim fame.
• Escape From the Ivory Tower: The Haskell Journey, From 1990 to 2011 - A great presentation from Simon Peyton Jones.
• A Taste of Haskell - More Haskell from the man himself.
• JavaScript RegExp - Presentation slides.

UX

• A Flexible ID Field Helps Forgetful Users Log In - A small touch that means a lot to the user.
• Are You Meeting the User Experience Hierarchy of Needs? - So, are you?
• Innovative Navigation Techniques to Save You Header Space - Minimize header, maximize content.

Web Development

• Dochub - Various API docs (HTML, CSS, JS, jQuery, PHP) wrapped in a sweet UI.
• RESTful API Design - Presentation slides.
• The Reality of HTML5 Game Development and making money from it - Read this before making those hip HTML5 games.

LiveReload = Instant Productivity Win

It's always fun to discover something that bumps up your productivity a notch. In this post I'm going to share one of those discoveries. I've always found it awkward to refresh browser during development. Thanks to LiveReload I don't have to do that anymore.

Ellipsis jQuery plugin + Events at Jyväskylä

I just released a small ellipsis plugin for jQuery. I had some long lists that needed shortening so that did the trick. It works with various other elements too. It's possible to animate that as well.

A lot has been happening around here lately. Here's a brief summary:

• The very first agile conference of Jyväskylä, AgileJkl, will be held at April. A similar event, Scandinavian Agile Conference, will be held around March at Helsinki.
• Geek Collision meetings have continued. So far we haven't had any special events. Just a few (ten or so) geeks and something to drink. Try organizing something like this around there too!
• A demo scene event, Instanssi (Finnish only), will be held at March.  Some members of the co-op I'm involved in will demonstrate their technology there.
• Our very own Hacklab (Finnish only) will have an open doors night at 14.2.
• Koodilehto, the co-op I'm involved with, just received a new site. Check it out to figure out what we're doing at the moment. You might also want to check out the source. There are some custom bits in it. This article covers the concept and some of the technology used.

Recent JavaScript Projects

Every now and then I like to write little JS snippets. Lately I've been a bit busy with work but there's always time for some casual coding. In this post I'm going to go through a few of these. I will present the following projects:

• caro.js - Minimalistic carousel plugin (jQuery)
• yabox.js - Yet Another Lightbox clone (jQuery)
• Graph Editor - Little jQuery + jQuery UI hack
• RSS Widget - Uses Google's API
• Twitter Widget - Uses twitterlib

Blog Highlights of '11

It looks like this year is nearing its end. Thanks for tagging along! I thought it might be fun to write a post that highlights some of the nicer posts I wrote this year. So far I've been blogging around two and a half years.

I think blogging is slowly starting show its advantages. Just a while ago I needed to solve certain Django specific problem. After googling around I happened to find the solution at my blog. In essence this blog serves as a kind of auxiliary memory of mine. As a side benefit some other people might find my ramblings useful too. This in turn might lead to new chances. Blogging is definitely a good way to market yourself if you're into that sort of thing.

There has been some talk on whether or not blogging is dying. The basic premise is that social mediums such as Facebook and Twitter are eating its popularity. That's probably partially true. I believe blogs will remain to have some influence. After all you'll need something to discuss and tweet about. Most importantly blogs are more permanent by nature. It's easier to refer back to some concrete blog post than some obscure Twitter conversation ages ago. Different mediums serve different purposes.

Now that I got the intro bit out of the way, let's take a look at the year. Quite a few things happened. While at it I'll try to outline some possible ideas for the next one. It's not like I'm running out of ideas. On the contrary. There's still plenty of material left I need to get out there sooner or later.

Replacing iTunes on OS X with Something Better

Some time ago I finally had it with iTunes on OS X. It's a really bloated piece of software these days. So as a result I decided to look for an alternative. I wanted something simple that supports multimedia keys for playback. Apparently a combination of Clementine player and a fix to disable default bindings does the trick.

In this post I'll recap my efforts. I tried various solutions before coming up with this specific combo. I'm not a big fan of Clementine's playlist driven user interface but it does the trick on a minimal level.