A coworker turned me on today to Browsershots. If you’re familiar with Browsercam you’ll be happy to know that Browsershots is essentially a free version of browsercam minus the remote access and mobile device capture features. Considering Browsercam charges $59 a month this is a pretty big deal even if they don’t have all the features… yet.
Anyone who’s ever created an HTML email knows what a pain it can be to get the document to render properly across the numerous email clients out there. Because of the lack of standards for email clients to follow HTML emails are a nightmare to develop and I personally try to avoid designing them at all costs. In the past I’ve used Campaign Monitor which I found to be one of the best resource in easing the burden.
It turns out the guys behind Campaign Monitor in addition to running a great business are trying to do something about HTML email standards too. Taking a page from the Web Standards Project (WaSP) book they’ve created the Email Standards Project which attempts to do some of the same great things for HTML email that WaSP did for the Web. You can help by spreading the word.
I ran across a suite of JavaScript based development tools for web designers called “Design“. The suite is comprised of four tools: Grid, Ruler, Unit and Crosshair. I currently use a lot of Firefox extensions that perform similar tasks but this bookmarklet has advantages because you can use it in Internet Explorer (no IE 6 support), Safari and Opera and it’s an all in one package. It’s also a JavaScript bookmarklet so it’s easy to install in any browser. Just visit the site and drag the “Design button” up to your bookmark bar and presto it’s installed.
“Grid” is probably the most robust and impressive of the bunch. Quickly create grids with any number of columns, tweak gutter space and vertical row height. “Ruler” functions the same way as it would in Photoshop or any other design app with rulers on top and left and it allows you to pull grid rules for alignment. “Measure” is my least favorite. I find the “MeasureIt” Firefox extension to be superior and easier to use for grabbing quick dimensions. The biggest thing missing from the Design suite is a color tool. Maybe it will show up in the next release. If you’re using Firefox a substitute is the ColorZilla extension which allows you to sample colors via an eyedropper.
Google recently added a new feature that allows you to easily embed Google Map Street Views in any web page just by copy and pasting some generated HTML. After you’ve drilled down to a street map location just click “link to this page” in the right hand corner. From there you’ll notice the second form field on the page reads “Paste HTML to embed in website”, that’s the code you want. Another cool thing to note: below the form field you’ll see another link that says “Customize and Preview embedded map”. This links to a new popup window that gives you a choice of selecting predetermined view port sizes (small, medium, large) or entering your own custom dimensions.
I’ve entered my office address and customized the view port sizes for my page layout. Here’s the example:
Looks like Adobe is working on a new product that would give designers another tool to help bridge the communication gap between design and development. The product is code named “Thermo” and after viewing a demo video it looks to be some sort of WYSIWYG product for flash/flex applications.
There is definitely a gap that needs to be addressed in product development between design and dev and with the advent of the “Rich Internet Application” a simple tool that would allow designers to work with data and specify functionality and behavior would be welcomed. As the demo illustrates you can start with a Photoshop comp, bring it into Thermo and then turn items into functioning components with just a few clicks.
On the plus side described in the video, Thermo supposedly will write code that’s reusable to developers, so the designer is actually creating a functioning prototype. This allows the designer to contribute more than just static comps. The problem is I’m a little skeptical on how usable the generated code from Thermo would actually be. And Is it realistic to think that a developer would use the code?. It reminds me of the garbage html and JavaScript that Dreamweaver would spit out. Sure, your front end developers loved using that stuff right?
At the very least It could be a powerful tool that would help convey the designers vision, regardless if the code was used or not. It seems like the product could be quicker and friendlier than using flash.
I was looking for a way to display a small sampling of recent photos on the site. Ideally I wanted a solution that tied in with Flickr so I could manage my photos from one location. While researching I ran across a WordPress plugin called FAlbum from the people at RandomByte.org.
The plug-in, as I was thrilled to find, pulls your photos from flickr and displays photos, albums, and tag sets right in your WordPress blog. Considering I was looking for a solution much simpler I was pleasantly surprised at how robust FAlbum was! The setup was pretty painless. I’m still in the midst of tweaking some of the presentation but so far everything seems pretty customizable. The only small snafu I ran into was a few database errors on initial setup. I’m running WordPress 2.3.1 and after installing the plugin (version 0.7) I kept getting a caching error that read “WordPress database error: falbum_cache’ doesn’t exist] DELETE from wpfalbum_cache…
I read on the RandomByte wiki that if you manually create the falbum_cache table it would take care of the database errors issue and sure enough it did. It looks like they just released a 0.7.1 update to FAlbum. Taking a quick glance it looks like they might have fixed the database cache issue.
