Latest Edited: 04/04/12

Inline-Block – Why it rocks and why it sucks – A nice rundown of why inline-block can be used instead of float, but some potential pitfalls with it.

Subtle Backgrounds – Really nice subtle background images you can you use for your next project.

CSS3 Button Generator – For us lazy types who like GUIs for doing this sort of thing!

Vendor prefixes in CSS serve the purpose of allowing browsers to play about with their own implementations of new CSS rules or adding stuff totally unique to them.

There have been arguments back and forward about how useful these are in production systems and there have been some great tools made to try and reduce how much time we spend in vendor prefix hell, personally I think anything that drives the web forward is a good thing and I think prefixes do that.  But anyway, enough pre-able.

What I would like to propose is that since we have vendor prefixes anyway, could we use them to target specific browsers with already known rules.

I have an edge case where it would be really nice to be able to do something like;

margin-bottom: 59px;
-webkit-margin-bottom: 39px;

What this would allow me to do is set the standard margin-bottom to 59px (if it not being 60px makes you twitch, join the club!) but in webkit browsers I would like the margin to be slightly smaller.

I know this could be misused and end in really sloppy, massive CSS files – but if used with care (which I promise I would do) it would be a neat way to achieve these odd little hacks that occasionally we need to do.

I have decided after giving pretty much every other conceivable to-do list system a fair try that the best way to manage mine in a way that allows me to keep on top of my current tasks is by popping myself an email, or letting others pop me an email.

In my opinion email wins for several reasons;

1. I always have access to my email – including when I am offline, when I am on my mobile devices and when I am in work.
2. I already need email – rolling my to-do list into my email doesn’t add an extra application, website or function to my daily life.  I would be checking it anyway.
3. I can categorise my list how I want – or decide not to categorise them, a lot of to-do list managers seem to want you to either not have groupings or categories, or force you to always assign a task to one group.
4. People can add to my list without my input – with pretty much every other list if someone wants you to action something you have to take time out to put it into your list, with email if someone mails me it goes straight on my list.
5. Conversely, I can remove from my list easily – I don’t feel as bad archiving off an email as I do marking off a to-do list item, if someone sends me an action I don’t think I want to do for whatever reason I can easily remove it.
6. Emails come complete with meta data – a lot of the time the email will already contain who it is for and when it was asked for, these are two of the three most important things you could need for meta data (when it is needed by is the third)
7. I can easily add links and attachments to my to-do item – this is something that is lacking from a lot of the solutions out there.
8. Email is normally the first contact – a lot of my actions are born from emails anyway, so it makes sense to capture them at source.

So there we have it, 8 reasons why I am going to use email for my personal to-do list manager. Glad I stopped short of having a top 10 list!

I said “personal to-do list” because one thing email does fall over on is allowing me to report on what I have done in the past hour / day / week / etc. which is something I need to do for work related projects.

Having discussed now what I use, let me briefly mention what I have used in the past and why they have failed in my opinion.

• Offline to-do list managers – Even the ones that sync feel very clunky and not very connected, always required that extra step to input things and needed installed on every machine you use.
• Online to-do list managers – Normally lacked core features, very few had good offline capabilities and it meant you had to remember a site to log onto when you wanted to view your list.
• Paper based list – This actually almost became my main way of doing things, it is quick and easy, gives you full control over what you write down, It’s just that I found that my notepad wasn’t to hand a little too often.

I would be interested to hear what you use and why.

This is my first attempt at using it.

I used to draw these little guys when I was bored during class.  I want to get better at drawing / creating graphics and hopefully charging about on this tablet will help me.  There is also built in hand writing recognition, which could be fun to play with.

I don’t think the design team at Pierce have much to worry about just yet, but who knows?

This was the response…

Haven’t had a meeting invite yet, odd.

1. The first was a talk by Gavin Strange, there are some pictures from the event here – excellent stuff, a truly inspirational character with some stunning work.
2. The second are two rather old Michael Jordan Nike videos (here and here), they always get me in the mood to get shit done.  I don’t even particularly like basketball.

Tonight I figured I would a) give it a go and b) explain why I don’t think it is a good idea.

I will cover b) first then show you a)!

So Edge is essentially a tool for writing Flash like animations which utilise current web standards to get the job done.  On the face of it this sounds like a pretty cool idea, since we all hate Flash, right?  I mean it can run in most modern browsers (including iDevices) and sure it doesn’t require you to download a third party plugin to play anything – what isn’t to love.

I will tell you what isn’t to love – the fact that animation isn’t semantic, you can’t display any markup to convey an animation (save for animation within video).  HTML is a Markup Language that should used for turning data into machine readable code to be parsed at will by whatever program wants to.

There is no data you can convey with an animation (or at least that couldn’t be conveyed a more semantic way) so being able to play an animation in HTML is pointless.  It is only good for some visual sprinkles (but then so was Flash!).

Anyway, rant over – I don’t like the idea of squeezing HTML to do something it wasn’t designed for and shouldn’t be used for.  You might, in which case you should download the trail whilst you can.

I did, here are the results.  Edge Test.

Interestingly, the one tag I expected to see was Canvas, I thought this is the ideal HTML5 tag for animation, apart from that I have to say the code it produces is pretty nice, and the learning curve (for someone who last used anything like that over 5 years ago) was pretty shallow.

By the way, I should give some love to the following YouTube video, helping me to get my animation on!

And, you know, if you need any animation work done, well my portfolio speaks for itself!

The issue, of course, was that my stylesheet wasn’t designed to hide the style of the unordered list items.  Here is the code I needed to add to remove the bullets.

#disqus_thread ul {
    list-style: none outside none;
}

Hope it helps someone.

An example of this would be when you have a td with a CSS property of width: 100px; and apply a colspan of say 3.

What most browsers seem to do is take that width and multiply it by the colspan, whilst this is sometimes useful it isn’t what you asked the browser to do.

IE7 doesn’t assume anything, it applies the colspan first then looks at the CSS and says ‘hold on a minute, they want this width set to 100px’ and applies it.

In my opinion that is the way it should work and well done IE7 for not trying to second guess me.

Apart from gaming I have yet to see a really interesting use for the canvas element but hopefully more people getting exposed to the basics of it will help bread some creativity and some fun things will follow as a result.