Raible Designs

Lightbox JS

Lightbox JS is a simple, unobtrusive script used to to overlay images on the current page. It's a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers. I dig it.

Media Center and Skype 2.0

Ever since we got our new HP Pavilion, I've been improving it and my "home office" setup as well. First off, I bought 2GB of RAM to boost it up to 3GB. Then I got a DVI KVM Switch, so I could plug Windows and Linux into the same KVM setup. Installing OpenSuse wasn't too hard, but configuring CUPS and Samba and adding a 2nd drive took a bit of wrestling. The best part, however, has been yesterday and today.

Julie got everyone in our families new webcams for Christmas. For the past week or so, we've been trying to get them to work. I've had an iSight for almost a year, and I've never been able to get it to work when talking with my parents. This time was no different, but we did get the Mac working with Yahoo Messenger. This led to getting Yahoo working on my Windows box, but the sound sucked and the video wasn't that good. I couldn't get any other IM clients to work either. Then I remembered Skype and thought "they must have video by now". Sure 'nuff, when I checked a few days ago, they had Skype 2.0 with video support. It worked great right away and I had a great "talk" with my parents last night.

Tonight, I got my sister hooked up on Skype and we talked for a bit. She's currently having lots of computer issues and Skype crashes (and quits working altogether) after working fine for about a minute. My dad had a few issues with his machine too - mainly due to Skype tacking out his 1GHz/1GB machine. Bottom line: Skype with Video works great if you have a new machine with plenty o' memory.

Lastly, I received a TV Tuner tonight from Amazon - thanks to a JavaLobby gift certificate (thanks guys!) Note that you need a card with "MCE" in the model name if you want it to work with Media Center. I plugged it in, configured it, and now I'm watching Law & Order while typing this. I setup Conan to record every night and life is good. It's a pretty cool setup - now I just need a new dual-core Intel-based PowerBook to get the best of everything.

Quick Guide to Prototype

Ryan Campbell has put together a very nice Quick Guide to Prototype. In the past, I've used the Unofficial Prototype Documentation by Sergio Pereira. Ryan's guide is a good learn-it-quick reference, while Sergio's documentation makes a nice reference manual. Hat tip to the Ajaxian gents.

Comparing Ajax Frameworks

From the SpikeSource blog:

SpikeSource's Matt Harrison blogs about his latest interest, AJAX. He's been checking out the various frameworks for AJAX's and being a python lover he has even ported some of them to be used with python. Matt has also conducted mini interview's with one of the framework creators: Alex Russell of dojo, and Bob Ippolito of MochiKit. An interesting read.

http://panela.blog-city.com/ajax_explosion.htm

Harrison also references a nice AJAX Library Comparison on the Open Source Applications Foundation website. I'd love to see an AJAX Framework Smackdown at a future conference.

PowerPoint 2.0

From beyond bullets:

Larry Lessig has been called a PowerPoint virtuoso, and his approach recently inspired Dick Hardt, Founder and CEO of Sxip Identify, to use a similar film-inspired approach in his recent presentation, "Identity 2.0" at a conference called OSCON 2005.

You can view his presentation at this link.

It's very creative, visually interesting, and makes great use of visual humor. You're sure to be inspired to try some of the techniques he used on your own storyboards; and it's a good example of a completely bullet-free presentation.

Woah. I'm blown away. This is a great example of what your presentations can be. To be honest, this looks very hard to do. You basically have to know what every word you're going to say is, and you have to have a new slide for every 2-3 words. It sure would be fun to deliver this kind of presentation.

How do we get good designs for the CSS Framework?

I love the idea of Mike Stenhouse's CSS Framework. It's so simple: name the elements in your XHTML with a specific set of names, and then create your CSS to match that. The only problem with this framework is I haven't seen any good-looking designs on top of it. For good-looking design examples, see the CSS Zen Garden or Open Source Web Design.

While the CSS Zen Garden is nice, most of the designs are not useable for web applications. They're more of a showcase of what CSS can do, and often contain too many images for a real-world application or website. The designs from oswd.org, on the other hand, are perfect for web applications. However, the underlying HTML is different for each design.

So how do we marry the two? Maybe we should lobby some designers at oswd.org to use the CSS Framework for their designs? I think this would be a great asset to many communities - imagine what you could do with your Drupal theme if you didn't have to change your template files (only CSS). That'd be pretty cool.

CSS Table Gallery

From CSS Beauty:

CSS Table Gallery. Showcase of how CSS and data tables can work together to create usable and pretty results.

I like Chrome de la chrome. Hopefully the available designs will grow so we can pick and choose the ones we want to use in our apps. I might have to use Chrome de la chrome with the Display Tag in the next AppFuse or Equinox release.

Google is helping developers make more money

From Relax, Bill Gates; It's Google's Turn as the Villain:

Google, Mr. Hoffman said, has caused "across the board a 25 to 50 percent salary inflation for engineers in Silicon Valley" - or at least those in a position to weigh competing offers. A sought-after computer programmer can now expect to make more than $150,000 a year.

Thanks Google - we appreciate the inflation.

A List Apart 4.0

I've always enjoyed A List Apart, so it's great to see they've got so much new stuff:

New design. New structure. New server. New publishing system powered by Ruby on Rails. As the dog days of summer draw to a close, we present A List Apart 4.0. So buy a tee shirt already.

Beautiful, just beautiful.

The DOM Scripting Task Force

It's nice to see that someone is going to help make JavaScript code more standardized.

"The skillset of a front end programmer is a three-legged stool: structure (XHTML) is the first leg, presentation (CSS) the second, and behavior (DOM Scripting) the third," said Peter-Paul Koch, a prominent scripting expert and one of the founders of the task force. "These three legs should be equal, but at the moment the behavior leg is the shortest, least-valued and least-understood of the three, even though the DOM has been a W3C specification for seven years and enjoys relatively solid browser support."

The Web Standards Project did a good job of helping evangelize and promote standards in HTML and CSS - let's hope they can do the same for scripting the DOM.