Unhandled Perception

With the ever-increasing sales of smartphones and the burgeoning tablet market starting to skyrocket, coupled with far greater access to more robust mobile data networks, the internet is now being accessed by our users in a multitude of new ways.

The huge range of mobile devices used to browse the web now means you really have to consider making your site mobile-compatible.

Link: http://sixrevisions.com/…

WebP is a method of lossy compression that can be used on photographic images. The degree of compression is adjustable so a user can choose the trade-off between file size and image quality.

A WebP file consists of VP8 image data, and a container based on RIFF. Webmasters, web developers and browser developers can use the WebP format to create smaller, better looking images that can help make the web faster.

Some huge reductions in file sizes without an loss of quality.  So far I’m impressed with the new Google WebP image format.

How WebP works:

WebP uses predictive coding to encode an image, the same methodology used by the VP8 video codec to compress keyframes in videos. Predictive coding uses the values in neighboring blocks of pixels to predict the values in a block, and then encodes only the difference (residual) between the actual values and the prediction. The residuals typically contain many zero values, which can be compressed much more effectively. The residuals are then transformed, quantized and entropy-coded as usual. WebP also uses variable block sizes.

Sample of side-by-side comparison:
http://code.google.com/speed/webp/gallery.html

This tutorial is based on a simple animated experiment that showcases just one of the amazing things you can create using CSS. I’ve used no images and no scripting; everything’s done using HTML and CSS.

Link: http://sixrevisions.com/css/css3…

Smashing Magazine’s very large list of Free WordPress Themes, 2010 Edition.

It’s hard to believe that a year has passed since our last WordPress theme collection, but there you have it — the time has come again. Once a year we feature the most useful and interesting WordPress-themes that we are collecting over months and present them in a nice quick overview. The collections from 2007, 2008 and last year are still useful, but some of the themes are outdated or updated now.

Veign has been getting deeper into WordPress customization.  In a week or so I will be releasing the first plugin developed by Veign.

Link: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/…

Once license to give.  leave a comments.

Expression Web 4.0: http://www.microsoft.com/expression/…

Link: http://slodive.com/freebies/…

Today we are making an Advanced Event Timeline with the help of PHP, MySQL, CSS & jQuery, that will display a pretty time line with clickable events. Adding new ones is going to be as easy as inserting a row in the database.

Link: http://tutorialzine.com/…

The Exceptional Performance team has identified a number of best practices for making web pages fast. The list includes 35 best practices divided into 7 categories.

Link: http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

Shadowbox is a web-based media viewer application that supports all of the web’s most popular media publishing formats. Shadowbox is written entirely in JavaScript and CSS and is highly customizable. Using Shadowbox, website authors can showcase a wide assortment of media in all major browsers without navigating users away from the linking page.

Link:  http://shadowbox-js.com/index.html

When I was choosing examples for this article I visited some design galleries and roundup posts and took screenshots of design details that are used (sometimes overused) in web design. I don’t encourage you to follow trends but rather develop your own style. Nevertheless, it is always useful to polish your Photoshop skills a bit more. Let’s get rockin’!

Well put together article on 5 techniques any web designer could use.

Link: http://thinkvitamin.com/design/…

Cool examples to get inspired by for your next design.

Link: http://sixrevisions.com/design-showcase-inspiration/…

FYI: This is my latest project. Very exciting…

Link: http://openmenu.com/

Here’s a quick sample showing how to auto-expand a SELECT (drop-down) when the user tabs into the field.  The effect is accomplished using JavaScript.

(view source-code to see how it’s done)

Link: http://www.php-insite.com/…

A must read for anyone in the web design (works for development too).  Such simple concepts yet designers struggle with them.  Why?

Link: http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1133

As web professionals, we’re always looking for ways to improve our knowledge and skills. Tips, tricks and checklists are often one of the most underused yet potentially useful models of providing great, quick and easy to follow pieces of useful information. You may or may not know some of the tips below — and you may or may not agree with everything listed — but hopefully it will give you some ideas for your own sites or motivate you to create a checklist to help cover your bases. Perhaps a few items may even inspire you investigating a subject further, and that would be pretty awesome too.

Link: http://sixrevisions.com/web_design…