Brian Fitzgerald

• S5 Project S5 is a CSS/Web-based alternative to powerpoint and keynote for presentations. It was developed by CSS guru Eric Meyer but has now become a project that will be developed and improved by an interested community.

While Adobe develops and sells THE ColdFusionMX server, there are cheaper and even free alternatives. A post on the Inside Out Outside In blog details some of these.

technorati tags:coldfusion, adobe, railo, bluedragon

• randomfrequency.net » Search Pages Plugin Plugin to allow wordpress search to include pages in the results. Without, wordpress only searches posts.

• beWidget - Dashboard Widgets A nice free screen ruler for OS X

The Israel / Hezbollah conflict has given CNN plenty of opportunity to use the Breaking News section of their recently redesigned site. I think it's pretty sharp looking.

technorati tags:cnn, breakingNews

• Survey Application
• Survey Ballot Login
• LogoPond Will Return Shortly
• The Tao of Mac - CSS/Techniques
• The Tao of Mac - Web Design

• CSS Beauty CSS Design Showcase, News, Jobs, Community, Web Standards

• Web Developers Network :: Index Help and Discussion for those developing sites on the UNL web site
• Parc Rittenhouse: Luxury Condos on Rittenhouse Square Philadelphia
• UNL | Web Developer Network Describes process for publishing content on the University of Nebraska - Lincoln web site. Also seems to preview the next version of the UNL web site with a very nifty transparent drawer that contains calendar items, webcam, people search and weather.
• AppStalker AppStalker keeps a watchful eye over your important applications, and makes sure they stay running. If an app quits, AppStalker will log the event and relaunch it. Both Growl notifications and basic logging are supported. AppStalker is ideal for servers t
• Free Website Icons Icons for websites and applications

Today I’m beginning the process of creating a new design for the LPS web site. I’m not sure at this point if it will be a dramatic change or just an update of the current design. The first step that I’m starting today is evaluating other web sites. It’s difficult to find well-designed K-12 sites, so I’m mostly visiting University and College sites. My link dumps this week will likley contain a number of sites that I thought had some good ideas or design. I’m only considering sites that are standards-based. If the sites aren’t based on CSS and xHTML, I’m moving on.

It’s been pretty quiet here for a couple of weeks. I spent last week on vacation visiting my brother and his family in Saco, ME. We had a fantastic time up there. Amanda, My sister-in-law Courtney and I went Kayaking at LL Bean (It’s only $12). We saw fourth-of-july fireworks in Kennebunkport. We had lobster, went to the beach and saw Portland Headlight. My brother also took us to a place called the Great Lost Bear that had a great menu and almost 60 beers on tap. The weather was beautiful and we came back feeling like a vacation should make you feel.

• Index of ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla1.8
• activeCollab - open source project management and collaboration tool.

• A love song about web standards: boagworld A love song about web standards: boagworld

• Make Names Web-Friendly - Automator Actions Automator script (runs on OS X) that converts file names to web-friendly names.

• Grow Collective: Web Design, Development, Hosting and Consulting An open-source slide show creator for web sites
• CAFFEINE Browser An image management system for the macintosh

• Evolving Trends » Wikipedia 3.0: The End of Google?
• Flip4Mac WMV Beta Program Flip4Mac for Intel-Macs Beta
• Handbrake Lite Handbrake lite is a VERY simplified version of handbrake that allows you to take a DVD and convert it for use on a video iPod.

• Flash Animator vs the Animation This is a crazy flash animation where the animation jumps off of the Flash stage (shown in-application) and starts fighting against the animator.
• ted@onFlex.org

15 to 20 brave folks will be joining me for the next two days for a sort of web development boot camp. We’ll be hitting all of the Web Development acronyms and will hopefully have a site to show for it all at the end of Wednesday. Participants can learn more on the workshop page.

Yesterday, I think, Opera (the company) pushed out the finished version of Opera (the browser) 9. If you haven’t tried or used Opera before, this is a pretty good time to try it out. Opera could probably be considered the original ‘standards’ browser. While IE and Netscape were battling over features and market share, this browser from Norway was steadily creating a browser that followed the rules.

Opera has become a browser that tries to do everything, similar to the way that Mozilla suite (they call it seamonkey now?! ha.) included all that one should need to use the internet. Opera sports a pretty good email client, a note taking system and a news reader. The new version also has widgets that are similar to dashboard widgets on OS X and Yahoo widgets (used to be konfabulator).

Opera is the only real browser on the macintosh that I know of that supports a true full-screen mode and if you work with CSS, it can emulate other user-agents such as a terminal or low-visibility display to let you see how your work will appear. The new version of opera can also respond to voice commands and read page text. One suggestion from Opera that I'd like to try is creating a slide presentation using pages, displaying them in full-screen mode, then using the voice recognition to have Opera navigate the slides.

Macromedia's Dreamweaver MX 2004 on the Macintosh used Opera to do it's in-application page rendering, but Dreamweaver 8 now uses Safari (WebKit). Opera was recently announced as Nintendo's choice to embed browsers in their current Gameboy DS portable devices, ensuring that many youth will be using Opera for every day browsing and requiring that web developers consider it when designing sites.

So what's wrong with it? First, the UI is a little kludgy. Opera 9 doesn't suffer from the window overload that previous versions did, but you can still end up with a lot buttons trying to get your attention. Second, like Firefox, the application is not really 'native' to any operating system, so while it runs on just about anything, it doesn't run as well as applications that were written specifically for a single operating system. Third, many developers just don't consider opera when they are developing sites, so many sites don't appear as they were intended.

While I still prefer Flock for my everyday-allday browser, Opera is worth having and knowing for when you need to do something were one of Opera's many tools can help you out. Every web developer should maintain this as one of the primary browsers that should be tested against along with IE, Firefox and Safari.

technorati tags:opera, browsers

Thanks to those of you who attended my Dreamweaver workshops this week in Columbus. I have updated all of the class notes with the resources I mentioned through the days and have provided downloadable project files on the page from the second day. You can find these pages by clicking on 'events' on the right side of this page.

We covered a LOT of stuff and I'm sure that you probably feel overwhelmed. The best suggestion that I can offer for getting something out of all of that is to start using it. You don't need to be the designer for a school (or other established) site to apply this. Make up something and build a site just for fun. Build just a page. Do anything.

When I started applying CSS to the LPS web site a few years ago, I didn't change the layout at all. I created some simply style sheets that did nothing more than style the text. I set the font, size, color, etc. For the first many months that I worked with CSS, this was all I did. Whenever I got a small site to work on (maybe only one page) I would try designing it with CSS. In the name of productivity, I often had to throw in the towel at first and build the sites in ways that I was more proficient. Eventually though, things started clicking and I got decent at creating CSS designs. This also gave me a long time (2-3 years) to establish my own 'best practices'. Finally, I applied my knowledge to re-styling the LPS website in the late summer of 2004. It took about six months to go through the site and recode the pages to work well with the styles. (I could probably do that same thing now in a few days).

Hope you had fun and find this something that you enjoy. Keep hackin'

technorati tags:dreamweaver, columbus, css

I’m in columbus, nebraska tonight between sessions of a two-day dreamweaver workshop that I’m facilitating. I turned on the TV, watched a replay of the US getting spanked by the czechs in the world cup, then saw the funniest thing I have seen in a long time: The USA Rock, Paper, Scissors League championship. A full blown sports broadcast complete with player back stories, expert analysis and guest referees. The winner, from Omaha, took home $50,000.

technorati tags:usarps

MacPractice Uses Parallels to Bring Windows Dentistry App to Mac

MacPractice this past weekend announced an agreement with Synca Direct, Inc. to bring the company's Cadi dentistry software to Mac users via Parallels Desktop, which enables running Mac OS X and Windows XP simultaneously

I knew this would happen. While it is a great thing to be able to run both OS X applications and Windows applications on the same computer, I do not like the idea that some developers will look at this as an opportunity to not write software for the macintosh. This could be particularly true in the future for Microsoft. Why would they create an Office for Macintosh when they know that everybody needs it and that only having a Windows version would require the purchase of a $300 copy of Windows. Where will this go?

technorati tags:windows, parallels, macpractice

Google Browser Sync is a new plug-in for Firefox that will allow you to keep multiple copies of Firefox (home, work computers?) in sync. Your bookmarks, history and cookies are all continually synced. Very cool – If you don’t mind google having a running record of everything you do online.

Update: I played with it a little bit, hoping that maybe it would provide a nice way for a person to log into any installation of Firefox and make it theirs. While it is conceivable that you could use it in this way, it really nags you to enter a login and password and not everybody would use it. It seems best suited to being used by a single person (like the home/work example earlier).

technorati tags:google, browser, firefox, sync

Adobe - MAX 2006 has been announced. Max is the conference for anybody doing web development using Adobe (Macromedia) tools. There are tons of sessions covering ColdFusion, Flex, Flash and Dreamweaver along with other Adobe apps. It’s a fun time to meet other developers and sit shoulder-to-shoulder in sessions with people that work for big-time companies. This year it’s in Las Vegas at the Venetian - October 23rd through the 26th.

technorati tags:adobe, max

Here’s a great page describing methods of debugging web pages with Safari.