You could use the traditional Christmas ball ornament for your tree this year, or you could spring for the ultimate designer Christmas ornament:
Put Your Images on a Diet!
Although there’s more bandwidth floating around the web than there ever has been; with more people using mobile devices, and Google now taking page speed into consideration in its ranking algorithm, making sure your images are as optimised as possible is still a very good thing.
Here are a few tools that I use to get the ‘least’ out of my images!
Is It Easier to Be a Copycat?
Matt Gemmell wrote an insightful look at the copycat phenomenon.
I’m not sure what level something has to reach to become a phenomenon, but it seems like when major brands openly release hardware that’s obviously a copycat, it’s become a phenomenon.
Take the iPhone 4 and Samsung Galaxy SII for example:
Google’s YouTube Redesign
YouTube is coming out with a new web design for their site that has yet to be released to the general public. The design is a much softer visual design than before that has completely and deeply integrated with Google Plus and other social media networks.
Here’s how you can try it out:
Responsive jQuery Photo Gallery
Building websites that jive on mobile devices and scale to browser size is becoming more and more important. As a web developer and designer, you strive to ensure the website experience is generally equal on all platforms. Or, that’s at least where we seem to be headed.
This is where responsive layouts come in handy. Not only is your webpage ready to be viewed on a giant 27-inch iMac, but it looks good on a netbook, too. Do you need a mobile app? Nope! Your responsive web design renders just fine on a smartphone and tablet, too.
One of the trickiest aspects of responsive web development and design is delivering cool and slick elements. After all, everything must be resizeable.
Here are two solid looking responsive jQuery photo galleries that can aid you in delivering full scalability without loosing the eye candy:
How-To Easily Find Unicode Characters
You know you’ve seen the character.
You remember what the character looks like, but you’ve completely forgotten it’s name and it’s Unicode code point.
Shapecatcher to the rescue!
Shapecatcher is a new website, that helps you to find specific Unicode characters, just by sketching their shape. Currently about 10000 of the most important Unicode characters are compared to your sketch and are analysed for similarities.
Very cool.