refresherate.com » design

idroppedie6.com

Sheldon Finlay — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 01:58:13 +0000

It’s about time. I have been saying for a long time that we need to drop support for IE6. By continously bending over backwards to support it, we are not giving users an incentive to upgrade. The number of hours that are spend writing tweaks and debugging IE6 issues is no doubt outstanding. Probably more than time waste on IE6 debugging than the stupid “25 random things about me” meme. So here’s a site where you can add your support for dropping IE6 by adding your site to an ever growing list of IE6 deserters. It’s interesting to see some of the sites on the list so far. There are a few high-profile sites, namely Google’s gmail service.

http://idroppedie6.com/

Hack-free PNG Transparency

Sheldon Finlay — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 15:40:32 +0000

If you’ve been around web design for any length of time you know about PNG transparency issues with Internet Explorer 6. PNG looks great in nearly every browser except IE6, and with plenty of folks still using IE6 despite its limitations, it’s a good idea to support these users as best as possible. Usually this means using Javascript hacks to exploit some proprietary features of IE6 to enable PNG transparency. But here is a an interesting screencast from Brenelz’s Web Solutions which looks pretty interesting. It’s basically a way of creating a PNG32 in Photoshop, then re-opening it in Fireworks and saving it as a PNG8 with alpha-transparency. The results are pretty impressive and the image file size is dramatically lower.

Edited: I tried this today using a PNG-32 which was previously saved in PhotoShop. The file was 16kb. The PNG-8 alpha transparency file was 4kb. 25% of the original size! In Firefox the image seemed just as good. It wasn’t as smooth as the PNG-32 given that PNG-8 has only a fraction of the color palette. The file in IE6 looked different, but was perfectly acceptable. It beat the usual method of Javascript hacks and conditional statements.

ava7 Patterns

Sheldon Finlay — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 14:59:44 +0000

I remember when background patterns were everywhere on the web. Was sometime around 2004 or so. Thankfully, the trend moved on. But sometimes a paisley pattern is just what you need for a winning design. I stumbled upon ava7 Patterns and was quite impressed. They have over 980 patterns thus far and a beautiful interface for for finding the right color and pattern shape for your web site. Patterns can also be sorted by top rated, most downloaded and most commented, so you know which patterns have been over-implemented.

Minify – On Demand CSS/JS Compression

Sheldon Finlay — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 14:40:44 +0000

It’s always a good idea to compress JavaScript and CSS files in order to have them load faster. However, it’s a compressed file is nearly impossible to edit if you need to make changes down the road. Enter Minify. Minify is a PHP5 app that can combine multiple CSS or Javascript files, compress their contents (i.e. removal of unnecessary whitespace/comments), and serve the results with HTTP encoding (gzip/deflate) and headers that allow optimal client-side caching. It’s a pretty sweet deal.

User Interface Tips

Sheldon Finlay — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 01:27:00 +0000

Here are a couple posts from Smashing Magazine regarding user interface design. A definitely must read for web designer and anyone working to design modern web application: