A few months ago, Jason Grigsby’s post about autocompletion in forms made the rounds. I loved the idea of allowing users to fill in their credit card details by taking a picture of their card. What I didn’t love was learning all of the possible values for autofill by heart. I’m getting lazy in my old age.
Lately, I’ve gotten spoiled from using an editor that does intelligent autocompletion for me, something that in the past only massive complex IDEs offered. Opening my editor of choice, I created an input element and added an autocomplete attribute, only to find that the code completion offered me the state of on or off. Disappointing.
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A while back, I wrote a post about starting an open-source project. The focus of that article was on starting an open-source project as an individual. I received a lot of positive feedback and also some questions about how the process changes when you’re open-sourcing a project at work.
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At Velocity 2011, Nicole Sullivan and I introduced CSS Lint, the first code-quality tool for CSS. We had spent the previous two weeks coding like crazy, trying to create an application that was both useful for end users and easy to modify. Neither of us had any experience launching an open-source project like this, and we learned a lot through the process.
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Many developers and designers want to release their work into the world as open-source projects. They want others to be able to build on and share their code. The open-source community is vibrant because of this. Open-source software is available for virtually any application you could think of. Most designers use open-source software or code on a regular basis (WordPress, Drupal and many other CMS’ are open source).
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There are many applications that can help you work faster and efficiently. Though, not many applications come cheap. For this post we tried to digg deep to find the best selection of free and open source mac applications that will help you be a more efficient designer. We’re covering from application launchers, GTD (Getting Things Done) to design utilities that can help you focus on what’s important: create.
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In computer graphics images can be represented in two ways — using raster graphics (or bitmap) or vector graphics. The former is the representation of images as an array of pixlels, and the latter uses paths, points, lines, curves and shapes or polygons (which are all based upon mathematical equations) for the same purpose. Raster images are based on pixels and thus scale with loss of clarity, while vector-based images can be scaled indefinitely without degrading. In other words, vector graphics are resolution-independent and thus can remain the highest quality at any scale.
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There are many useful Web development tools that integrate in your browser. These in-browser tools are commonly known as add-ons or extensions. Though add-ons and extensions aren’t just for Web development, many of them out there are designed specifically for Web developers. In-browser tools vary greatly in the jobs they perform; for example, some of them help you diagnose issues with CSS, HTML and JavaScript, while others evaluate the accessibility of your website.
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Below are 15 useful project management applications, almost all of which are targeted directly at web developers, designers (both web and graphic) and other creative types. The last one is not geared specifically at creative types, but is the most unique project management application I’ve found, and was included on that basis as well as its potential usefulness for designers and developers.
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Whether you’re a Web developer, Web designer or blogger, you’ve probably had to deal with the headache of converting many images to different sizes and formats. It’s not much fun if you have to convert all of them by hand. Batch image processing can reduce this process from hours of work to just a few simple clicks.
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If you’ve ever collaborated with other people on a project, you know the frustration of constantly swapping files. Some do it by email, some through file upload services and some by other methods. It’s a pain in the neck, and every designer and developer knows it. Revision control is an excellent way to combat the problem of sharing files between workers.
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