All sorts

Finally an accessible way to render text within your designs with out having to use flash/images with alt tags or JS with descriptors.

Cufon is a way to “render” your text on screen giving you cleaner looking fonts – i have put together a working example here

I wouldn’t use this with p tags or anything below a H2 as it isn’t selectable.

Google has just released our something similar to my browser chrome entry although it is live working version of browser resolutions.

Through this tool you can view your site live with guides on where screen resolutions start and finish

http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/

It isn’t too bad although this would mean that your site would have to be live before you’d get a chance to test it.

The Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of Mobile Web Application Best Practices. The goal of this document is to aid the development of rich and dynamic mobile Web applications. It collects the most relevant engineering practices, promoting those that enable a better user experience and warning against those that are considered harmful. W3C invites implementers to complete an implementation report template. The group also published today a Last Call Working Draft of Guidelines for Web Content Transformation Proxies 1.0, which provides guidance to Content Transformation proxies as to whether and how to transform Web content. Comments on the latter document are welcome through 11 March. Learn more about the Mobile Web Initiative.

So you want to tell the world everything you do? Seems that people are tweeting about all sort of stuff… i am not a massive fan but have had some clients who want there own look and feel.

I have put together a multilayer photoshop document so you can see what i belive is best practice within the twitter environment.
NB – this is for screen res of 1280 X 1024 and above.

Download the PSD document here | 1.14Mb

Just found a web service that allows you to send large files up to 2Gb

http://www.mailbigfile.com/pro/

Sick of Alt Print screen? not a fan of paying for Viso?  Just stumbled on these awesome Firefox add-ons which can replace Viso and print screening…

Screen capture – Aviary
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/11587

Viso replacement  – Pencil
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8487

It might not be a facebook killer as it has some limitations at this stage although any new products out there do cause the current main stream apps to rethink what they do… Hopefully this doesn’t lead to facebook having another interface  change.

(this is first product i have notice from google with out the word “beta” in the logo- http://www.google.com/buzz )

Some general stuff (from Googie’s mouth)

Just found this lovely little toolbar add on for Firefox to test accessibility.

http://wave.webaim.org/toolbar

For the development Sydney New Year’s Eve web site they wanted the abiliity to be able to add alearts to the site via multiple entry points (web, sms, web phone).

With limited time and no budget also i really didn’t want to build something from scratch (more so why would you?) i took twitter and turned it into an alert system which any one with a mobile phone and acocunt passwords could update.

All i did was repurpose a Twitter widget so that it would do exactly that – see screen shots to the right. The only catch is that the twitter account must be clear unless the alert will appear.  So if an alert was needed to be sent out you would have to log in and delete the alert afterwards.

See the code working here

Dowload the code here

Every lost your phone contacts? When i first got my Iphone – somehow I managed to wipe the sim card clean…   Instead of manually entering all the contact details  i built a contact form which out-puts an  xml file. This file is easily manageable/editable and quickly able to be imported into my iphone via Gmail contacts.

View an online demo here

Download the source code here – 22Kb zip

Notes:  Needs to be in an ASP friend environment.