Tools

Create Favicons Online With These 5 Useful Tools

Favicons are to websites what bread and water is to human beings: essential. They’ve been around long-since and will still be when we all have perished. Shortly after the inception of the web, they started their triumphal march. Nowadays, favicons are not long thought or talked about, they are just implemented like a duck takes to water. To create them, several solutions exist. First on there are plugins or native functionality for common desktop software solutions. What we want to focus on today are solutions in the form of online services. There are a few and they differ quite considerably.

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New Tools: CSS-Preprocessor Roole and HTML Converter Markdown.css

Astonishing things happen inside the development community. It keeps pushing out tools at an hourly rate, where some tools become essential and others are never again heard of. Today we will be looking at two tools, one from each side of this spectrum. While Roole, a JavaScript-based preprocessing CSS language, proves immediately useful, Markdown.css asks for a deeper look, or two.

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Pinstamatic Pimps Pinterest, Allows for Sharing of Websites, Texts and Places

You know that the social network Pinterest limits itself to the sharing of visual media, images foremost. Even though this is surely part of its success, there are times when you’d like to share other content, especially when the content is not available as an image. In these cases, Pinstamatic, a new service to extend Pinterest’s capabilities comes into play. Pinstamatic allows for the sharing of texts, websites and places. It enhances the presentation of images also.

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HINT.css – Tooltips In Pure CSS3 And HTML5, No JavaScript Needed

Tooltips in HTML pages general do not need any effort from a developer’s side, as long as they put proper title attributes to their elements. The title is then used for showing the tooltip, but also for other things, such as providing a screen reader with proper content. Speaking of the use case of tooltips, the visual presentation depends on the browser your site gets visited with. Developers with the need for more control turned to JavaScript bases solutions years ago. Kashagra Gour created Hint.css, which proves as a decent alternative, based completely on CSS and HTML.

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Tips for Designing Small Websites Faster and Cheaper without Sacrificing Quality

Web designers/developers often find themselves needing to turn down small projects simply due to a lack of time or budget. For instance, a friend may be starting a doggie daycare and needs a simple website to provide clients with information. Or maybe a cousin needs to create a website for her social club events. Some of these projects may only pay in exchange of services, a much lower fee than you would offer if it wasn’t your cousin, or maybe even no pay at all.

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Close Up: Decent Zoom Effects with elevateZoom for jQuery

Onlineshops have them. I particularly like the product pictures over at Amazon. Hovering the pictures with your mouse enables a zoom effect that shows a larger portion of the original right beside the image. If you like these presentations you might also like to implement similar effects into your own web projects. The jQuery plugin elevateZoom promises to achieve just that. It can even be customized to vary the effects to your liking.

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Tear Down This Wall: HTML_CodeSniffer Checks Websites For Accessibility

Accessibility is a major societal task that is constantly gaining in importance. Websites are no exception here. Even more so, online services for some people are their sole possibility of taking part in social life. Thus accessibility is a vital precondition to allow handicapped people to claim their share of the information age. HTML_CodeSniffer is a tool to check any given website for compliance to given standards. The tool generally works as a bookmarklet and can be invoked while surfing around any given website easily.

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Heyoffline.js Notifies Your Users When They Go Offline

The new features of HTML5 offer online and offline events that can be queried to check for an existing internet connection. Especially web apps need to be able to rely on the proper transmission of the state of the web connection to avoid losing data. The JavaScript library Heyoffline.js provides functionality to achieve just that.

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AI -> Canvas: Export Fully Functional HTML5 Canvas From Within Adobe Illustrator

Mike Swanson, though having been aboard Microsoft for more than 11 years, has created a plugin for Adobe Ilustrator that resembles a good wine. The older it gets, the better it grows to be. More than two years ago, still employed at the Redmond company, Swanson pushed out the first version of AI -> Canvas. At that time HTML5 canvas was already of some prominence, but who would have dared to use the element in production environments? Today things look different, entirely different…

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Fed Up with Unreadable: Are You a Human realises Captchas in the Form of Simple HTML5 Games

You know these sickening Captchas any web form these days brings before your eyes. Want to download something? Captcha. Want to send in a complaint to your telecom provider? Captcha. This would not even be a problem if it were only annoying. But more often than not, these Captchas are plain unreadable. Even if you own eagle’s eyes you will surely have experienced difficulty in deciphering common Captchas around the web at one point or another. What was once supposed to be unreadable for machines turns against its inventors. Is Skynet just around the corner? Anyway, alternatives exist. „Are You a Human“ offers a Captcha method that does not depend on blurry text and your deciphering abilities. Instead, these Captchas are little games, the so-called PlayThrus.

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