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» Friday Designer Humour - Font Conference

There are a lot of humorous things made which relate to design and client work in any kind. Here are one of my favourites called the Font Conference. It’s basically a video of a metting with all the different fonts as persons with personalities that suits their names and well, just watch and laugh!

» jQuery Part 2: Why use it?

I got quite a few questions about why you want to use jQuery after the article I ran yesterday about the editease plugin for jQuery. I thought I should address those here in part two and explain why you’d want to use it.

Recapping, what is jQuery?

jQuery is a javascript framework that allows you to develop plugins with, essentially cool and useful effects. Naturally you can just download any of the vast amount of plugins that are available and use on your site, which brings us to another advantage. A lot of the code don’t need to be rewritten again and again in the scripts, because that’s in the framwork. So in essence, it’s a great way to style up your site using javascript effects.

Why should I use it then?

Well as I’ve said, it does allow you to add creative effects through javascript but not only creative and good looking effects. You can also add useful boxes, form validations, site editing (like I talked about yesterday), really simply through the plugins of a framework. If you’re a developer you can of course write your own functions much simpler than it would be if you were to write everything from dead scratch. This is something every user benefits from in the case that you don’t need to load a ton of scripts onto a website that are writing the same base code all over, which brings us onto another important thing. The whole framework itself is really lightweight.You are not really adding a lot of page weight with the framework.

Another big pro of using a popular framework is the wide range of plugins available. jQuery is a very big framework and has a super plugin repositry, where you can find a whole whole lot. If you are looking for AJAX effects, you’ll find it. If you happen to be looking at basic content management, you’ll find that too.

Now, there are other javascript frameworks out there such as Prototype and Mootools. It’s a lot of a personal thing. I’m a jQuery guy and I like how it’s built and therefore I use it.

» Thursday Dailies

• Adobe has announced that they are going to have a screencast showcasing the upcoming Creative Suite 4 on the 23rd September. It’s a free signup so Signup Now!
   
• If you’re like me and like WordPress and install it for a lot of clients, you will be interesting in this article over at WP-Candy on Five Ways to Familiarize Clients with WordPress. It might be a pretty simple content management system but can look very daunting at a first look. The ideas are really good and will work for anyone who install WordPress for clients.
   
• I’ve you’re at Photoshop World right now in Las Vegas, you are probably right in the opening keynote and viewing something cool. Hopefully all of us who can’t be there will hear about some of the cool things really soon and as soon as I do, I’ll post the stuff right up here.
   
• Yesterday when I posted about my ten favorites iPhone apps and I wrote about some bugs in Homeworkr. Now after I get an email from the creator of the app asking about the bugs so that he could fix them. I just wanted to acknowledge that they are keen on hearing from you if you have any bugs or feature requests for the app.

That’s it for now, hopefully I’ll be able to post up some Photoshop World news later.

» jQuery Part 1: Content management

jQuery is a very good and stabile javascript framework that has loads of plugins available which will do everything between heaven and earth. I’ve decided to be running an article series about it for just that reason. When checking the repositry for plugins out a bit yesterday I found some really cool jQuery scripts and one was a clever one to do with content management.

Granted though it isn’t a dabatase solution and neither is it meant for very large scale sites but for smaller sites that just need to update the content online, this script will work wonders. It’s called EditEase and is a free download. Being built on the jQuery javascript framework, that and Thickbox is really all you need to have included for this to work. There is also a multiple file uploader available in the script with the need for SWFupload script.

What EaseEdit will let you do is define areas of certain pages of your site that are editable using the script online. The editing interface is really slick and all is really stylish and easy to use. It’s even got the FCKEditor embedded in the full edit screen!

Go and check out the demo of the script and play around with it and I think you’ll find that you’re going to like it quite a bit.

» My Top 10 iPhone Apps

A post like this is almost a necessity for bloggers right now and why should I be any less. Actually though a lot of people are asking me which apps I use a lot and which ones I do really like. Considering that I have four (soon five) pages of apps the narrowing down must be done to the very importants. Oh, and I decided not to include the App Store even though I love browsing it on the iPhone itself Nor have I included any default apps in here that I still use all the time and are in my dock. The list is not in any top order at all, they are equal.

Twitterific
I just like Twitterific. I use the desktop version of it and it’s just my favorite way of updating to Twitter. I did write a review of the app here in the iPhone center I put up a while ago.

NetNewsWire
Again, I’m using NetNewsWire on my computer and I do really like the program and naturally the free NetNewsWire iPhone app is a good one for me because I can sync which feeds I want to access on the go from my full list. I find it works really well for most things but there are things I’d like to see, like flagging on the phone and sync those back up to the computer. Again, I wrote a review of the app in the iPhone Center.