I just got back from the Mix '09 conference in Las Vegas, and it was so much better than I expected! For being a Microsoft sponsored conference mostly focusing on .NET and other MS technologies, there was about 50% Mac users there and most of these people were designers. It was a really nice mix (haha?) of designers and developers. I've got some photos from my trip up here on Flickr.
I think one of the best things they do is put up ALL the session videos online for free! There's some really valuable information in these!
http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09 (also you can view past years MIX sessions at http://videos.visitmix.com )
Here's some highlights I'm going to recommend:
Web Form Design - absolutely one of the best sessions I attended. Watch this video! He talks about why forms suck and what we as designers can do to help the process along. Very very well done and extremely informative. As soon as this session was over I went and bought the speakers book.
The Way of the Whiteboard: Persuading with Pictures - Anotehr great session, but not necessarily directly related to web design. It's on how to get ideas out of your head and communicate them properly to people via a whiteboard of napkin.
The other day I ran across a very useful article about the $$ selector in Firebug for Javascript and how to use it to loop through your stylesheets to find unused CSS styles. Very cool. The original code snippet would output everything to the firebug console, which I found to be useless on larger sites because I would hit Firebug's limit too often.
I modified it a bit to output the CSS to the actual site instead inside a styled element. So to use this on your own site, just copy and paste the code below into Firebug's console and hit run.
//Create a styled place to output styles to
var output = document.createElement('pre');
output.setAttribute("id","unusedCSSstyles");
output.setAttribute("style","height:95%; overflow:auto; text-align:left; background:#000000; border:2px outset #00CC33; color:#00CC33; opacity:0.9; padding:3px; position:fixed !important; left:5px; top:20px; width:95%; z-index:9998; font-size:12px;");
//create a styled close button
var closeBtn = document.createElement('a');
closeBtn.setAttribute("id","cssCloseBtn");
closeBtn.setAttribute("href","#");
closeBtn.setAttribute("onclick","document.body.removeChild(document.getElementById('unusedCSSstyles')); document.body.removeChild(document.getElementById('cssCloseBtn')); return false;");
closeBtn.setAttribute("style","position:fixed !important; left:2; top:0; z-index:9999; color:red; font-size:16px; padding:3px 20px; background-color:#000000; border:1px solid #FFF;");
closeBtn.innerHTML="close";
//add button and output element to body
document.body.appendChild(closeBtn);
document.body.appendChild(output);
//Find each stylesheet
for(var i = 0; i < document.styleSheets.length; i++) {
//write the filename to output element
output.innerHTML+="<br /><h3>"+document.styleSheets[i].href+"</h3>";
//find CSS rules
for (var j = 0; j < document.styleSheets[i].cssRules.length; j++) {
s = document.styleSheets[i].cssRules[j].selectorText;
//write unused CSS rules to output element
if ($$(s).length === 0) output.innerHTML+="<strong>["+j+"]</strong> "+s+"<br />";
}
}
Do note that this has a few limitations:
It cannot find stylesheets from another domain or subdomains
It cannot find inline styles or the <style> tags anywhere
It will not work on sites that use Mootools since it also uses the $$ selector. (this site does, so don't try it here!)
If you're really serious about finding what CSS styles you haven't used on your site, you might want to check out a Firefox plugin called Dust Me Selectors
Just wanted to give a quick plug to of of my new favorite products, Foxmarks. Foxmarks is a great little online service and browser plugin to synchronize your bookmarks between computers. I rely on this between my computer at home and my work computer. If I see something at work that I want to look at later, I simply bookmark it and forgot about it. When I get home, I have it already in my bookmarks bar. They also have a pretty nifty web interface so you can access you bookmarks from anywhere without installing software.
So if you want to try it out, download the Firefox Plugin, create an account and start backing up and syncing your bookmarks. If you’re not a Firefox user (and you’re not afraid of alpha or beta release software) there’s a version for IE and a version for Safari as well. The Safari syncing really comes in handy for iPhone users since your iPhone bookmarks are synced from Safari.
I’ve just now installed the Safari plugin and everything seems to be working great so far. Let me know what you think, leave a comment!
It's usually a good idea to wipe off your hard drive and start fresh once every year or so, regardless of what OS you run. In the past it's been a thing I've dreaded mostly due to the huge time commitment involved. My process before was to:
Make sure all important files were backed up (1 hour minimum)
Wipe the hard drive and re-install OS X (1-2 hours)
Reboot and install OS updates (~30 minutes)
Copy all the backed up file back onto the machine (~1 hour)
Install all software needed from installation disks and the web (3-4 hours No thanks to Creative Suite...)
Needless to say, that's pretty much an all day event. It involved so many steps that were spaced out just enough so that you couldn't really leave and get anything done. It can also cause a lot of mental stress because you're always worried with "Did I remember to back up my _____???" In the end, it was worth it though, I got rid of all kinds of junk that had built up and I ended up with a faster machine that's no longer bogged down.
Enter Time Machine. I began to use this last year and haven't looked back yet. For those that don't yet know, Time Machine is Apple's brilliant and easy backup solutions. You just designate another hard drive for backups, and once an hour it makes a copy of all the files that have changed. Because of this I have pretty much everything I've worked on since the beginning of 2008 - and multiples copies of it.
For those curious, I choose to trust my data with a Drobo, which is like RAID for dummies. I've got two redundant 1 Terabyte drives - I feel my data is safe.
One of the best new features in OS X was the ability to use that Time Machine backup as a way to restore your computer to a previous state. This is perfect for you if your hard drive crashes, or even if you're having problems. My initial thought was that if I was having problems, wouldn't restoring from Time Machine just restore the problems as well? In short, no. Time Machine only backs up your user data, no system files are backed up and noting that can be re-generated will be backed up (things like caches and your spotlight index).
Recently my Macbook Pro was feeling pretty sluggish. Videos didn't play smoothly, applications took forever to load, and importing and browsing through my photos in iPhoto was painfully slow. It was time for a clean start. Lucky for me, Time Machine removes the majority of the steps I listed above. Basically all that needs to be done now is:
Wipe the drive, install OS X
Restore from Time Machine
Install OS updates
Now this isn't a quick process, but it's no longer a thought intensive, worrisome, all day process. So if you're in a similar situation to mine and you're already using Time Machine, lets get started! Follow the jump to read more.
Today I decided to finally sign up for Evernote since it's finally out of private beta. Basically it's a way to organize and keep all kinds of things you come across all day. There's a desktop app as well as a web app that allows you to add a new note to evernote. The feature I'll probably use the most is mobile uploads where I can take a picture of soemthing and upload it right to the site via MMS on my phone. Evernote will even do some OCR on images and try and pull out text it see's in the images. Incredibly useful.
