10 Adobe AIR Apps for Web Designers
Adobe AIR - a cross-platform runtime environment for rich-internet and desktop applications - is just starting to get popular outside of the early-adopter circles, but there’s already a growing amount of tools and utilities that can help web designers with various design-related and managerial tasks.
If you’re a web designer that’s into experimenting and trying out new applications (they don’t cost a dime), check out these 10 Adobe AIR applications perfect for web designers. Graphics designers, interaction designers, and web developers might also find this collection useful.
Em Calculator
Add Ratings, Polls and Reviews in Minutes Without Programming
Editor’s Note: Andreas Krohn runs the web hosting comparison site WebHostNinja.com and is blogging on digitalistic.com and on the swedish blog mashup.se.
There are many scripts that makes it possible to add polls, reviews and ratings to your web site relatively easily. Many of them do require a lot of configuration, uploading various files to the server and maybe even some programming to get them to work. Lately I wanted to add polls and reviews to my web hosting comparison site, but I did not have much time to spend on it, so complicated scripts where not an option. Thanks to js-kit I managed to add both a poll and hosting provider reviews in a matter of minutes. It didn’t require any programming and most of the configuration was done directly in the browser. It took me more time to style the poll and the reviews than it took to get them included in my site and working, and I suspect that most Six Revision readers are much better with CSS than I ever will be.
Graphing/Charting Data on Web Pages: JavaScript Solutions
Effective data visualization allows users to easily understand and consume otherwise complex, boring information. Plotting your data can serve as a replacement to tabular data, and is also a great way to add practical graphics to your web page or application. There are a variety of ways you can plot data on-the-fly - but in this article we’ll focus on 10 excellent JavaScript solutions to graphing/charting data that allow you to process data client-side. You’ll also find a link to one of the demonstration pages of the script so that you can see it in action.
Flot
Web-Based Tools for Optimizing, Formatting and Checking CSS
Stylesheets can get large real quickly, both in terms of length and file size. To ensure that your web pages render correctly and quickly, here’s a compilation of some of the best free, web-based CSS optimizers/compressors, code formatters, and validation services. Check them out and pick the ones that work best for you.
Optimizing and Compression
CSS Optimizer
12 Websites To Help You Learn Flash/ActionScript
Adobe Flash is an excellent technology that allows developers to add interactivity and smooth animations to web pages. Its popularity is so immense that you’ll find many websites dedicated to helping developers interested in Flash.
In this article, you’ll find 12 wonderful websites that’s worth a bookmark if you’re looking into sharpening your Flash development skills. For each entry, you’ll find three tutorials from the website so that you can see what’s in store for you.
1. kirupa.com
Cheat Sheets for Front-end Web Developers
Cheat sheets are helpful to have around because they allow you to quickly remember code syntax and see related concepts visually. Additionally, they’re nice decorative pieces for your office.
In this article, you’ll find 23 excellent, print-ready cheat sheets for HTML/HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (including MooTools and jQuery).
So go ahead – print out your favorites and pepper your workspace with these wonderful references.
HTML/XHTML
1. HTML Help Sheet
25 Outstanding WordPress Designs
WordPress is a popular, versatile, highly-customizable publishing platform. It’s used primarily for blogs, but with a little bit of innovation - it’s utility is limitless.
If you’re contemplating on creating a theme for your newly-established WordPress installation or looking for design inspiration for an existing one, check out these 25 hand-picked, beautiful WordPress designs that showcase the creativity of its designer and the malleability of WordPress.
1. 3.7 Designs
Learning MooTools: 20 MooTools Tutorials and Examples
There are literally over a hundred of JavaScript frameworks out there that make writing complex client-side code significantly easier. If you’re in the market for a powerful, relatively lightweight, and customizable JavaScript framework, MooTools is worth checking out.
To help you get on your way to developing highly-interactive web applications using MooTools, here’s 20 tutorials and working examples that’s worth a read.
Getting Started with MooTools
1. The "Mootorial"
Readers Pick: 12 Excellent Websites to Follow if You’re into Web Design
The easiest way to keep up with the latest news and resources is by subscribing to RSS feeds of your favorite sites. When I wrote an article called "30 Websites to follow if you’re into Web Development", I knew I couldn’t include everyone’s favorites, so I asked readers to suggest other websites worth following.
This is a collection of just some of your suggestions. Each entry has a link directly to the site’s RSS feed, but if you want to include all of them into your feed reader, here’s an OPML file for all of them.
1. CSS-Tricks
Suggested by: Matthew Adams of 101PoundWebsite.com, David Lano of David Lano’s Blog, Jake of DesignerFied.com, and Nodster
15 Tools to Help You Develop Faster Web Pages
Response times, availability, and stability are vital factors to bear in mind when creating and maintaining a web application. If you’re concerned about your web pages’ speed or want to make sure you’re in tip-top shape before starting or launching a project, here’s a few useful, free tools to help you create and sustain high-performance web applications.
I’ve tried to include a wide variety of tools that are easy to use, and have tried to keep them as OS and technology-independent as possible so that everyone can find a tool or two.
1. YSlow for Firebug
YSlow grades a website’s performance based on the best practices for high performance web sites on the Yahoo! Developer Network. Each rule is given a letter grade (A through F) stating how you rank on certain aspects of front-end performance. It’s a simple tool for finding things you can work on such as reducing the number of HTTP request a web page makes, and compressing external JavaScript and CSS files. A worthwhile read is the Ajax performance analysis post on IBM developerWorks that outlines practical ways of using YSlow in your web applications.
2. Firebug
