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A few things have me tremendously excited lately.

editease

In my continuing quest to become even moderately javascript literate I stumbled onto an amazing plugin that creates a tiny CMS using jquery. Pretty impressive, I love lightweight stuff like this. Crappy name though, needs some work.

RGB Color Profiles

I grew up ignorant of things like color profiles. To this day I’ve never had any instruction in graphic design, and certain things are still rather mysterious. I’ve now crossed RGB color profiles off that list when I found this consise and easy to read post on how to accurately reproduce color when exporting for the web.

The Wisdom of Crowds

No I’m not reading the book. I just heard about the book on a RadioLab podcast, but it sounds great. It’s all about harnessing the power of the masses to make accurate and effective decisions. It’s on my list.

Multi Theft Auto

Gaming took a giant leap forward just a short while ago when some cool dudes got together and built a platform to create a multiplayer version of GTA San Andreas. I can’t wait to form a posse of thugs and cause some damage.

Lou Dorfsman

I’d never heard of Lou Dorfsman until I read this post about his passing, but I recognized his work instantly. A great source of inspiration.

I’m completely on the fence when in comes to javascript. I like the idea of implementing extra whirly gigs that make sites more usable and behave more like desktop applications, but bloat is bloat and if poorly implemented javascript can quickly blow apart your design into something completely unusable.

To make things even more complicated, I am a bit of a javascript moron. This is well documented. I won’t regale you with stories of my idiocy - suffice to say that as a result I demand that javascript is simple, easy to use and degrades gracefully.

I find javascript particularly useful to make up for the shortcomings of IE6 and that is what this post is mostly about.

Anyhow, I’ve started to use a few bits of javascript regularly and here’s my top 3 list –

Suckerfish (CSS/js dropdowns)

by htmldog.com

I first came across Suckerfish on A List Apart, but since that post they’ve gone back and made their code even better. Now, with just a dozen lines of javascript, you can make beautiful dropdowns that work across all browsers. In case you’re wondering the javascript part is really only necessary for IE6. I’ve used this code for both Wordpress and Drupal themes with very few problems. Hint: don’t bother trying to get your menu items to text-align: center. It won’t work. Really, it won’t work.

Form validation with jQuery

by bassistance.de

Forms, how I loathe thee. Building forms is a total pain in the ass and filling out forms isn’t fun either. Still they can be a beautiful thing when they are done correctly. Luckily some very clever people have made it easier to build forms - such as pForm and with a bit of help from the folks at bassistance.de you can make filling out your forms easier for the average user with a bit of validation.

pngFix for IE with jQuery

by andreaseberhard.de

Png’s are wonderful for designers because they fully support transparency. From wikipedia, “PNG offers a variety of transparency options. With truecolor and greyscale images either a single pixel value can be declared as transparent or an alpha channel can be added.” Back in the old days you had to fudge drop-shadows, etc. by using a gif with a matte around it that was the same colour as the background.

I like pngFix because you don’t have to add special classes to your html in order for the fix to work. It also supports background-images BUT it doesn’t yet support repeating background images.

What a wild, wild week.

First the really big news - Grand Theft Bicycle has been accepted for a show at the Stride Gallery in Calgary. We don’t know when it will happen yet but I’d guess it will probably be within the next 6 months.

Then this morning I got an email telling me that this is box/this is machine has been accepted into the Bearded Child Film Festival (Minneapolis/Grand Rapids) and will play not just once but twice - how sweet is that?

And last but not least, Love&Olson are playing a semi-private gig next Tuesday Thursday evening at Discovery Coffee with our old friends i send data live. You can watch a blip from my preparations below or on Vimeo.

QC test from robotoverlord on Vimeo.

Nice little article about the adoption of Open Source by the finance sector, great news for advocates of OSS.

The Finance Sector: Open Source Rising | OStatic

Though the average user is unaware of the change, the web has been revolutionized in the last decade by the mass adoption and maturation of open source technology. Publishers, programmers, corporations and even governments have embraced open source as a reliable and elegant development methodology for projects of all shapes and sizes.

Tonight while scavenging the web I came across what may potentially be the most useful application yet for the ipod touch. DropCopy allows you to transfer files across networks very easily. Just grab whatever files you like and drop them down the semi-transparent hole in your desktop. The app has been around for awhile but was just recently ported to the touch/iPhone. Mac only, free for up to 3 machines on the same network.