ok, I mistitled my url on purpose.. But I thought either way it's clever that based on my browser, they knew to toss up an alert tailored to me and my preferred web browser suggesting tips on how to speed up my gmail session. See screenshot:

Upon closer inspection, they actually sniffed out my use of Firebug plugin always running.  They recommend disabling Firebug for gmail. I suppose it would be a good practice, in general, to just enable firebug for specific sites I'm working with-- what a novel idea..

I was stuck with the dilemma of printing out an entire website for complete overview review, but I didn't want to waste a Lot of paper (only a little). A coworker found a helpful blogpost to get me part of the way, and a comment within gave me the real answer: Web PrintSmart 2.0: HP IE plugin to print an entire or select snippets of an entire website (or web browsing session) in a single print job. In effect, it allows you to queue up small screen shot clips and then print only the ones you choose all from one convenient interface!

Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (2nd Edition)

Recently, I started into a great, handy, and very attractive book called Don't Make Me Think. It's an easy-to-follow guide to creating usable interfaces on the web.

Ok, I have to admit. I say "recently," but really, the attractiveness of the book caught my eye while at FlashForward2006 a few months ago. I haven't even finished reading the book... It's not tough to follow at all, but with all that it covers, one thing it doesn't do is create pockets of reading time and bark at me to return to it when time does present itself.

When I leave Firefox open for a few days (opening and closing lots of tabs all the while), for some reason firefox ends up juicing like 250+megs! What a hog!

To clear up memory and not have to bookmark all the open workspaces (tabs), I force a restart via Windows TaskManager. The goal is to improperly force an exit so that when you fire up firefox again, you'll get the option to "restore session." You get this by opening task manager and clicking into the Processes tab and clicking End Task. If you End Task under the Applications tab, you don't get the same result. When you restart Firefox, you will be prompted to reload all previously opened tabs! Perfect!

Using a PHP IDE with integrated debugger allows realtime debugging, step thru, watch, etc. in PHP. However, some things can be tricky to set breakpoints: the Drupal module imagecache is one of them.

The trick to setting a breakpoint in imagecache is to understand that it's not really the same "debug session call" as when you actually hit the page containing imagecache references. It's really the respective img src="" that calls the imagecache module that needs to invoke the debug session, so rather than trying to debug the page, try opening the url that shows in src="" and debug that.

In Flash 8, I had a movieclip "artwork" that I wanted to mask with another movieclip "mcdots" from actionscript. The typical syntax is:

mcMaskee.setMask(mcMask);
// or in my case:
artwork.setMask(mcdots);

The trouble is when I dynamically load the movie "maskdots," something weird happens, and the mask won't work:

maskdots.loadMovie("dots.swf");
artwork.setMask(mcdots);

The movie loads as expected, but the dots simply overlay rather than mask.

The solution was to delay or separate the process of loading the mask and applying it. To avoid a messy load checkstate routine, I simply used a basic enclosure called from a setTimeout (years of javascript taught me that):

Today I struggled with Adobe Photoshop CS2's Shape Tool. When I first mocked up a website layout for later slicing, I had nice, crisp, rounded rectangle background shapes as expected. However, after receiving some super tips from a talented graphic designer, I decided to revisit my original site layout and remove the rounded corners. I was disappointed to discover that my shape tool (rectangle in this case, but lines, circles, etc), when in the fill layer setting, was automatically anti-aliasing all my edges (not just the rounded corners as expected). I called a fellow web developer, and he saw the same results. Crisp in Fill Pixels (with option to antialias), but fill layers refused to draw crisply. Another bright designer we consulted suggested importing Illustrator ai's as smart objects...