David Emery Online

Shifting my Opinion on CSS Animations

Having actually taken some time to implement CSS animations in an example, a light bulb clicked. The way I looked at how animations were declared and in what situations you would declare them suddenly changed. I believe I have done a 180 on this.

CSS transitions are easily my most used piece of ‘new’ CSS, followed closely by text-shadow. It makes it so easy to add superfluous, non-essential but experience-enhancing touches of animation that I’d never have time to add via javascript. I use them on practically every site I build now – it would be great if other browsers (ok, I really mean Firefox realistically) would implement them as well.

SoundManager 2 > 360° player demo

Inline “donut player” example (experimental)… Canvas-based UI. Load progress, seek, play/pause etc.

This is totally cool – we use Soundmanager all over the place already; hopefully we can roll this out without breaking things for rubbish browsers…

Web Design

Fuck the foundries

Seriously. Fuck them. They still think they’re in the business of shuffling little bits of metal around. You want to use a super-cool ultra-awesome totally-not-one-of-the-11-web-safe-fonts? Pick an open source font and get on with your life.

I couldn’t agree more. The font foundries – like the music industry before them – need to accept the fact that this whole internet thing exists and there’s nothing they can do about it. What they need to be doing – as soon as they possibly can – is changing their licensing so that you can use them on websites in a legal way.

Because they’re just about to have a huge influx of new potential customers for their fonts, so it might – you know – be useful to be able to sell to them.

D&AD Nominations Announced

The nominations for the 2009 D&AD Awards have just been announced. After last year’s furore, will graphic design figure this time?

Never mind graphic design, is anyone else thinking that the websites nominated are almost all rubbish? All chintzy, obvious marketing rubbish with no hint of style, class or innovation. It’s quite interesting how out of touch the traditional design world is from the ‘web’ world.

Working

Fluid Images

Ultimately, I decided to use the approach from his third example, which was to set a max-width of 100% on all images on my website […] And as it turns out, this works just fine for most embedded videos, too.

Well that’s mighty clever.

jbd2.

Very nifty use of static backgrounds on this portfolio site – took me a little while to figure out how he did it (it wasn’t as complicated as I thought it might be – I was already thinking along the lines of swapping out images with js…).

Combining Cufon and @font-face

Everyone wants @font-face to work everywhere, but as it stands, it only works in Safari and the upcoming versions of Firefox and Opera. In this article I’ll show you how to use Cufón only if we can’t load the font through other, faster methods.

This looks like a very good solution, and could probably be adapted to work with sIFR as well if you so wished.

Posterous

Posterous – The place to post everything. Just email us. Dead simple blog by email.

I’d checked out Posterous a while back but forgotten about it for being maybe a bit to simple (I forget exactly why, to be honest) but they seem to be rocking a pretty good service at the moment. You just email them at post@posterous.com and they take care of the rest – setting up a blog, hosting the images/audio/video attachments you send, the works basically.

The key for me is that they also let that data be sucked out again as well, either via RSS or direct via the MetaWebLog API which means they’re a perfect (free) backend service to power post-via-email onto pretty much any site. Incredibly handy if – like me – you look after 50+ Textpattern sites that need to be maintained by a bunch of people that can’t necessarily be inclined to deal with logging into a CMS on a regular basis.