For over fifteen years, my blog and Unfinished Business podcast have been popular with website designers and developers.
For the past six months, I’ve been designing, writing, and presenting a series of Inspired Design Decisions articles and webinars for Smashing Magazine. These have been brilliantly well received and I’m currently working on more content which will become a book which will be available later on this year. But I wanted a regular project to experiment with new designs.
Looking back, I’ve redesigned this website roughly every three years. Today I’m proud to show you the new Stuff & Nonsense.
The Official Movie site for Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes has launched and, chattering chimpanzees, is it a piece of work! As if I weren’t excited enough about the film. It’s not released until July 2014 but the site gives fans a taste of what’s happened since the end of Rise.
I know I’ve talked about Ghostlab a lot on Unfinished Business and mentioned it a fair few times on Twitter. This isn’t just because its makers Vanamco have sponsored the show. No, I use Ghostlab almost everyday and it’s really made my designing responsive websites much more convenient.
As Ghostlab is an app for the Mac, often when I tweet about it I see people complaining that it’s not available for Windows. Well quit your whining Windows users, because today Vanamco have launched Ghostlab for Windows!
Ghostlab for Windows has a new interface and is available in both 32 and 64 bit versions. There’s even a free seven day trial and a licence costs just $49 US.
Ghostlab for Windows may be just what you were ho, ho, hoping for.
My Responsive Web Design workshop at Smashing Magazine is getting closer and some tickets are still available. In the meantime, here are three useful new resources for responsive layout using CSS3:
An interesting media query mixin that also deals with legacy Internet Explorer. I need to play some more, but this looks promising as a better solution than mine for Rock Hammer.
I’ve been using Emmet these last few months in Espresso and find it incredibly useful. I suppose between this and Sass, I write half the code I used to. (Now I just need to write the Emmet shortcuts reminder sheet I’ve been planning for months too.)
We know that it’s only web designers who habitually resize a browser window to see if a site’s responsive. But why not reward their dedication with a little something special? Add this to your stylesheet:
@media only screen and (min-width: 960px) and (max-width: 970px) {
body {
-webkit-transform : rotate(180deg);
-moz-transform : rotate(180deg);
-o-transform : rotate(180deg);
transform : rotate(180deg); }
}This could be the most essential CSS3 media query you’ll need today.
This couldn’t have come at a better time (for me.)
Jessica Hische made Quotes & accents (& Dashes). Remembering keystrokes for these characters is hard, but for me remembering character entities is downright impossible. So I made TextExpander do the remembering for me. Here’s how I did it: