Pngcrush is a command line tool that processes png files through several algorithms (read “magics”), optimizing the png without quality loss. Here is how you can install it from source on snow leopard. Continue reading
Google announced that they have added a new feature to search results. The brief summary in a result may contain links to specific sections of content on the page. This helps get a user directly to the most relevant content faster. For example, if I search for “jquery tabs”, one of my results looks like this:
Clicking “How To…” would take me directly to this portion of the page (http://docs.jquery.com/UI/Tabs#How_to…) instead of the top of the page (http://docs.jquery.com/UI/Tabs). I think that I will enjoy this feature quite a bit, and since most users do not scroll, this should get some dusty content a little bit of fresh attention. Continue reading
A project I worked on recently called for a carousel with five images of different sizes — somewhat like a “light” coverflow. I ended up building it with basic <img> tags that get scaled by javascript which modified the width attribute.
Cover Slider Layout
One of the problems that I ran in to involved the loss of quality from Internet Explorer 6 and 7 when the browser renders the image at a smaller dimension than the file.
An image scaled in internet explorer.
This project was for a site that still has a substantial amount of visitors using IE6 (and IE7′s scaling abilities are not much better than 6). So I needed to come up with a way to correct the image scaling. A short google later, I found Ethan Marcotte‘s blog post Fluid Images [via Unstoppable Robot Ninja] and a post on flickr’s developer blog. Continue reading