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10 Web Geek Christmas Gift IdeasDecember 3

It’s December, which means it’s Christmas shopping time again. If you’re not sure what to get the web geek in your life (or if you’d like some inspiration for your own wishlist), I’ve put together a list of 10 items (in no special order) that anyone working on the Web would be happy to find under the tree on Christmas morn.

1. Arduino

   Arduino is an “open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments”. It’s basically a really simple way to build electronic projects controlled by computer - letting you create physical projects that interact with the Web. Some cool Arduino projects: A Twitter scroller, Arduino RSS reader, A Web-based air quality meter that uses an antique voltmeter for a display

   To get started, you’ll need an Arduino board (which you can either build yourself, or buy from one of many distributors), download the software and read the documentation on the Arduino site (or buy a copy of

Designers and Developers, Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?November 25

At The Future of Web Design in New York, the final session of the day was a panel discussion on the frictions and misunderstandings that often arise between designers and developers working together. The panel was chaired by Liz Danzico, while putting across the the developers’ point of view we had Joe Stump and Chris Lea, while on the design side of things we had Ryan Sims, and Daniel Burka.

The audience provided lots of great questions to ask the panel, but, unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time to answer them all (I have a stack of about 60 here on my desk). I thought I’d publish a collection of ten of the best unasked questions and see if the Vitamin audience, which is comprised of both designers and developers, can’t come up with some answers.

Here is the list of questions:

1. Would I be a better designer to work with if I knew coding myself? Do developers appreciate knowledgeable designers?
2. Designers: Developers don’t like you because you represent Work and don’t see why said work is wholly necessary. Developers: Designers are scared of you because you are the gatekeeper. This is the dynamic. Discuss.
3. How can stronger communication be developed no

The Future of Social NewsNovember 20

In this video of Kevin’s presentation at the Future of Web App Expo London 2008, Kevin talks about the future of social news and digg. There are lots of interesting nuggets of information in this presentation.

The Future of Web Apps returns to Miami, February 23-24 2009, with speakers including Michael Arrington, Daniel Burka, Jason Fried, Joel Spolsky, and Gary Vaynerchuk.

Tables: The Next Evolution in CSS LayoutNovember 19

Today, a talented web designer must be a modern-day MacGyver—that 80s TV action hero who could turn a rubber band and three tin cans into a serviceable aircraft. Turning the average site design mockup into a living, breathing slice of HTML and CSS is a comparably delicate miracle, which must be accomplished using whatever makeshift tools happen to be lying around in current browsers.

That’s exactly why so many professional designers still choose to use HTML tables for layout. How can we expect beginners to adopt CSS for layout when it takes someone with the resourcefulness (and snappy dress sense) of MacGyver to fully understand the techniques involved?

Thanks to the imminent release of Internet Explorer 8, CSS layout is about to become something anyone can learn to do—no chewing gum or makeshift explosives required.

HTML Tables Are a 90% Solution

HTML tables produce the grid-based layouts we want to achieve with relative ease, but the price is that users with screen readers and other technologies that rely on semantic markup have a hard time making sense of the page.

As standards-conscious designers, we have convinced ourselves that the benefits of semantically meaningful markup are worth the added hassle of using CSS for layout. Not everyone shares this conviction. Whenever I write about some new CSS layout technique, at least half the feedback I get boils down to “You’re kidding yourself if you think designers will use that

Add Undo and Redo to Your Web Application With CappuccinoNovember 13

Undo and redo are two of the most essential features in any real rich application experience. In many cases, your user has already turned these commands into reflexes, automatically hitting the proper keys and expecting the right thing to happen. Unfortunately, this is often left unimplemented by developers when making the transition from the desktop to the web, serving as a rude awakening to your users when they make a mistake that can’t be undone. It makes sense that this doesn’t receive the attention it deserves since the actual functionality of your application should obviously come first, and it doesn’t help that implementing these features from scratch can be quite difficult. However, they add a necessary amount of polish that you should seriously consider adding to your web application.

Luckily for us, Cappuccino has built-in support that can allow you to plug undo and redo right in by just by adding a few lines of code. In this tutorial, we will be exploring how to add sophisticated undo and redo support to a graphical application in the browser. We won’t be creating the entire application from scratch however, but instead building off of an existing example. We’re doing this for two reasons. For starters, we don’t want to get distracted from our main task by having to wade through unrelated code. Instead we’ll simply review whatever code we need to as we get to it. More importantly, the sample provided is c