I decided quite a while ago, probably about 18 months ago, that I wasn’t going to attempt to style form controls any more.

This was based on my personal experience and my personal preference - I think your average user appreciates being able to easily identify a text box, a form button etc. - as forms can be confronting beasts to some people. If you leave all the form controls in their default style in the users chosen browser then at least they can readily and quickly identify and understand them.
Continue reading this entry »

For those of you who have had the pleasure of dealing with browser testing slightly complex CSS the title explains it all.

For those of you who haven’t, all I have to say is this: you lucky bastards.

For a current project I needed a browser based image cropping user interface, I wanted it to have the same features as found in something like Photoshop and be based on the Prototype JavaScript framework and possibly script.aculo.us, as they are both being employed in the area this tool will be used, plus taking advantage of their power would reduce the weight impact of the interface.

I did quite a lot of searching for some ready made solutions and found none that had the complete feature set that I required or any complete versions based on Prototype, the closest I found was Encytemedia’s Prototype/Script.aculo.us Javascript Image Cropper, but this is far from complete.

So after a week and a half of work, I present the JavaScript image cropper UI, built on Prototype & script.aculo.us, there is also demo page which allows you to try out all the functionality of the image cropper UI.
Continue reading this entry »

When I saw Steve Jobs present iWeb at the January Expo, the interface reminded me a lot of another Apple product; Pages.

I liked the look of the interface, just as I like the interface of Pages and I can see the market that Apple are aiming for with these products - the home computer user who wishes to make their creative output appear more professional.

My other first thought was "I bet the code output is awful", apparently I was in the minority there.
Continue reading this entry »