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Cabel Sasser has released a very slick image zooming library. Similar to Lightbox, but sexier :-)

If you aren’t familar with Dean Edward’s IE7 project, you should definitely check it out. It’s a Javascript library that can be dropped in unobtrusively and makes most of IE6’s quirks go away. Use PNGs with alpha transparency, CSS selectors like adjacency and parent/child, :first-child, :last-child, :before, :after, as well as positioning fixes and min/max-height attributes.

I just noticed that he recently put out a major update to the project. It’s smaller, faster, and is hosted on Google Code. You can even include the JS file directly from Google. For more info, see the version 2.0 page.

This is somehow incredibly beautiful.

I watched the first couple of these Lost “Missing Pieces” videos a while back, but found them pretty lame. Until this one that is.

Although it sounds like a postmortem, Khoi Vinh has an interesting post about good design not being enough to help Yahoo. You can’t pick up a current business magazine these days without a couple of major pieces on the importance of solid design visionaries and practices (with which I’m usually in agreement with). With Yahoo’s mostly superior attention to design, why are they unable to gain ground on Google? Is it just that Google lept so far ahead of the pack that no amount of magic would help?

Maybe this is common knowledge, but I just came across this tip this week. You can get rid of those annoying dotted borders around links in Firefox…

… just by adding this rule to your stylesheet:

a:focus, a:active {
    outline: none;
}

I’m guilty of being overly antsy with tracking my UPS and FedEx packages, but this might be a bit much. Via SlipperyBrick.

I know I’ve piqued an interest in Processing for a couple of you, so this tip may come in handy. You can use SQLite for your database needs and access it via a drop-in JDBC library. I found this entry on Tom Carden’s (of Stamen) blog and I finally got it working in my sketch.

The gotcha (which I’m recording here partially for my own future reference) is that you need to use the “nested” version, for which I couldn’t find the download link. So, here it is.

This is about one of the coolest damn things I’ve seen in a long time. Iconfactory has updated xScope to version 2.0 and it includes a feature called Dimensions that gives you the width and height of just about any onscreen element by just clicking on it. Best $10 upgrade ever.