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.

Time’s State of the Union tagcloud.

Another site that I’ve been working on for a while has launched recently. This one is for a company called Dyenomite Tie Dyes and, as the name implies, they manufacture all sorts of tie dye garments for customers large and small.

Dyenomite’s designer, Andy Johnson, created the overall design to match that of their print catalog. I took it from there and built the backend including the shopping cart and checkout system.

All of my projects I’ve worked on lately have had at least one new and exciting piece to work on (or if not, I’ve come up with one) and for Dyenomite, it’s the “virtual” garment previews. Previously, they had to shoot photos of all of their garments, come up with a clever name, and then upload them to the website. This covered the “stock” tie dyes, but there was no way to show the (literally) trillions of possible custom combinations of garment types, tie dye styles, and colors.

With their new system, they can create a vector line drawing of each of their garment types - something like this…

… where the green designates a transparent region. And tie dye styles like this…

This particular style has five colors that can be set to any of their 50+ choices. So, these vector files are little Flash SWFs that are stacked up - the style goes on the bottom and you specify the colors to use for each placeholder (sort of like color by numbers) and then the garment goes on top and acts as a mask with the style visible through the transparent areas. The end result would be something like this…

Anytime a tie dye image needs to be displayed (thumbnail for shopping cart, larger version for customizing, etc.), a little Flash movie is called upon with parameters describing which pieces and colors to use. Even after the user starts to make more specific filter selections (only certain garments, styles, and colors), we still can’t expect to show every possible combination. The idea is that they will find something reasonably close and they can then customize it. Existing product photographs may also be customized in the same way.

This certainly isn’t an exact representation of the final product, but it gives customers a new way of shopping and a nice tool for experimenting.

flight404 once again shows his mind-blowing Processing skills.

A great look at the challenges of clear presentation and copywriting in a user interface design.

If you build ExpressionEngine sites with Coda, you probably already know about this trick, but if not - it’s a gem.

I’ve made a couple of posts recently about a new site I’ve been working on and it has now been out in the wild for a week or two. My client decided to combine two of his passions, food and photography, into an online community of sorts. The result is PhotoEats.com.

One of the features I am most excited about is the search tool. I really like the live search-type search that Apple is using and I tried to replicate it for PhotoEats. Since people may want to search everywhere as well as near a specific locale, the search tool allows users to enter a location.

On the backend, the freeform text queries are performed by Ferret. If you are searching near a specific location, an additional GeoKit search is done and the intersection of the two result sets are returned.

The site is just getting off the ground, so there aren’t a ton of photos just yet. Feel free to visit and check the site out - and post some photos if you like!