The humble button + a sprinkling of css

I always figured buttons were born into this world boring, had boring childhoods and died well… boring.

See what I mean? But after reading Shiny Happy Buttons at 24ways.org, my entire world view shifted:

Wow!! (Firefox 3)

Note: They obviously look great in Firefox but so too in Safari (Chrome seems to do something weird to them for some inexplicable reason. They’re both supposed to use Webkit though right?! Right???!!!) and IE although not identical - IE doesn’t do rounded corners:

Still lovely in IE me thinks although the padding is somewhat exaggerated. Safari:

Last, and in this case certainly least, Chrome:

And here’s the Css:

.buttons button {
    padding: 7px 10px;
    color: #ffffff;
    font-weight: bold;
    text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px #000;
    border: solid thin #882d13;
    -webkit-border-radius: 7px;
    -moz-border-radius: 7px;
    border-radius: 7px;
    -webkit-box-shadow: 2px 2px 3px #999;
    box-shadow: 2px 2px 2px #bbb;
    background-color: #ce401c;
}

Lighthouse

I’ve decided to start work on a little side project of mine very own mostly to keep the old juices of creativity properly exercised and flowing freely, and to have a place where I can play with any new and exciting webby-type technologies along the way.

Lighthouse came to mind immediately for project management (New ideas pop up faster than I can implement them… must capture them! :-)) since I’d remembered hearing good things about them from the 37signals guys. To make a long story short, Lighthouse is awesome!

Getting started is easy - your first project is free so trying them out doesn’t cost you a penny. (I have other ideas I’ll eventually want to try out which is where the service starts costing money. Fine. I don’t mind paying for excellent software.) In terms of usability, the interface is a complete joy to use - the only thing that tripped me up (for all of about 2mins) was getting my milestones properly prioritized.

An excellent service I’d recommend to anybody starting out. Setting up Trac, Bugzilla, et. al, hosting it myself, and backing it up regularly is just something I don’t want to spend my time on.

(I went with a Beanstalk hosted SVN repository too which happens to have at least 1 very simple, very nice integration point with Lighthouse that I’m aware of anyways, but I’ll save that topic for later.)

Welcome to Internet Explorer 8

Apparently Microsoft has quietly released IE8. My inner geek couldn’t resist trying it out so here goes...

So far so good. Roboform still seems to work. (That’s non-negotiable.) First thing I found was a neat little ‘blog this’ option under one of the menus that proceeded to fire up Windows Live Writer and immediately start work on a new post. The brand new post gets pre-filled with the title of whatever happens to be active in IE when ‘blog this’ is clicked + a link back to that page.

Very cool indeed!

Welcome to Internet Explorer 8

Lifehacker v2...

I didn't have the words to describe a not-quite-right feeling I couldn't shake for the new lifehack look - until reading Robin Williams's most excellent "The Non-Designer's Design Book" that is. (Link)

Contrast is what's lacking. (That's contrast of the non-wimpy variety.) The tall vertical banner on the left blends with the horizontal bar at the top, blends with the article headers to the right. The links and summaries are devilishly difficult to distinguish too. (Say that 5 times fast I dares ya!)

With the right amount of contrast - of which size is but one technique, there's also colour, form, direction and weight - a reader should be able to pick up on the different elements of a layout almost immediately with little-to-no effort.

Highly subjective of course. Can you tell I'm not digging the new look? :-)

Macbooks...

I was kinda waiting on this one for awhile and was it ever worth it! Isn't she beautiful?



Small, light, excellent build quality and with a bright, vibrant screen too. I couldn't be happier. So long MS... it was great while it lasted. :-)

Model associations in Cake...

I just bumped into this little trick in a forum post on model associations...

class Recipe extends AppModel {
   var $hasOne = 'User';
}

class User extends AppModel {
 var $hasMany = 'Recipe';
}

Associations seem to allow ->finds like these:

$this->User->Recipe->find('all', array('conditions' => array('cooking_time <' => '30 mins.'));

Who knew?! This automatically does a Left Join of User on Recipe. Note to self: Find a code snippet formatter/style for Blogspot! :-(

PHP HereDocs

Look what I found in some random bit of open source php the other day:

$a = <<<END
Hello, World!
Hi ma!
END;

Excellent!