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50 Common Mac Problems Solved

pc@pedrocorreia.net (pedrocorreia.net) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 22:58:08 +0000

Mac problems? Isn't that an oxymoron? If you just switched to the Mac from Windows, you might be thinking that you accidentally picked up one of your old PC magazines--and, by the way, we've got solutions to the seven most common problems switchers encounter, too. If you're a longtime Mac user, you could even be wondering where we get off accusing the Mac platform of being problematic. Using a Mac is generally painless and trouble free, but things can go wrong. Usually they're not catastrophic (for solutions to true Mac disasters, click here). Sometimes the things that go wrong are those little annoying things that you just shrug off--over and over, until you finally have to deal with them. ...

8 jQuery Optimization Tips and Tricks

pc@pedrocorreia.net (pedrocorreia.net) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 22:36:53 +0000

Its been quite a while since i write anything about jQuery. Furthermore, i have been writing many different optimization articles and jQuery is something that i have not write for quite sometime. Since many uses jQuery quite intensively in either design or application, why don't i give some tips on jQuery too. I think it will be beneficial that such optimization tips can be share and utilize in future application. Therefore, in this article you will see 8 jQuery optimization tips and tricks that might just benefit you during your jQuery coding. ...

10 great Alternatives to phpMyAdmin

pc@pedrocorreia.net (pedrocorreia.net) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 22:21:14 +0000

Most people in the web development world are under the impression that phpMyAdmin is the only MySQL client out there for websites. Going a step further, some users are aware of alternative however assume that phpMyAdmin is the best. Now, I agree that phpMyAdmin is one of the best out there and is is very user friendly. I myself also used phpMyAdmin much until recently... I got introduced to another program which within an hour became my favourite and also this led me to research others out there ...

A Tale of Planetary Woe

pc@pedrocorreia.net (pedrocorreia.net) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 22:19:07 +0000

Once upon a time - roughly four billion years ago - Mars was warm and wet, much like Earth. Liquid water flowed on the Martian surface in long rivers that emptied into shallow seas. A thick atmosphere blanketed the planet and kept it warm. Living microbes might have even arisen, some scientists believe, starting Mars down the path toward becoming a second life-filled planet next door to our own. But that's not how things turned out. Mars today is bitter cold and bone dry. The rivers and seas are long gone. Its atmosphere is thin and wispy, and if Martian microbes still exist, they're probably eking out a meager existence somewhere beneath the dusty Martian soil. ...

Introducing Closure Tools

pc@pedrocorreia.net (pedrocorreia.net) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 22:16:06 +0000

Millions of Google users worldwide use JavaScript-intensive applications such as Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Maps. Like developers everywhere, Googlers want great web apps to be easier to create, so we've built many tools to help us develop these (and many other) apps. We're happy to announce the open sourcing of these tools, and proud to make them available to the web development community. Closure Compiler Closure Compiler is a JavaScript optimizer that compiles web apps down into compact, high-performance JavaScript code. The compiler removes dead code, then rewrites and minimizes what's left so that it will run fast on browsers' JavaScript engines. The compiler also checks syntax, variable references, and types, and warns about other common JavaScript pitfalls. These checks and optimizations help you write apps that are less buggy and easier to maintain. You can use the compiler with Closure Inspector, a Firebug extension that makes debugging the obfuscated code almost as easy as debugging the human-readable source. Because JavaScript developers are a diverse bunch, we've set up a number of ways to run the Closure Compiler. We've open-sourced a command-line tool. We've created a web application that accepts your code for compilation through a text box or a RESTful API. We are also offering a Firefox extension that you can use with Page Speed to conveniently see the performance benefits for your web pages. ...

70 Of The Best Photoshop Actions For Enhancing Photos

pc@pedrocorreia.net (pedrocorreia.net) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:21:50 +0000

The compilation consist of 70 of the best Photoshop actions collected from all around the web from photo effects to actions for even creating photo borders, An essential design resource for all designers weather your an expert or an beginner. Photoshop actions consist of a series of menu commands such as i.e. filters, image adjustments etc which can be recorded and played back this process is called a Photoshop action. Photoshop actions are perfect for novices to Photoshop simply because it allows you to apply multiple different photo effects to an image within a few seconds without having knowledge about the ins and outs of Photoshop. ...

Browser support for CSS3 and HTML5

pc@pedrocorreia.net (pedrocorreia.net) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:03:44 +0000

Last week we launched FindMeByIP.com, a simple app which reveals your browsers' support for CSS3 and HTML5 features in an easy to read format using Modernizr. We've had a great response and we're going to be implementing some of your feedback in the near future. For now though I thought people mind find it useful to know the state of support in the current browser market. I've taken all the A-Grade browsers and tested them one-by-one for their feature support . Needless to say it's produced some interesting results. ...

A Mars Rover Named Curiosity

pc@pedrocorreia.net (pedrocorreia.net) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:03:05 +0000

If you found your grandmother's diary, tattered and dust covered, up in the attic, would you read it? Of course you would. Granny was a pistol! Brush off the dust, open up the little book, and foray into her lively and interesting past. Dust cloaks some fascinating tales in other places, too. NASA scientists will soon brush the dust off some Martian rocks that are practically bursting their seams to give their lively account of the red planet's past. The Mars Science Lab -- aptly named "Curiosity" -- is heading up there in 2011 to read the diary of Mars. The small, car-sized rover will ramble about on the rocky surface, gizmos at full tilt, not only brushing dust off rocks but also vaporizing them with a laser beam, gathering samples to analyze on the spot, taking high resolution photographs, and more. ...

55 Terrific Cinema 4D Tutorials & Techniques

pc@pedrocorreia.net (pedrocorreia.net) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:02:01 +0000

Cinema 4D is getting very popular day by day mainly due to the body paint functionality. It has artist friendly interface with a customizable work flow. Many films like Spiderman 3, Monster House, Chronicles of Narnia, Beowulf, Polar Express and Superman Returns also used Cinema 4D to present a long lasting effect. People also used Cinema 4D in motion graphics because of its excellent integration with compositing application pipelines. The most useful thing about Cinema 4D is its instinctive interface and sound work flow that lets an artist to jump in and be creative and dynamic swiftly. In this post we have gathered 55 excellent tutorials which we will greatly help you to create some beautiful 3D graphics. ...

The Ails Of Typographic Anti-Aliasing

pc@pedrocorreia.net (pedrocorreia.net) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:01:30 +0000

As printed typography enjoys the fruits of high-DPI glory, proudly displaying its beautiful curves and subtleties, its on-screen counterpart remains stifled by bulky pixels, living in a world of jagged edges, distorted letterforms and trimmed serifs. Until display manufacturers produce affordable 200 or 300 PPI monitors, we'll have to rely on software advances to fix these problems. Enter anti-aliasing: the next best thing to a world of higher-resolution monitors. The concept of anti-aliasing is fairly simple: add semi-transparent pixels along the edges of letterforms to smooth the appearance of the "stair-step" effect. However, many factors and technologies determine the actual effectiveness of the process: hinting, subpixel rendering, software capabilities and operating system specifications, to name a few. Here, we'll look at what you as a designer can do to improve the results of anti-aliasing with Photoshop, Flash and CSS. Plus, we'll explain the constraints of hardware, browsers and operating systems. ...

HTML5 Tutorial - Getting Started

pc@pedrocorreia.net (pedrocorreia.net) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:00:03 +0000

HTML5 is coming quicker than a lot of web designers are probably aware. You've probably seen the stories that it won't actually be usable until 2022 but in reality, you can actually start using it today. Not all web browsers support CSS2.1, not all visitors are using software capable of using JavaScript but that doesn't stop us from using it and it shouldn't stop you using HTML5 either, and here's why... Using progressive enhancement we can start using HTML5 while ensuring that visitors that are using outdated technology will still find your site usable and accessible. I've uploaded an example of a simple webpage using HTML5 and below will explain how it differs from HTML4.01 that you'll be familar with. ...

Running Mono - an Overview

pc@pedrocorreia.net (pedrocorreia.net) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 02:57:32 +0000

The game is running on an Ubuntu server. We downloaded the source code and installed it manually. We could have used the packages, but that isn't versatile enough. Packages aren't always up to date and we find them hard to manage. For example, how could we have two versions of Mono installed and choose witch to run? How could we always have an up to date version? To fix this problem we chose to install by source, having as a guideline the Parallel Mono Environments article. This was great because we could change to use Mono from SVN or a specific version, just by changing some variables. We wouldn't want to install a new version, getting problems, and having a bad time to rollback. Use use FastCGI with Nginx to serve the game. Nginx's really cool, and very easy to configure and manage. We also installed MySQL. Not considering Mono, all the other necessary software was very easy to install and configure, with the help of Google of course. We managed to get the server displaying ASPX pages easily. ...

10 Reasons why I prefer Fireworks CS4 to Photoshop for Web Design

pc@pedrocorreia.net (pedrocorreia.net) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:05:04 +0000

I have been a Photoshop user for over sixteen years, ten of which have been in a production web design environment. I've got used to the way it works. I'm used to its feature set and how it does what it does. I've worked happily within that framework and mostly not digressed unless my requirements have been to design a logo - where a vector illustration package like Illustrator has come into its own. More recently, however, I've begun to feel like I'm actually using the wrong tool for the job, in some ways like using a word-processor to replicate the work of a spreadsheet. Just after Adobe's CS4 suite was released, I decided to have another look at Fireworks - a package I had looked at a few times in earlier versions, but repeatedly given up on - each time falling back to Photoshop. I played with it, and I was impressed by a lot of what I was seeing. I persevered with it and started producing much of my my day-to-day work in preference to Photoshop. ...

Spitzer Discovers Saturns Largest Ring

pc@pedrocorreia.net (pedrocorreia.net) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:56:49 +0000

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered an enormous and previously unknown infrared ring around Saturn. "This is one supersized ring," says Anne Verbiscer, an astronomer at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. "If you could see the ring in the night sky, it would span the width of two full Moons." Verbiscer is co-author of a paper about the discovery to be published online tomorrow by the journal Nature. The other authors are Douglas Hamilton of the University of Maryland and Michael Skrutskie of the University of Virginia. The new belt lies at the far reaches of the Saturnian system, with an orbit tilted 27 degrees from the main ring plane. The bulk of its material starts about six million kilometers (3.7 million miles) away from the planet and extends outward roughly another 12 million kilometers (7.4 million miles). It would take about one billion Earths stacked together to fill the voluminous ring. One of Saturn's farthest moons, Phoebe, circles within the newfound ring, and is likely the source of its material. ...

Optimized Event Delegation in jQuery

pc@pedrocorreia.net (pedrocorreia.net) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:54:46 +0000

Often when working with large datasets, you will come across issues related to intense event overload for objects like table cells. This could translate to poor client JavaScript performance. The root cause for the performance lag is the large number of events that are associated and handled by web page at the client. Lets consider a scenario of highlighting cells in a table as follows ...

100 Ajax And JavaScript Techniques

pc@pedrocorreia.net (pedrocorreia.net) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:53:53 +0000

JavaScript is becoming more common in modern web designs and when it is done with taste and moderation it can enhance the user's experience and provide interactivity to your website. The secret is balance. To not have too much JavaScript and to use the right techniques for your purposes. There is a lot you can do with JavaScript - form validation, stylish navigation, amazing slideshows, tool tips, interactivity and more can be achieved with some JavaScript code. Cashrevelations.com presents 100+ Ajax and JavaScript techniques with demos that can make your websites visually and interactively more interesting or user friendly. They are all more or less easy to configure, but perhaps this is not the first thing you should do if you just have learned to build websites - but on the other hand, It doesn't harm to try. ...

65 Free Social Icons for Blogs

pc@pedrocorreia.net (pedrocorreia.net) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:53:14 +0000

Since the launch of our website we have not only showcased tons of great Free Social Icons, but we have also given away 5 free exclusive sets of social icons for blogs and websites. Below we have rounded up the 5 sets of exclusive icons for blogs so you can have them all in one place. The icons are all 64�64 pixels in size, .png format and match in style. Simply click the images below to download the free social blog icon sets. ...

Most distant gamma-ray burst spotted

pc@pedrocorreia.net (pedrocorreia.net) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:49:46 +0000

Two teams have spied a huge blast from the far reaches of our early Universe. Such γ-ray bursts occur when certain massive stars violently explode. The latest burst happened a mere 630 million years after the Big Bang (that's 13.1 billion years ago) and is the youngest such blast to have been spotted - the previous record-beater happened 825 million years after the Big Bang. NASA's space-based Swift telescope spotted the burst, named GRB 090423, on 23 April this year. "Gamma-ray bursts are rather rare," says Nial Tanvir of the University of Leicester, UK, who led one of the efforts to characterize the burst. The Swift telescope spots around 100 a year. "It's hard work to pin them down," he says ...

15 Best jQuery Navigation Plugins

pc@pedrocorreia.net (pedrocorreia.net) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:47:09 +0000

The tiny navigation in your site decides if a two second long visit is memorable or not! Spice up your web user interface with this colelction of easy to use yet eye catching navigation plugins and tutorials. ...

Modern CSS Layouts: The Essential Characteristics

pc@pedrocorreia.net (pedrocorreia.net) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:45:07 +0000

Now is an exciting time to be creating CSS layouts. After years of what felt like the same old techniques for the same old browsers, we're finally seeing browsers implement CSS 3, HTML 5 and other technologies that give us cool new tools and tricks for our designs. But all of this change can be stressful, too. How do you keep up with all of the new techniques and make sure your Web pages look great on the increasing number of browsers and devices out there? In part 1 of this article, you'll learn the five essential characteristics of successful modern CSS websites. In part 2 of this article, you'll learn about the techniques and tools that you need to achieve these characteristics. We won't talk about design trends and styles that characterize modern CSS-based layouts. These styles are always changing. Instead, we'll focus on the broad underlying concepts that you need to know to create the most successful CSS layouts using the latest techniques. For instance, separating content and presentation is still a fundamental concept of CSS Web pages. But other characteristics of modern CSS Web pages are new or more important than ever. A modern CSS-based website is: progressively enhanced, adaptive to diverse users, modular, efficient and typographically rich. ...

11 Most Popular Open Source Softwares Of All Time

pc@pedrocorreia.net (pedrocorreia.net) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:43:54 +0000

Today we are listing here 11 Most Popular Open Source Softwares Of All Time in which most of them are cross-platform. You might not be able to enjoy all the features as commercial software but it will really help you to perform your task in a better way when your pocket does not allow you to purchase paid software. ...

50 Photoshop Tutorials For Creating Poster Designs

pc@pedrocorreia.net (pedrocorreia.net) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 01:48:55 +0000

The ultimate compilation of over 50 Photoshop tutorials which will guide you through the process for creating a poster design, and will show you the necessary skills in order to design your own poster. Photoshop may not always be designer's first choice of software for designing posters in simply because it's not a vector software. Photoshop may not be a vector software but has some handy and useful features which make it easy and more efficient to create beautiful poster designs using simple techniques. I hope you enjoy the handpicked collection of tutorials which we have featured within the article. Feel free to leave a comment to share any tutorials we may have missed or to share your favourite tutorials featured within the list. ...

69 Awesomely Free Snow Leopard Compatible Apps

pc@pedrocorreia.net (pedrocorreia.net) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 01:48:27 +0000

The word free gets thrown around quite a lot lately. Cell phone carriers offer "free" phones that are tethered to a two-year contract. Those free rooms in Vegas come at the price of three hours of your life spent listening to a time share pitch. Even Steve Jobs said the new camera in the iPod nano was free. If you're still paying money, it's probably not free. To help get free back to its rightful place of, well free, we've compiled a list of apps and services that are indeed free and won't require you to sit through a pitch about how great it is to be a foster parent to a monkey. We do want to note that some of these items are services or system preferences. But hey, they're free, so stop complaining and enjoy. We would also like to note that some of these apps are donationware. If you find that an app you find here is the greatest thing ever and you plan on using it all the time, consider donating some money to the developer. They'll appreciate being able to buy food for the monkeys they're currently playing parent too. ...

40 Adobe Illustrator Text Effect Tutorials

pc@pedrocorreia.net (pedrocorreia.net) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 01:44:43 +0000

Which one is better for manipulating text, Photoshop or Illustrator? There is no clear and defined answer. What is clear is that Illustrator, being mainly used used for creating seamless vector images, allows the user a greater degree of accuracy, control, and precision. Of course this depends on the hand controlling the mouse. So, if you are looking to simply manipulate text, then Photoshop would be your choice. If your goal is to create beautiful and original typographic art, then it has to be Illustrator. In this Illustrator tutorial round-up, there are over 40 text effects, or if you prefer typographic effects, to help you learn new techniques and expand your typographic repertoire. Of course, as any good graphic designer knows, being knowledgeable in one graphic editor limits your creativity. To accomodate this, we have included some tutorials that will require the additional knowledge of Photoshop and even some 3D software to give your text that added awesomeness. ...

Building an Object Collection Manager with the Standard PHP Library (SPL)

pc@pedrocorreia.net (pedrocorreia.net) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 01:38:10 +0000

The purpose of a collection is to store objects in an organized manner with specific access rules. We are going to build a collection class using the Standard PHP Library (SPL). Our final product will be capable of iterating, counting and access to objects via array. If you are not familiar with SPL you can find some additional information on the PHP SPL manual site. Unfortunately the manual is somewhat lacking. Here is a more detailed list of SPL classes. We will call our class "Collection" (original, I know). This class will eventually implement the SPL classes: ArrayAccess, Countable and Iterator. If you are unfamiliar with SPL your first reaction may be that you don't have any of these classes in your project. The beauty of SPL is that the classes are built into PHP (compiled by default). Once you implement a class you are exposed to a series of abstract function which you must implement. Once implemented the result is the ability to manipulate objects and create functionality you wouldn't normally be able to code. First we are going to do a quick introduction to the interfaces we will be using. After that we will jump right into code and examples. Please keep in mind that the collection class we are going to build is more about demonstrating the capabilities of these particular SPL interfaces then actual practical use, although you could easily turn this into a useful class. ArrayAccess ArrayAccess is an interface that lets you override array access of objects. Basically it lets you use an object as an array and use keys to access values stored within the class. ...

jQuery and General Javascript Tips to Improve Your Code

pc@pedrocorreia.net (pedrocorreia.net) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 01:36:27 +0000

I have published several articles describing the many benefits we can all get from using jquery. Having access to many good plugins, examples and tutorials is important to get great ideas turned into excellent solutions as fast and elegant as possible and that is what jquery is all about. If you use jquery regularly or plan to start using it as more and more web developers tend to do I believe a few fundamentals and best practice tips to improve your jquery code will be worth spending a few minutes on. Please don't hesitate to post a comment with your own tips and suggestions. ...

8 different ways to beautifully style your lists

pc@pedrocorreia.net (pedrocorreia.net) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 01:33:23 +0000

The use of HTML lists ( for an ordered list, for an unordered list) is very common these days. Today, we're going to look a little bit further than creating regular lists, by showing 8 different ways to beautifully style your HTML lists with CSS. We'll use some pure CSS techniques to make a bored list look awesome (and even have some extra functionality). ...

Is your CSS reset doing more harm than good?

pc@pedrocorreia.net (pedrocorreia.net) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 01:29:39 +0000

You know the drill. Code the XHTML. Check. Validate. Check. Start the CSS style sheet with a reset. Che... Hold on there. Before you dump the latest and greatest CSS reset in your style sheet, you might want to think about what those style declarations actually do. If you're resetting tags that aren't in your markup or tags that don't need to be reset, you could cause more problems than you fix. In case you're not familiar with CSS resets, they're a list of style declarations you put at the beginning of a style sheet to undo, or reset, the default styles browsers apply to certain tags. This ensures that the styles you actually declare look consistent from browser to browser. ...

A beginners guide to regular expressions

pc@pedrocorreia.net (pedrocorreia.net) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 01:28:19 +0000

I've noticed over the past few months quite a few developers with little to no knowledge of regular expressions (regex from here on out). For whatever reason they haven't taken the time, or had the chance, to learn what I consider to be one of the most powerful, and useful tools available in programming. Even knowing a few basics can really streamline your workflow, and improve your code. Not only are they useful IN code, but they can even help you write code. In this post I'm going to cover some regex basics, then show you some real examples of how they can solve problems for you. The basics are always a great place to start, so let's look at some syntax. At it's heart, regex are simply a way to match (and replace) one string with another. So we replace the literal string cat, with mouse, or the number 8675309, with 42. Now that would be useful if we wanted to replace many occurrences of 8675309, but that's not all that common. Wouldn't it be nice if, in addition to replacing 8675309 with 42, we could also replace 5318008 with 42? Regular Expressions let's you do that with special strings called meta characters. Meta characters are what gives regex their incredible power. Here's a list of some of the most common meta characters and how they're used. ...

The Mystery Of The CSS Float Property

pc@pedrocorreia.net (pedrocorreia.net) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 02:30:20 +0100

Years ago, when developers first started to make the transition to HTML layouts without tables, one CSS property that suddenly took on a very important role was the float property. The reason that the float property became so common was that, by default, block-level elements will not line up beside one another in a column-based format. Since columns are necessary in virtually every CSS layout, this property started to get used - and even overused - prolifically. The CSS float property allows a developer to incorporate table-like columns in an HTML layout without the use of tables. If it were not for the CSS float property, CSS layouts would not be possible except using absolute and relative positioning - which would be messy and would make the layout unmaintainable. In this article, we'll discuss exactly what the float property is and how it affects elements in particular contexts. We'll also take a look at some of the differences that can occur in connection with this property in the most commonly-used browsers. Finally, we'll showcase a few practical uses for the CSS float property. This should provide a well-rounded and thorough discussion of this property and its impact on CSS development. ...