Issue #61 | Tuesday, June 12th 2012 | 107,799 subscribers | Previous issues
Dear Friends,
When you stumble upon a Twitter account with a relatively large following, you might be wondering whether someone would actually read a tweet that you send them. Should you care about answering a question? Should you participate in a poll or survey? Is there any reason to get involved in a conversation if there is little chance of getting a reply?
Probably not. However, at our @smashingmag and Facebook page, we care a lot about the feedback coming from our readers. In fact, we read and care about every single tweet, and we do our best to reply to all the mentions, links, suggestions, photos, videos — whatever you can think of. We take our time to engage, to discuss and to help you out with a tweet or two—because your feedback is important to us. So feel free to send questions, suggestions and your general thoughts @smashingmag—we are reading and watching out for mentions and replies.
In this email newsletter we present a free font, a useful jQuery library, keyboard shortcuts trainer and a digital SLR camera simulator. Also, we're giving away two tickets to the Media Evolution conference taking place in Malmö, Sweden. If you'd like to win a ticket, tweet us why you'd like to go there and don't forget to use the hashtag #smmeconf!
— The Smashing Team
Table of Contents
01. Train Your SLR Camera Skills
02. Free Quality Font: Bariol
03. Make Things With WordPress? Code Poet Knows It All!
04. The Trouble Solver: 50 Problems In 50 Days
05. Beautiful HD Retina Wallpapers
06. An Advanced Replacement For <select> Element
07. Discover Obscure Keyboard Shortcuts
08. Share Wonder, Discover Wonder.
09. Museum Of Endangered Sounds
10. Smashing Highlights (From Archives)
11. New On Smashing Job Board
12. Recent Articles on Smashing Magazine
1. Train Your SLR Camera Skills
Learning how to handle a SLR camera has never been easier or more comfortable. Developed by Jon Arnold, CameraSim gives you the opportunity to virtually try and learn how to use a SLR camera. For now you can experiment with lighting, distance, focal lengths, ISO, shutter and aperture, but more features are promised to be available in the future.
CameraSim is a valuable tool for those of us who only use our SLR cameras in "automatic" mode or want to explore more possibilities before purchasing one. You might want to look into the desktop version (available for both Mac and Windows through the "pay-what-you-want" price), as it makes experimenting much easier. (ml)
2. Free Quality Font: Bariol
Free quality fonts are always difficult to come by—designing a typeface is a very time-consuming task which requires thoroughness and an attention to detail. Spanish designers from the design agency Atipo have recently released a playful, half grotesk and half rounded sans-serif typeface with curves—for free.
By default, Bariol Regular is available for free download, but you have to tweet about it first (which requires giving access to your Twitter data to PayWithATweet.com—make sure to revoke the access after the download). The font can be used for personal as well as commercial work, and can be used with the @font-face-attribute. The complete family also includes Bariol Thin, Light and Bold, which are available as the "pick-your-price"-model, starting with 3 Euros per bundle. (vf)
3. Make Things With WordPress? Code Poet Knows It All!
WordPress has a very robust and active community surrounding it, which means there are constantly new books, interviews, articles and valuable resources coming out on it on a daily basis. Now you can keep up to date with all of it using WordPress Code Poet.
The new website provides you with updates about everything happening in the world of WordPress, including information about books, resources, and even exclusive sneak previews. Code Poet aims to be your go-to source for expanding your WordPress know-how. The website already has a remarkable collection of their favorite resources, adding new content to it all the time. (cc)
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4. The Trouble Solver: 50 Problems In 50 Days
Design has many functions: aesthetics, ergonomics, functionality, and practical solutions for our everyday lives. Maybe one of the most important things is not even the most evident: the social function of design. Peter Smart proved this statement right through his project 50 Problems in 50 Days.
During his adventure, the designer traveled 50 days through diverse cities in Europe, with the intention to solve 50 social problems with design. Click through his itinerary and you'll see the details for each of his solutions. There are valuable ideas offered that could be adopted by anyone, which would make a big difference in our everyday life. Hats off to you, Peter... that's an inspiring project! (tts)
5. Beautiful HD Retina Wallpapers
The Retina Wallpapers for iPad 3 are part of Simon C Page's geometric CUBEN 12 series. The wallpapers give the impression of a very time-consuming piece of work, however they "actually didn't take long to create", as the designer states. The pattern was created through repetitions of one shape, equally spaced with a double-sized version over the top.
As a second step, the designer picked out vibrant colors, ran a random color and transparency script, and added some noise as the final step. You can download these wallpapers from Simon's page and if you're looking for a stream of colorful inspiration, you might want to check Veerle Pieters' inspiration stream as well. (ml)
6. An Advanced Replacement For <select> Element
The good ol' <select> controls are a common design element which is often used to provide users with a selection of navigation options or a value in a Web form. However, <select> can do much more than that.
Select2 is a jQuery-based replacement for the <select> element that supports search, remote data sets and infinite scrolling of results. With the library, users can type the first letters of the option they are looking for (e.g. the country) and select it from the updated list of items. You can also define a minimum input setting, a placeholder value and template options for customizing the display options (e.g. you can add a flag to the country's overview). The library provides a plethora of further features, all tested with IE8+, Chrome, Firefox 3.5+, Safari 3+ and Opera 10.6+. The script works with IE7, too, but has some minor issues with z-index. Now, that's a helpful addition for your toolbox! (vf)
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7. Discover Obscure Keyboard Shortcuts
Everybody loves keyboard shortcuts... after all, they are those few helpful little time-savers that can significantly boost your productivity while making it easier to perform those mundane regular tasks. Every application has its obscure yet valuable shortcuts and Shortcutfoo helps you discover and effectively learn the right shortcuts for your favorite text-editing program. It works similarly to interactive websites that train vocabulary. The tool shows an action and your task is to type in the matching shortcut. There are one-minute sessions for several shortcut groups, and the it measures the time and accuracy of the right answers given.
Currently you can learn shortcuts from Vim, Sublime, Emacs, TextMate, Visual Studio, XCode and command line. If your enthusiasm for shortcuts goes even further, you might want to consider downloading the free CheatSheet app as well (available only for Mac). Once you've installed it, you can just hold the Cmd key a bit longer to get a list of all active shortcuts for the current application. Now you are armed with powerful tools to help you become quicker with your work! (ml)
8. Share Wonder, Discover Wonder.
In today's Web, we often find ourselves buried in a wasteland of silly videos, YouTube comments and Twitter spam. It really is a challenge to find content of great value, even if you know where to look for it. Organized Wonder helps to separate the good stuff from all that noise out there.
Organized Wonder is a platform to share and discover the best talks, documentaries, interviews, short films and various other videos across the Web. You can follow people you admire and share the content you value with others. Organized Wonder is a true oasis to find great content—let's help to keep it that way. (ml)
9. Museum Of Endangered Sounds
Do you remember how your first mobile phone used to ring? What about the starting melody from Windows 95, or the background noises from the popular games Pac-Man and Tamagotchi? If these lines have awoken your nostalgic senses, you can remember these special sounds again in the Museum of Endangered Sounds.
Brendan Chilcutt selected samples of old technologies and electronic equipment and decided to create a museum for the sounds offered by these objects. He tries to explain that these noises also have musical value. Whether you agree or not, it's up to you, but at least it's entertaining to hear those forgotten tones that once used to be a part of our lives. (tts)
10. Smashing Highlights (From Archives)
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"But The Client Wants IE 6 Support!"
Frequently, when I discuss CSS3 with other developers, the issue of stubborn clients comes up. They tell me that even though they personally don't think a website should look the same in all browsers and they're eager to try all of these new techniques, their clients insist that their website should look the same, so the developers are stuck with the same Web development techniques that we used five to ten years ago. Their clients just don't "get" graceful degradation.
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Brand = User Experience: The Interface of a Cheeseburger
The adventure of a Web designer starts in a McDonald's, where he discovers that there is a worm hole between the world of Branding and User Experience Design. Years later he learns that it is the Interface that connects both worlds.
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New High-Quality Free Fonts (January 2012)
Every now and then, we look around, select fresh free high-quality fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually time you should be investing in your projects. We search for them and find them so that you don't have to.
11. New On Smashing Job Board
Here are the job openings published recently at our very own Smashing Job Board:
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Director of User Experience at MyRegistry.com and Clipix.com (Just outside of New York City)
MyRegistry and Clipix are looking for someone with an incredible passion for user experience to lead our product team. We're a dedicated group of experienced entrepreneurs, designers and developers who care deeply about the experience we create for our users. We combine the stability, business fundamentals and capital of an established company with the atmosphere, agility, and mindset of a hot startup.
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JavaScript Developer @ Atlassian, Makers of JIRA and Confluence at Atlassian (San Francisco, CA)
You like the good bits of JavaScript. You love building things that are fast without whizzing all over the screen. You think JS can improve user experience without replacing the entire front end. You love solving hard problems with elegant practical code. You love the challenge of being one of a cadre of UI-savvy experts amidst an organisation that's 50% back-end developers.
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World-Class Web Developer at Plaudit Design (Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN)
This is an opportunity for a hardworking developer, like you, to be part of a dedicated team of professionals focused on quality (hopefully, also just like you). And to make it even better we're located in the geographical center of the Twin Cities—which by the way is not downtown but exactly in-between Minneapolis and Saint Paul. This affords us the enjoyment of free parking and easy access from two highways making commutes from most anywhere rush-hour-headache-free.
12. Recent Articles on Smashing Magazine
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