jQuery Visual Cheat Sheet is an useful and practical reference to jQuery 1.3 for web designers and developers designed by me. This cheat sheet (6 pages) contains the full jQuery API reference with detailed descriptions and some sample code. The simple visual style I used to design this sheet allows you to find at a glance everything you are looking for.

(thx Neil)

 -webkit-border-image

Launchpad HQ:

So for example, the image to the right is an original image from the iPhone. Its width is 29px. That breaks down to there being 14px on the left and right, defining the rounded corners and a 1px sliver which is the body of the button. So, in theory, if you were able to keep the left and right sides of the button stationary while expanding the 1px center piece, this would create a horizontally-scalable button with only one image.

But alas, how would we do this using only CSS? Well, I started digging around Safari’s ‘-webkit’ innards, and was able to to use the -webkit-border-image to accomplish exactly what I wanted.

This goes very nicely with the iPhone GUI PSD.

(thanks, Tim)

For web designers, there are four keys to surviving bad economic times: do good work, charge a fair price, lower your overhead, and be sure you are communicating with your client. As a reader of 24 ways, you already do good work, so let’s focus on the rest.

Coda 1.5 adds a number of major new features, including:

• Fully integrated source control with Subversion
• Find and replace across multiple local files
• Easier-than-ever text clips with groups
• A user-customizable bookshelf
• Improved AppleScript

Best of all: it’s a free update.

I am in the middle of a site redesign, and this is one less thing standing in my way. I like 37signals’ take on MobileMe and IE6: I, too, am hoping this is the beginning of a trend. 

SWFObject is an easy-to-use and standards-friendly method to embed Flash content, which utilizes one small JavaScript file.

Version 2 — just released last month –offers the new express install from Adobe as well as whole new method for loading Flash files into your pages. The project’s home base is over at Google Code now, and there’s plenty of examples, help, and even a code generator (which is pretty slick).

The best news of all: upgrading to version 2.0 fixed a “wmode” transparency issue I was having in Firefox 3.

Forgive me if I sound harsh, but if your skill set is basically HTML and CSS, then I think you are worth maybe twelve bucks an hour. HTML and CSS are extremely simple languages anyone can learn in a weekend by picking up a good book or two.
…
So what is valuable? Judgement. Logic. Creativity. Ability to learn quickly. Ability to work under pressure. Experience. Empathy. Design theory. Design history. Opinions. Decisions. And so on. I’d like to think that a good 80% of what my employer pays me for is for these things. Hopefully only a small percentage of my salary is because I know CSS and Photoshop.

Via Inman.

What is it about people still using IE6?

Now, my website is clearly not the most popular on the Internet, so I can’t assume 47% of everyone on the Web is using IE6. But I get a significant amount of traffic. From all over the globe. Lots of my site’s visitors might actually be looking for the Other Me (explanation), however, the fact remains: it’s a lot of traffic. Maybe it’s not as clean of a cross-section view as, say, CNN.com’s or NYTimes.com’s statistics might be, but it’s it’s good enough for me.

And, I’m not going to pretend IE7 is a great browser, but it’s a giant leap forward from IE6. Even my infrequently-booted Parallels-run copy of Windows XP has updated itself to IE7. Get with it people; do yourselves a favor and stop using the world’s shittiest browser.

I don’t have an iPhone nor do I need one — although I would like to “use the future right now” — I’m just not letting that stop me from using Leaflets. It’s a small window on my desktop, it gives me only the content I want to see (no flashing banner ads), and it’s super fast.

Get Leaflets.

Not sure what I’m talking about? Find any story on the news Web site (here’s one for you), start reading it, and highlight/select any word and double click. A smaller new window opens with the results of a query automatically run for you.

A good user experience. I love it.

I say what he says:

“One way to judge the scope of an app is to think about how much time you’re intended to spend using it. There’s plenty of room for apps you use here and there for a few minutes at a time, or which you launch just once or twice a week. There’s hardly any room at all, though, for apps you work in for hours at a time, every day.

By this measure, Coda, the new app from Panic, is an epic.”

Kudos, John.

In his most recent post, Zeldman offers:

“Over 12,000 people filled out The Web Design Survey during its first 24 hours online. Average completion time was 8 minutes, 45 seconds. Not a bad start. Keep spreading the word.”