Chosen is a JavaScript plugin that makes long, unwieldy select boxes much more user-friendly. It is currently available in both jQuery and Prototype flavors.

Not much in the way of browser support and it sure looks great. (via Andy)

It’s time to get back to basics — back to optimizing every little byte like your life depends on it. Your challenge? Build a web app in less than 10 kilobytes.

Nicholas Feltron:

Ultimately, I think the most fascinating story here is the change in our news habits after September 11, 2001. After this day, a new and higher baseline for visits to the site is established, and the inference is that this event really established CNN.com and the greater Internet as a reliable, timely and indispensable source for news.

(via df)

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)

What You Offer

Do you want an innovative environment, technical challenges, and brilliant colleagues in addition to business stability? Wall Street on Demand, Inc. has doubled in size the last two years and continues to look for exceptional people who want to solve hard problems and truly make a difference at work.

Intermediate to advanced knowledge of Javascript, ASP.NET, ASP, C#, Ajax, D/X/HTML, CSS, Web standards, Browser compatibility issues. A crush on xmlHTTPRequest, JSON and purely semantic markup language, reverence for Crockford and Hewitt, dreams in #000 and #fff, a loathing of Redmond’s rendering engine (but the skills to bend it to your every whim). Experience with object-oriented programming, the prototype inheritance pattern, and understanding of systems like DWR, Dojo, Prototype, RoR, jQuery, YUI. Technical and user experience contributions to site design, site architecture, and site production. Ability to work in a collaborative environment.

What We Offer

Wall Street on Demand, Inc. is a growing organization, headquartered at the base of the Rocky Mountains in Boulder, CO, focused on the design, development and hosting of financial web sites, reports, and tools. We deliver innovative, high quality products to help our clients and their customers visualize, manipulate and understand complex financial information. Our compelling, presentation-rich services for financial professionals and individual investors have won acclaim for our clients, many of whom rank at the top of the Gomez and Forbes awards. Our products are custom designed for each client, completely private-labeled, and fully integrated into the client’s other offerings.

The opportunity to work on projects for almost every top-tier financial institution in the world. Training in the necessary knowledge in developing for financial information. Ramp-up time to gain comfort in our environment. Learning from some of the best developers this side of the Mississippi.

Fotopedia is breathing new life into photos by building a photo encyclopedia that lets photographers and photo enthusiasts collaborate and enrich images to be useful for the whole world wide web.

jQTouch is a jQuery plugin with native animations, automatic navigation, and themes for mobile WebKit browsers like iPhone, G1, and Pre.

You can preview right on your iPhone or watch a demo.

(thx, Scott)

There are many ways to make websites run faster. In this section, you can discover performance best practices that real web professionals employ in their everyday work. These practices have improved the user experience for millions of users and we hope they are useful for other web developers.

• Remembering Apollo 11 at The Big Picture
• John Noble Wilford, who covered the Apollo 11 mission for The New York Times, narrates a look back at the historic journey.
• One Hand for Space History, as Superpowers Spar. The New York Times
• Maps of the Apollo 11 moon walks superimposed on a soccer pitch and a baseball diamond. (Re-link from January)
• Extreme profanity at it’s best: The Onion reports on the Moon landing.
• Apollo 11 40th anniversary at NASA.gov

The Boston Herald reported on the new site today:

Families crowded around black-and-white television sets in 1969 to watch Neil Armstrong take man’s first steps on the moon.

Now, they’ll be able to watch the Apollo 11 mission recreated in real time on the Web, follow Twitter feeds of transmissions between Mission Control and the spacecraft, and even get an e-mail alert when the lunar module touches down. Those features are part of a new Web site from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum commemorating the moon mission and Kennedy’s push to land Americans there first.

“Putting a man on the moon really did unite the globe,” said Thomas Putnam, director of the JFK Library. “We hope to use the Internet to do the same thing.”

The Web site — WeChooseTheMoon.org — goes live at 8:02 a.m. Thursday, 90 minutes before the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla. It will track the capsule’s route from the Earth to the Moon, ending with the moon landing and Armstrong’s walk — in real time, but 40 years later. Internet visitors can see animated recreations of key events from the four-day mission, including when Apollo 11 first orbits the moon and when the lunar module separates from the command module, as well as browse video clips and photos and hear the radio transmission between the astronauts and NASA flight controllers.

SSL was initially positioned as an upgrade driver to higher plans. And while we don’t know what percentage of people considered SSL a key reason for upgrading, we believe everyone is entitled the best security we can offer. There shouldn’t be first class or second class customers when it comes to security. It doesn’t matter if Customer A is paying us $149 and Customer B is not paying us at all — they are all customers and their data is equally important.

This is the first step in our renewed focus on being a better corporate citizen. We plan on rolling out similar SSL upgrades across our entire product line (Highrise, Backpack, and Campfire). We’re also examining additional good citizen initiatives beyond security. Profit will be considered (we are a business, after all), but it won’t always come first.

Expedia.com said Wednesday it will stop charging fees when customers book airline tickets over the Internet, upping the ante in the competition among online travel agencies.

The company, a unit of Expedia Inc., stopped charging booking fees in March under a promotion that was scheduled to end May 31. The latest move makes the no-fee policy permanent.

Rival online agencies Orbitz.com, a unit of Orbitz Worldwide Inc., and Sabre Holdings Corp.’s Travelocity.com also had eliminated booking fees on a promotional basis. The companies declined to comment on possible next steps. “Orbitz intends to remain a competitive place to book online,” a spokesman said. A Travelocity spokesman said: “We’re continuing to waive booking fees through this month.”

Facebook, the fast-growing social network, has found a deep-pocketed friend in Russia.

Digital Sky Technologies, an Internet investment company based in Moscow, said Tuesday it has invested $200 million in Facebook in exchange for a 1.96 percent stake in the company, and would eventually offer to buy at least $100 million in Facebook’s common stock. Facebook said the deal values the entire company — which Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, founded in his Harvard dorm room in 2004 — at $10 billion.

Ten billion dollars. Jiminy.

Lens is the photojournalism blog of The New York Times, presenting the finest and most interesting visual and multimedia reporting — photographs, videos and slide shows. A showcase for Times photographers, it also seeks to highlight the best work of other newspapers, magazines and news and picture agencies; in print, in books, in galleries, in museums and on the Web. And it will draw on The Times’s own pictorial archive, numbering in the millions of images and going back to the early 20th century.

Here at Wall St., we host some of the largest financial websites on the Internet. From The New York Times to E*TRADE and Barclays to Charles Schwab, our data centers serve content to millions and millions of users per week. It’s imperative our websites provide accurate market data, look good, are easy to use, and are fast. With so much information to relay, we’re pushing a lot of data (including scripts, CSS, images, etc.) through the pipe. So Nicole’s presentation was perfect fodder for our design and development teams.

A few highlights from her talk, with some links for your consumption follow.

• Nine best practices for designing and building faster websites:
  1. Create a component library of smart objects.
  2. Use consistent semantic styles.
  3. Design modules to be transparent on the inside.
  4. Optimize images and sprites.
  5. Avoid non-standard browser fonts.
  6. Use columns rather than rows.
  7. Choose your bling carefully.
  8. Be flexible.
  9. Learn to love grids.
• Watch her presentation on the YDN.
• PNG8 is the clear winner for images on any website. They’re smaller in file size than GIFs (I didn’t believe it until I saw it), and they support transparency in IE5.5 and IE6. No CSS filter hacks needed. If you’ve got a copy of Fireworks, you’re in business because Photoshop doesn’t help create PNG8′s transparency. If you don’t have Fireworks and are comfy with the command line, see this guide to making alpha transparency in PNG8.
• Embrace Smush.it — a web service and Firefox plugin created by Nicole and former co-worker Stoyan Stefanov. The tool allows web developers to upload images of any kind while Smush.it runs through a long list of compression algorithms stripping meta data and needless information from them before spitting them back to you in a Zip file. It all happens in seconds and a few tests we ran here — 15 images reduced in size by 320kb (99.18% compression rate) — yielded impressive results. Evidently, Smush.it is in the process of being adopted by Yahoo! which has immediately interrupted the service (but hopefully not permanently).
• Consider Object Oriented CSS, or OO CSS. Much of OO CSS is in the 9 best practices mentioned above. But it’s not what you think. It’s not object oriented in the traditional programming sense of the term. It’s object — as in a virtual thing: a module, a header, a sidebar bucket, etc. I had a hard time with this one in the beginning. Most of OO CSS is pure common sense — at least it is here at Wall St. Sit down, evaluate your designs before you start building, and determine a baseline for common elements across the site. Then piece together your CSS efficiently. Three really useful tips for page layout:
  1. Don’t use height-specific modules. Let the content determine the height. This is genius and must be recognized by designers. Vertical grids, not horizontal.
  2. If you have two or three modules with rounded corners that are different but look similar, just pick one and move on. “Users aren’t that sophisticated,” she said.
  3. Use grids to determine layout, and let the content fill 100% of the available space. This way two columns becomes three columns or becomes 6 columns and the content continues to just fit.
• Set aside a few minutes to watch her presentation on OO CSS. It’s not earth-shattering stuff, but she does make some interesting points that convinced us to approach web dev from a slightly different angle.

Thanks Nicole. Safe travels in India.

His claim that crappy code is inevitable is based on the notion that crappy code is cheaper than clean code, and that therefore businesses will demand the crap every time. But it has generally not been business that has demanded crappy code. Rather it has been developers who mistakenly thought that the business’ need for speed meant that they had to produce crappy code. Once we, as professional developers, realize that the only way to go fast is to create clean and well designed code, then we will see the business’ need for speed as a demand for high quality code.

I’m in the business of web-based software and website development where clean code is paramount but deadlines always seem to win. There just aren’t enough hours in the day and days in the month to get through all the requirements. The process usually works like this: business development sells the job, design chews through the schedule, development is a rush, and quality assurance is an after thought. And, as Bob and Ed clearly point out, this is certainly not the best way to develop software or websites.

(Thx, Tim)

So maybe instead of getting your company on twitter, paying marketers to mention you are on twitter, and paying people to blog about your company, forget all that and just make awesome stuff that gets people excited about your products, hire people that represent the company well, and when your stuff is so awesome that friends share it with other friends, you may not even need “social media marketing” after all.

(via DF)

 -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.

Here at The Times, we often hear a common story of usage from our customers: Reading the Sunday Times, spreading out the paper on a table while eating brunch. For many of our customers, this ritual is fundamental to their enjoyment of the weekend, and its absence would be jolting.

With this in mind, we present an as-yet-unnamed article skimmer. Think of it as an attempt to provide the Sunday Times experience anytime. Of course, there are parts we can’t replicate: the satisfying crinkle of the paper; the circular stain of your coffee; the smell of newsprint.

…

Please note: Sunday Browsing is not compatible with Internet Explorer 6, but is compatible with Internet Explorer 7 and 8.

(via)

It’s not surprising because I never really understood Twitter from the beginning. I never learned what “RT” meant, why a “#” was prepended to certain words, and why Direct Messages only showed up in my email. For the 195 Tweets I posted, I can only think of a few instances when I had something to say in less than Twitter’s max 140 character limit. I followed acquaintances on Twitter — people I knew but don’t know — as well as real-life friends. I can’t knock it (I don’t think) because Twitter has millions of users who seem to Tweet all day and all night. But something’s wrong. Twitter’s two founders can’t figure out how they’re going to make money off their invention. Pogue can’t figure it out. And there are rules and snobs. It’s just too much.

In the end, I’m with Pogue: it’s just another time drain.

Until some future version of HTML gives us new native controls to use in a browser, at Google, we’ve been playing and experimenting with controls we call “custom buttons” in our apps (among other custom controls).

(via)

(via SimpleBits)

Look for “Cleanup Working Copy Locks” under the “Action” menu.

After years of over-design and over-clutter, this redesign is a welcome change.

Dear Mark Healey,

You now live in a state where online delivery of your insurance paperwork is not currently offered. You will now begin receiving your policy documents via U.S. Mail. We will notify you when ePolicy becomes available in your state.

Please use our convenient Policyholder Service Center to make policy changes or to make payments.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us at epolicysupport@geicomail.com.

We appreciate your business and look forward to continuing to serve your insurance needs.

Sincerely,

GEICO Customer Service