February 22, 2012
by Cooldotz
0 comments
Content sites, such as blogs, article directories, image galleries, video galleries, etc. are a major category of sites and if you haven’t designed such a site until now, you can be sure that sooner or later you will. Designing a content site is in many aspects easier than designing a corporate site but it has its specifics.
February 9, 2012
by Cooldotz
0 comments
Scribus is an Open Source program that brings professional page layout to Linux/UNIX, Mac OS X, OS/2 Warp 4/eComStation and Windows desktops with a combination of press-ready output and new approaches to page design.
Underneath a modern and user-friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as color separations, CMYK and Spot Color support, ICC color management, and versatile PDF creation.
Scribus is powerful software that helps you create great looking documents of all kinds. It also comes with a lot of support options to help you achieve the best result. There is an enthusiastic and friendly community around Scribus that assists beginner and pro alike through our mailing list, IRC channel, wiki, contracted support, and the bugtracker.
You can make amazing publications with Scribus like the example below.
February 9, 2012
by Cooldotz
0 comments
Every hard disk is too small if you just wait long enough. TreeSize Free tells you where precious space has gone to.
TreeSize Free can be started from the context menu of a folder or drive and shows you the size of this folder, including its subfolders. You can expand this folder in Explorer-like style and you will see the size of every subfolder. All results can also be drilled down to the file level.
Scanning is done in a thread, so you can already see results while TreeSize Free is working. The Explorer context menu is supported within TreeSize, as well as the usual drag & drop operations.
The disk space tool now also includes the main feature of our discontinued freeware NTFSRatio: TreeSize Free can display the NTFS compression rate and apply the NTFS compression on directory branches.
TreeSize Free is freeware for Windows XP/Vista/7/2003/2008 (32 or 64 Bit).
Users of Windows 2000 can download the last compatible version TreeSize Free V2.4.
Users of Windows 9x/ME can download the last compatible version TreeSize Free V2.1.
Download and view all Jam Freeware
February 9, 2012
by Cooldotz
0 comments
SpaceSniffer is a freeWare (donations are welcome) and portable tool application that lets you understand how folders and files are structured on your disks.
By using a Treemap visualization layout, you have immediate perception of where big folders and files are placed on your devices. Treemap concept was invented by Prof. Ben Shneiderman, who kindly permitted the use of his concept into this tool.
Start a scan process and see the overall situation. Bigger are the elements on the view, bigger are folders and files on your disk. You need more detail on a big folder? Just single click on it. The selected element will be detailed with its content. Need more and more detail? Keep selecting elements and they'll discover their secrets to you. Need a larger view of a small folder? Then double click on it, and it'll zoom to the full extent of the view.
February 6, 2012
by Cooldotz
0 comments
2011 was a big year for the advancement of HTML5 in the web development community. It became pretty widely adopted, especially for the mobile web. There have been major projects that help developers use HTML5, like Paul Irish’s HTML5 Boilerplate (technically 2010, but popularized in 2011) and books galore! I would strongly recommend Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 for Web Designers, published by the venerable A Book Apart (a service by Happy Cog). But what started as a movement in 2010 became the proper way to do things in 2011, from mobile websites to progressive enhancements, and that includes integrating HTML5 into WordPress themes.
What exactly is HTML5? It’s the latest iteration of HTML, for which development began in 2004. Some of the more notable changes in HTML5 are the addition of header, footer, article, nav, and aside tags, a whole host of new form inputs, including email and phone (which will perform proper validation for you), the placeholder attribute, which allows you to put example text in a form field, and a bunch of new media elements. The media elements include support for video, audio, and a canvas, which allows you to draw or otherwise dynamically change content.
HTML5 is paving the way for faster, more interactive, more semantically correct websites (not to mention it’s the best way to make mobile-friendly websites). It it includes functions that used to require javascript or Flash, which means your sites depend on less and work on more platforms. The faster websites adopt this the better, and what more suited platform than WordPress?
So how did HTML5 make it’s way into WordPress? Let’s take a look…
We saw a brand new theme in 2011, aptly named “Twenty Eleven.” On top of demonstrating the new features of 3.0/3.2 and boasting some very nice design changes (including some fantastic typography), Twenty Eleven is the first WordPress theme to support HTML5 and CSS3. I think that is a big step forward, since WordPress does power almost 15% of Alexa’s top million websites(*).
In Twenty Eleven, we see the added support of the following HTML5 tags: <header>, <footer>, <aside>, <article>, and <time>, which can be styled using CSS, as Twenty Elevent also uses the html5shiv, a javascript library that adds the new HTML5 elements to the DOM for Firefox, Chrome, IE7+, and more.
This means a lot to developers, as they can now leverage the power of HTML5 in WordPress’ default theme; we can create forms with better input types, add in the new media formats, and use <canvas>, among other things.
WordPress theme frameworks are also getting in on the HTML5 action, which means that any theme using those frameworks will also be using HTML5. This is really where we can (and did) see widespread HTML5 adoption, since certain frameworks can power thousands of sites. Here is a list of some great WordPress theme frameworks, which also happen to support HTML5:
Besides themes, there are countless plugins that help bring HTML5 into WordPress driven sites. You’ll get everything from embedding HTML5 audio and video, to changing divs to HTML5 elements like <aside> and <nav>, to creating HTML5 forms. There is even a plugin that will insert the HTML5 Boilerplate into your current theme.
Plugins like this allow anyone using WordPress, not just theme developers, to progressively and incrementally make their sites more modern and more platform independent through the power of HTML5.