BrianBal.com

24 ways is back for 2007 with new tips, tricks, and tutorials.

Here are my favorite articles from the new 24 ways

Transparent PNGs in Internet Explorer 6

Dealing with support for transparent PNGs in IE 6

Get To Grips with Slippy Maps

Creating interactive, draggable maps using the Mapstraction library

Capturing Caps Lock

Detecting Caps Lock in a web app

10 Ways To Get Design Approval

10 tips for getting approval of a design

Unobtrusively Mapping Microformats with jQuery

Using jQuery to extract data from Microformats

CSS for Accessibility

CSS techniques that help make your site accessible to as many users as possible

Christmas Is In The AIR

Introduction to Adobe AIR and using standard web technologies to build a desktop application

A List Apart’s article “A Preview of HTML 5” gives an overview of the current status of HTML5. One of the cool things about HTML5 is that it would introduce new elements that would provide semantic alternatives to using the div element for page layout.

HTML 5 introduces a whole set of new elements that make it much easier to structure pages. Most HTML 4 pages include a variety of common structures, such as headers, footers and columns and today, it is fairly common to mark them up using div elements, giving each a descriptive id or class.

The use of div elements is largely because current versions of HTML 4 lack the necessary semantics for describing these parts more specifically. HTML 5 addresses this issue by introducing new elements for representing each of these different sections.

Definr.com is a pretty cool dictionary site. It’s tagline is “incredibly fast dictionary” and it is fast. Definr.com is only one page but it does everything a dictionary should do and does it well in that page.

From a BBC News Article “Stricken Antarctic ship evacuated“.

The M/S Explorer is now lying on its side close to the South Shetland Islands, in the Antarctic Ocean.

The jQuery add-on “Humanized Messages” make it easy create growl like alerts with javascript.

Humanized Messages is a javascript-based system for non-model notifications, from an idea by Jef Raskin, as relayed by Aza Raskin and adapted for jQuery and use with K2 by Michael Heilemann.

These messages seem like a great way to alert users to new or updated data in a ajaxified web app.

Favikon is a great new web app that makes it very easy to create favicons.

The great thing about Favikon is how easy it makes creating a favicon. First you upload the image that you want to convert to a favicon. Then you can resize and crop that image to your hearts content. When you are done editing the image in the cool little editing window you can then preview and download your new favicon.

Ars Technica’s article “Games that can educate” reports that EA has donated the original SimCity to the OLPC project

Those of us who have fond memories of the original SimCity know that EA’s contribution will provide many students with a valuable and entertaining learning experience. The continued involvement of Don Hopkins in the porting effort is a promising sign that the game will remain true to its roots while it continues to evolve.

According to the Ars Technica article Latest OECD broadband data in Japan you can get a 93Mbps connection for $31 a month.Yes, I am very jealous of those jaw dropping speeds. Right now my bill from Comcast is $29.99 per month for woeful 3Mbps connection.

Coda-Slider 1.1 is some pretty slick javascript animation that mimics the coda tab sliding effect.

Here is how to use a “side-styled” or “no-glass” dock on the bottom of the screen.

Open the Terminal Application it can be found in /Applications/Utilities

In the terminal type the following command to enable the no-glass dock.

$ defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES

Then restart the dock by entering this command.

$ killall DockThats it, enjoy