BrianBal.com

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

Some good tips for making your markup more POSH can be found over at 456 Berea St. in their article “POSH Plain Old Semantic HTML”

Explaining the benifits web standards to clients or management is always difficult. The advantage of using them is difficult to quantify in terms of dollars. It is even more difficult to justify spending even a small amount of development time to semantic markup.Robert Nyman has put together a great article “Explaining semantic mark-up” that will help explain the benefits of using semantic markup. Here is a quick list of the key points in his article.

• more accessible with out CSS
• screen reader friendly
• better search engine rankings
• easier to maintain the code
• faster load times because of smaller HTML file sizes

Apple Mail has been given a major overhaul in Leopard. One of this applications new features is the ability to create to do’s inside of a mail message. This new feature fits into my workflow brilliantly.

“Leopard Tip: How to create Mail To Dos from messages” is a good how to article from ars technica

The article Microsoft buys Facebook slice in the Seattle Times describes the details of the interesting move by Microsoft.

Microsoft is paying top dollar to outbid its chief rival for a key piece of online-advertising real estate: leading social-networking site Facebook.