I loved elastic textareas since the very first moment I used one (at facebook obviously). They let you save screen real estate while at the same time they are more comfortable for the end user. It’s one of the rare occasions when you can have your UI cake and eat it too! However, I never liked the i...

It’s been a while since I posted my little server-side solution for cross-browser RGBA colors (in a nutshell: native rgba for the cool browsers that support it, a PHP-generated image for those that don’t). For features, advantages, disadvantages etc, go see the original post. In this one I’ll only d...

In case anyone is interested, this is my take on the “challenge” that Brad Neuberg posted today on Ajaxian. It needs more properties, but it’s very easy to extend. I guess I should also add CSS3 values (RGBA/HSL(A) colors, CSS gradients etc) but oh well, I’m currently in a hurry. I will, if anyone a...

I consider CSS3’s text-shadow one of the most exciting CSS3* properties, which offers us a lot more effects than it’s name suggests. Of course, it can be used for creating drop shadows for text, and it carries out that task very well, but it’s inherent flexibility allows it to be also used for glow ...

Yesterday, I was editing a CSS file and I was wondering how many bytes/KB would a particular addition add to it, in order to decide if it was worth it. Since, I had found myself wondering about the exact same thing multiple times in the past, I decided to make a simple standalone HTML page that woul...

If a web application has some sort of registration system (and most do), the registration page should be one of the most attractive, inviting, usable pages of it. It should make you to want to register, not repulse you. We don’t want the user to give up in the middle of filling it because they are f...

Yeah, yeah I know, bevels are soooo 1996. And I agree. However, it’s always good to know the capabilities of your tools. Talented designers will know when it’s suitable to use a certain effect and incapable ones will abuse whatever is given to them, so after a lot of thought, I decided to blog about...

I just read Jakob Nielsen’s recent post in which he urged web designers/developers to stop password masking due to it’s inherent usability issues. I found it an interesting read. Hey, at last, someone dared to talk about the elephant in the room! In most cases password masking is indeed useless, but...

First of all, sorry for my long absence! I haven’t abandoned this blog, I was just really, really busy. I’m still busy, and this probably won’t change soon. However, I will still blog when I get too fed up with work or studying (this is one of these moments…). Now, let’s get to the meat. The situati...

In the past, I used MySQL for any of my DBMS needs. It wasn’t really an informed decision based on solid facts, actually I had never really given it any thought. It was what most developers used, it was what vBulletin used (one of the main projects of my company is based on vBulletin), it was what m...

A while ago, I posted a script of mine for creating 2-color cross-browser imageless linear gradients. As I stated there, I needed them for a color picker I have to create. And even though 2-color gradients are sufficient for most components, in most color spaces, I had forgotten an important one: Hu...

I’ve previously discussed many times the color picker I have to create, and blogged about my findings on the way. An essential component of most color pickers is a slider control. I won’t go through much techincal details or JavaScript code in this article (after all the usability guidelines present...

First of all, sorry for not posting as frequently as before. I’m feverishly working on a new project with a really tight deadline and I don’t have as much time as I previously did. For reasons that are irrelevant to this post, I have to write lots of Java code. So, sorry if I disappoint my fellow re...

In this post I’m going to share some tips to increase a site’s usability that are very quick to implement. Not all of them are cross-browser, but they are the icing on the cake anyway, nobody would mind without them. 1. Make buttons and button-like links appear pressed This is a personal favorite. W...

If you are a creative professional, or just passionate about colors, please take my survey: http://bit.ly/colorsurvey It will greatly help me to make a future project of our company more usable (some of its features at least) and it only takes a few minutes (it contains 10-19 questions, depending on...

I frequently meet these “hardcore” developers that deep (or not so deep) inside them, tend to underestimate JavaScript developers and boast about their own superiority. I’m sure that if you spent an important percentage of your career working with JavaScript and are even barely social, you definitel...

As Math.log currently stands, it’s a bit useless. It only calculates natural logarithms (base e).  We can easily modify it however, to calculate logarithms of any base: Math.log = (function() { var log = Math.log; return function(n, a) { return log(n)/(a? log(a) : 1); } })(); We can now specify the ...

As I mentioned in an earlier post of mine, I have to create a color picker, so I’ve already started to write the code for the Color class it’s going to use. I need it to natively support RGB, HSL, Lab and CMYK. And the latter part is causing unexpected trouble. It seems that there is the notion out ...

I have to write a color picker in the near future and I wanted it to have those little gradients on top of the sliders that show you the effect that a slider change will have on the selected color. Consequently, I needed to create imageless gradients, in order to easily change them. My very first th...

I usually view mockups in a browser, so that the impression I get is as close as possible to reality (I learned this the hard way: A mockup that seemed great in the neutral and minimalistic environment of a picture viewer, ended up looking way too fancy when viewed in a browser, something that I rea...

Yesterday, I had a session at MediaCampAthens (a BarCamp-style event), regarding CSS3 colors. If you’ve followed my earlier posts tagged with “colors”, my presentation was mostly a sum-up of these. It was my first presentation ever, actually, the first time I talked to an audience for more than 1 mi...

As someone who dealed a bit with print design in the past, I consider CMYK colors the easiest color system for humen to understand and manipulate. It’s very similar to what we used as children, when mixing watercolors for our drawings. It makes perfect sense, more than HSL and definately more than R...

If you are following the current news on web development, you probably heard that the new Safari 4 has a great feature: It natively allows the user to select multiple files via a single input control, if you specify a value for the attribute multiple: <input type="file" multiple> or, in XHTML: <inpu...

When using CSS, we can just include both declarations, one using rgba, and one without it, as mentioned in my post on cross-browser RGBA backgrounds. When writing JavaScript however, it’s a waste of resources to do that (and requires more verbose code), since we can easily check whether the browser ...

I used to take pride in my short, bulletproof and elegant String and Number type checks: // Check whether obj is a Number obj + 0 === obj // Check whether obj is a String obj + '' === obj I always thought that apart from being short and elegant, they should be faster. However, some quick tests gave ...

Ever wanted to run a snippet of JavaScript on a browser that doesn’t support a console in order to debug something? (for instance, IE6, Opera etc) You probably know about Firebug Lite, but this either requires you to already have the bookmarklet, or include the script in the page. Although Firebug L...

You might just dislike JavaScript libraries and the trend around them, or the project you’re currently working on might be too small for a JavaScript library. In both cases, I understand, and after all, who am I to judge you? I don’t use a library myself either (at least not one that you could’ve he...

Recently, PPK stated that he hates Google Chrome’s automatic updates. I disagree. In fact, I think that all browser vendors should enforce automatic updates as violently as Google Chrome does. There should be no option to disable them. For anybody. But what about the user’s freedom of choice? This m...

UPDATE: New version First of all, happy Valentine’s day for yersterday. :) This is the second part of my “Using CSS3 today” series. This article discusses current RGBA browser support and ways to use RGBA backgrounds in non-supporting browsers. Bonus gift: A PHP script of mine that creates fallback ...

As you probably know already, when browsers implement an experimental or proprietary CSS property, they prefix it with their “vendor prefix”, so that 1) it doesn’t collide with other properties and 2) you can choose whether to use it or not in that particular browser, since it’s support might be wro...