In an effort to force myself to blog much more than I am currently doing, I have decided to launch a new initiative with a weekly review of the most important bits and bobs I have encountered during the week, things I have read, watched, appreciated, or even disliked, although I will tend to concentrate on the positive side of them.
Hope you like it, let’s get it on…
Screencasting a Complete Redesign by Chris Coyier
For years, CSS-Tricks has been one of the websites to go to when looking for tutorials, reference guides, tips & tricks on the areas as various as web design, web development, WordPress, CSS, Javascript and more. So when the site’s owner (and web design guru) Chris Coyier (pictured above…at work) decided to leave his full time job to concentrate on CSS-Tricks, redesign the site and screencast what he refers to a super detailed design journey, a lot of people including myself got really interested.
Chris initially launched this project through Kickstarter, asking a minimum funding of $3,500, and raising in the end a whopping $90k. I have been fortunate enough to be one of the 2187 Kickstarter backers and have therefore started watching Chris’ short screencasts. And boy, there’s a lot to take in. From visual design decisions to semantic html, CSS to CSS3, responsive design to version control, javascript and pre-processing to name only a few.
This is a very interesting idea and there’s material for everybody. I had very little knowledge on pre-processing, and a few screencasts later, I now feel confident to use both sass and compass, having digged into the subject for a few days on both mac and windows environments… Chris has the ability to talk you through his methodology in a natural manner, making mistakes we would make ourselves, troubleshooting them the way we would too. His knowledge, eloquence and nonchalance make it such an easy experience, I can only recommend you to subscribe to his lodge area ($12.99/Month) and join in.
On top of that, Chris is a real cracker (you will have a few laughs during the journey) and as opposed to SOME web design & development big guns, he does prove that knowledge and notoriety do not have to come along with patronizing and cockiness.
Sign up : https://css-tricks.com/lodge/signup/
Chris’ radio show: http://shoptalkshow.com/
Box release Box Sync feature
Box have just released their new box Sync feature, which now makes the Online file sharing provider a very attractive Dropbox-like cloud storage actor, with his 5Gb (to 50 GB) free account.
I have a 50Gb account, having benefited from a ’50Gb Lifetime upgrade’ promotion last year, and I am really starting to love Box.
More info here.
Where is that f’n IOS Simulator?
Fed up with trying to locate the IOS simulator in Xcode 4.3, I have decided to follow the advice of PlanetQuark’s article and put a short cut on my Mac app menu bar. Just a quick tip but worth doing i reckon.
My name is Flo Preynat and I am the freelance webdesigner and developer behind shoogle designs. I live in France and specialize in responsive web design. Give me a shoogle or get in touch with me on twitter.
Follow @shoogledesigns
