“Adiós flash charts” and other plotted links…
Dave Martin: “Not only does the page look better, it also loads faster thanks to flot.js. Flot is a great little open source chart library for jQuery. Flot give us complete flexibility over how we display stats, and it allows you to view stats on any device that supports JS.”
“Create an Exploding Moon Orbiting a Gas Giant in Photoshop”
“…Ed Lopez will demonstrate several techniques including how to break apart a planetary object, create a star field, dust and clouds, and even how to create a gas giant from scratch. This is a written tutorial but it also includes over 800 MB of video instruction.”
“Five Ways To Know Your Photos Aren’t Cutting It”
Scott Bourne: “Your Photos Aren’t Cutting It if nobody is attacking your work. This will surprise you, but the first sign your photos aren’t cutting it is that nobody has ever told you that your work is horrible. If you stick with safe, plain vanilla photos, nobody will care. If nobody cares enough to complain, you probably aren’t taking enough risks.”
“ImageOptim”
Chris Coyier: “Why do you need this? If you are ‘Save for Web’ing from Photoshop, that just isn’t as good as you can do. I’ve been using it and saving 8% on average of lots of different images. That's a significant speed boost on the web.”
Knockout.js
“Knockout is a JavaScript library that helps you to create rich, responsive display and editor user interfaces with a clean underlying data model. Any time you have sections of UI that update dynamically (e.g., changing depending on the user’s actions or when an external data source changes), KO can help you implement it more simply and maintainably.”
“The Mystery Of CSS Sprites”
Sven Lennartz: “Digg has quite an esoteric sprite, with small arrows and brackets. The large empty space between the images is used to make sure that text resizing doesn’t display multiple images as the background image. You can [explicitly] define width and height in pixels, so that this problem does not occur—however, in this case the resized text will never break out of the defined box, thus possibly making the text unreadable. Consequently, you must be cautious when using spriting for buttons with variable text labels. For those buttons, you should define font size in pixels also. Or just use the large empty space in the sprite (thanks, daftie!).”
“Welcome to Google Body”
Google Labs: “Google Body is a detailed 3D model of the human body. You can peel back anatomical layers,zoom in, click to identify anatomy, or search for muscles, organs, bones and more. You can also share the exact scene you are viewing by copying and pasting the URL.”
“Pirates Love Daisies”
Larry Larsen: “Here is an introduction to a new Tower Defense game called Pirates Love Daisies. If you like TD games, I think it could keep you very busy over the holiday break. It was written by Grant Skinner at GSkinner.com. Grant is a Flash developer and this was his for project for HTML5. That's right, the whole game runs in HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript—no plugins.”
David Mccandless
davidmccandless.com: “I’m an award-winning writer, designer and author based in London. My work has appeared in over 40 publications worldwide including Wired and The Guardian.”