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Git For Designers (Part 1)

By @jseifer

01 February 2012 | Category: Uncategorized

Hi designers! I’m not a designer. Sorry. I’m a developer. I can barely tell when things look good or not. This week I learned that there are different ampersands out there (thanks, Allison!). But that’s not why I’m writing today. We all have to work together. Professionally, one way we do that is by using version control. A version control system tracks changes to your code. There are a lot of different version control systems out there. Today we’ll be talking about git. Specifically, as it relates to designers making web sites.

Article

SQL Fiddle

By | 02 February 2012 | Category: Uncategorized

If you like jsFiddle, then you will love SQL Fiddle. It allows you to select a database, build a schema, populate the schema and run queries against it. The service currently supports MS SQL, MySQL, Oracle, and PostgreSQL. Why is this interesting? You can compare databases, post questions to forums along with your schema and query or just prototype an idea.

Article

Free Video: Control Flow

By | 02 February 2012 | Category: Uncategorized

In this 4 minute video, you will learn about the concept of control flow in Ruby. This goes in to using if/else statements and case statements

A screenshot from the Control Flow video demonstrating a case statement.

This video is from Treehouse, a high-quality video training site with hundreds of short videos on topics like …

New videos are added regularly, so it’s a great way to stay up-to-date on all the latest technology and methods. Browse the entire library of videos.

Article

Showcase of the Best Google Fonts

By | 01 February 2012 | Category: Uncategorized

It’s no secret that I am in love with Google Fonts. In fact, I use Google Fonts frequently in Treehouse videos. :)

A screenshot of sans-serif typography that replicates the text from Darwin's book The Origin of Species.

The ongoing drawback to Google Fonts has been the smaller selection compared to other font services, but that’s rapidly changing. Even better, an editorialized web page called “Beautiful Web Type” has popped up that showcases the best fonts that Google has to offer. Loving this!

Article

Styling Images with CSS3

By | 31 January 2012 | Category: Uncategorized

Nick La over at Web Designer Wall put together a great article on how to style images with CSS3. The styles include: Basic Style(rounded corners), Embossed Style, Soft Embossed Style, Cutout Style and Glossy Overlay. I personally love the Embossed Style, it’s ideal for interface buttons. Originally Nick ran into some issues when styling for a responsive layout. He quickly fixed them with an alternate solution. Check out the article to see his solution. Great job Nick, we appreciate the tips and tricks!

View the Tutorial
Demo Page

Article

Kevin Rose and Jason Calacanis confirmed for Future Insights Live in Vegas

By | 30 January 2012 | Category: Uncategorized

Kevin Rose standing against a blue wall and Jason Calacanis sitting in a red chair

We’ve just confirmed that industry leaders Kevin Rose and Jason Calacanis will be speaking at Future Insights Live in Vegas on April 30 – May 4th!

Future Insights Live is our new show that combines Future of Web Apps, Future of Web Design and Future of Mobile into one huge 5-day, 5-track, 1,500 person conference. It’s going to be epic and you won’t want to miss it.

Early bird pricing (save $200) is almost over, so grab your ticket today.

Article

Free Video: iOS Tab bar (UITabBarController)

By | 26 January 2012 | Category: Uncategorized

In this 7 minute video, you will learn the basics of the UITabBarController and how to create one using the Xcode project template.

This video is from Treehouse, a high-quality video training site with hundreds of short videos on topics like …

New videos are added regularly, so it’s a great way to stay up-to-date on all the latest technology and methods. Browse the entire library of videos.

Article

Twitter Bootstrap 2.0

By | 26 January 2012 | Category: Uncategorized

Twitter Bootstrap 2.0 will be coming out January 31st. In the mean time, there is a pre-release you can check out and report on any bugs that you find. Twitter Bootstrap is a great HTML and CSS framework that has been gaining a lot of popularity recently. You can check out sites built with bootstrap on the unofficial Built With Bootstrap tumblr.

Article

A New Year, A New Responsive Dribbble Portfolio – Part 1 of 2

By | 26 January 2012 | Category: Uncategorized

Dribbble Portfolio

What better way to start off the new year than a fresh new Dribbble portfolio?  If you are a designer with minimal coding experience and want to display your Dribbble work in all browser sizes, you have come to the right place.  We will be creating a HTML5 one page portfolio which pulls your Dribbble information and is responsive in all browsers.  This little project will be presented in two parts.

Article

Scrolling Made Fun

By | 25 January 2012 | Category: Uncategorized

Scrollorama

Just when you thought scrolling your web page was getting boring. Scrollorama has stepped the scroll game up with this remarkable jQuery Plugin. Scrollorama allows you to manipulate text when you scroll the page. You can do everything from Transitions to Zoom to Parallax. Check out the Scrollorama site to view some great examples and the plugin’s documentation.

This Plugin is great for landing pages and highly interactive web applications. Like CSS3 transitions, use your animations sparingly.

Article

Our new Treehouse Student Plan is live!

By | 25 January 2012 | Category: Uncategorized

Treehouse Airship flying through a white sky

We’ve just released our new Treehouse Student plan and it’s only $9 per month! It’s the equivalent to our Gold plan, which is $49 per month, so you’re saving a massive 82%. Anyone who attends a school, college or university is eligible. After you sign up, we’ll ask you to provide proof of your student program.

Benefits include:

  1. Unlimited access to our Video Course Library. 450+ videos, more added each week on topics like CSS3, HTML5, JavaScript, iOS, Photoshop and more. All videos downloadable for offline viewing. Unlock Badges to prove your knowledge.
  2. Complete Project Videos show you how to create real-world sites and apps, from start to finish. All example files are downloadable.
  3. 114 Conference Videos from Future of Web Design and Future of Web Apps ($545 value)
  4. Closed Captioning on all videos for non-English speakers and the deaf.

If you’d like to get Treehouse in to your entire school, college or university, please contact Chris and he’ll be happy to help!

There’s a money-back guarantee, and you aren’t tied in to a contract. Sign up today.

Article

HTML5 Please – Which Features Can You Use?

By | 23 January 2012 | Category: Uncategorized

HTML5 Please is a great resource for determining browser support for many HTML5 and CSS3 Features. Each feature offers a recommendation to either use, not use, use with caution, or use with a fallback. It offers great information like the browser share for each feature, as well as the fallbacks you can use to simulate the feature in incompatible browsers.

My favorite feature is the search, which allows you to filter features by compatibility, for instance what is safe to use in IE8+.

Article

You’ve gotta come to this event

By | 23 January 2012 | Category: Uncategorized

Photo of the 'Welcome to fabulous Las Vegas' sign at night in neon glow

If you’re a Web Designer, Developer or Entrepreneur, you can’t miss Future Insights Live in Vegas on April 30 – May 4th. We’ve combined Future of Web Apps, Design and Mobile into one massive five day event, with over 100 sessions. It’s going to be like SXSW, but with valuable content ;) We’re expecting 1500+ attendees, so it’s going to be insane. The tracks include …

  1. Development
  2. Design
  3. Frontend Development
  4. Mobile Development
  5. Business
  6. Cloud

Early bird pricing ends soon (save $200) so move quick and book your ticket today.

Article

How We Built Code Racer in 4 Days

By | 19 January 2012 | Category: Uncategorized

If you haven’t seen Code Racer, you should give it a try. Code Racer is the product of Idea Week at Treehouse. Idea Week is a tradition brought over from Carsonified to Treehouse where the entire team drops what they are doing to work on a completely new project for one week.

This is my recounting of the Idea Week when we created Code Racer. This won’t be a full story as a lot of people worked on this project and I wasn’t in a position to keep track of what everyone was doing. Fortunately our video professionals at Treehouse had cameras rolling, so much of this is documented on video. I can only tell you about what I was involved in, which was the server and client side development.

Article

CodeKit the missing tool

By | 19 January 2012 | Category: Uncategorized

The web is rapidly evolving and it seems like the editors just can’t keep up. If you are web developer using Sass, Stylus, CoffeeScript or Haml then CodeKit is for you. The only drawback is that CodeKit is only available for MAC OSX Lion.

CodeKit automatically compiles Less, Sass, Stylus, CoffeeScript & Haml files. It effortlessly combines, minifies and error-checks Javascript. It supports Compass. It even optimizes jpeg & png images, auto-reloads your browser and lets you use the same files across many projects. And that’s just the first paragraph.

CodeKit

Article

Free Video: Installing Ruby

By | 19 January 2012 | Category: Uncategorized

In this 8 minute video, you will learn how to install Ruby on both Mac OS X and on Windows. This will let you get IRB up and running and is the basis for running Ruby programs on your own computer.

Installing Ruby Video

This video is from Treehouse, a high-quality video training site with hundreds of short videos on topics like …

New videos are added regularly, so it’s a great way to stay up-to-date on all the latest technology and methods. Browse the entire library of videos.

Article

Customizing the design of UIPopoverController

By | 18 January 2012 | Category: Uncategorized

Popovers are very common within the iPad user interface but you were restricted to the design provided by Apple. With iOS 5 came a little known class called UIPopoverBackgroundView which allows you to provide a custom border and arrow for the popover.

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