I’ve been on the lookout for a designer/developer podcast to help me keep up with new trends and improve my knowledge of the industry.  While trying out the Sitepoint Podcast they had Paul Boag as a guest on one of their older episodes and he spoke about his own Podcast, Boagworld, so I thought I’d mosey on over there and give it a try.

This podcast first started as your normal weekly deal, but recently the format has been completely re-hauled to be “season” based.  Where it has a group of episodes all revolving around one main topic.  Currently they are Podcasting the entire process of redesigning the website.  I love how transparent they’re being about the process, and it’s really great to learn about each step  in detail.  I’d highly recommend giving it a listen 🙂

http://boagworld.com/

While I was listening to Sitepoint’s 118th Podcast the other day and they mentioned a very interesting CSS 3 experiment.  Sadly this won’t be working with IE just yet so it’s not something we can put to use right away, but the idea of Pure CSS icons is quite neat 🙂  The use of pseudo elements to create the icons out of pure CSS is truly innovative and makes me start to think about all the code that could be cleaned up by taking advantage of pseudo elements as opposed to adding in more DIVs to get certain background and border effects…

Regardless, it’s an interesting peek in to what we’ll be able to achieve once CSS 3 is fully supported

http://nicolasgallagher.com/pure-css-gui-icons/demo/

I’ve tried out some remote control aps for my iPod, but most of them only act as a touchpad.  They will allow you to control your computer from anywhere within wireless range, which is cool, but recently I found something that’s even cooler.  Splashtop is an app that not only allow you to control your computer, but you can also see it’s full screen on your iPod!  It’s very handy for controlling your computer in places where you can’t actually see the screen and allows you to do pretty much anything that you can do on your computer in the palm of your hand.

http://www.splashtop.com/remote

We’re going to look at something today that is near and dear to my heart – anime :3  But, anime wallpaper in particular.  You end up looking at your desktop every day, so why not make it something nice and unique?  Anime wallpapers can be breathtaking, and well, full of fandom goodness.  Two very nice sites dedicated to the subject are Anime Paper and Minitokyo.  So check them out if that’s your thing.  Also, I’ve got an old account myself on Minitokyo.

http://www.animepaper.net/
http://www.minitokyo.net/

On occasion I’ve been handed work where I needed to replace some text in an image without any the original files.  It can be very time consuming to try and dig up the original font – or at least find a font that’s close enough.  That’s where My Fonts “What the Font?” can come in handy.

You can upload an image of some text, then designate which parts of the image are what letters and the application will give you a list of fonts that are similar to the one in the picture.  A definite time saver 🙂

http://new.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/